Time for Benign Neglect

London and Washington decide, for the moment, to do nothing

Sometime this week, a new multiracial government headed by Bishop Abel Muzorewa will take office in Rhodesia. Since the bishop was the victor in seemingly free elections in which at least 60% of the country's blacks went to the polls, Washington and London face the agonizing dilemma of whether or not to recognize the new regime and lift economic sanctions against Rhodesia. After three days of talks in London between U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and the new British Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, the two governments last week reached a practical conclusion: for the moment, do nothing.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had already decided to send three new emissaries to southern Africa. One will concentrate on the problem of Namibia (South West Africa), another will be dispatched to a number of African capitals to discuss the Rhodesian question. The third, Assistant Under Secretary Derek Day, will go to Salisbury in an effort, as Lord Carrington put it, to develop "the closest possible contacts with Bishop Muzorewa and his colleagues." This fact-finding mission will probably last until after the opening of the Commonwealth Conference in Lusaka, Zambia, in early August, thereby relieving the Thatcher government of the need to take any kind of action on Rhodesia in the meantime. After declaring ambiguously that the U.S. and Britain must recognize that there is "a new reality" in Rhodesia, Secretary Vance heartily endorsed the British plan to send an envoy to Salisbury. Conceivably that plan may give the Carter Administration, as well as the Thatcher government, a little extra time in which to rethink policy on Rhodesia.

Since the election, Muzorewa has been involved in some bitter internecine quarreling with his black colleagues. Last week, however, the bishop made a shrewd appeal for national unity: he let it be known that he had selected Josiah Gumede as the country's first black President and ceremonial head of state. Gumede, a civil servant in London during the days of the Central African Federation (1953-63), resigned from his government post after Prime Minister Ian Smith's unilateral declaration of independence for Rhodesia in 1965; a grateful British government promptly awarded Gumede an M.B.E. Bishop Muzorewa has been accused of playing favorites by appointing too many of his fellow Shona tribesmen to office; since Gumede is a Matabele, the second largest ethnic grouping in the country after the Shonas, his nomination as chief of state made good political sense.

Observers are watching carefully to see whether the advent of a predominantly black government in Salisbury will change the strategy of the two wings of the Patriotic Front, whose guerrillas have been waging war against the Rhodesian regime for the past six years. One leader of the Front, the hulking Joshua Nkomo, who heads the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU), was on a private visit to the U.S. He skipped a stopover in Washington, but dropped in at the United Nations and attended an African-American Institute conference in Houston, where he turned his gargantuan appetite loose on a Texas barbecue.

Co-Leader Robert Mugabe, meanwhile, spent most of the week with his soldiers in the Mozambican bush. Mugabe's colleagues in the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) have nothing but contempt for Muzorewa, whom they regard as inept, indecisive and thin-skinned. Scorning him as "Queen Abel," a mere figurehead, they believe he will be unable either to end the war or gain real power from the country's 212,000 whites, who retain a strong behind-scenes voice in the government and have had outright control over the army, police, civil service and judiciary for ten years. Says one ZANU official in Mozambique: "At least the leader of a so-called independent Bantustan in South Africa can fire his own police chief." The advantage of the new system to the whites, he contends, is that when the Rhodesian army commits its next atrocity against African villagers, it will have "a black mouth to defend it."

Some Patriotic Front leaders profess to be concerned that Western recognition of the Muzorewa regime could lead to a sharp increase in the fighting, with South African troops coming to the aid of the security forces and the guerrillas calling for increased Eastern bloc support. There are reports in Mozambique that ZANU has privately assured its backers among the so-called frontline African states that if the lifting of sanctions against Rhodesia can be avoided, ZANU will then be prepared to take part in internationally supervised elections and abide by the results, even if Bishop Muzorewa wins again.

Not so coincidentally, East Germany's Defense Minister Heinz Hoffmann was visiting Zambia and Mozambique last week, promising to arm the Patriotic Front "to the teeth." The guerrillas can also ask for increased aid from the Cubans, who already have plenty of military advisers on duty in Angola and Ethiopia. And last week Libya's strongman

Muammar Gaddafi offered to provide training for 2,000 guerrillas of Nkomo's ZAPU. Other ZAPU soldiers are currently being trained in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Ethiopia and Angola; a few of Mugabe's ZANU troops are in Eastern Europe and Ethiopia, but most are in camps in Mozambique.

Despite the availability of all that outside help, military experts believe Nkomo's 17,000-man army is deteriorating; moreover, the long-feuding Mugabe and Nkomo groups have not yet settled on a common military strategy. That could give the Rhodesian army an important advantage, except that its morale and fighting power also seem to be declining as experienced white officers continue to leave. Thus, conclude some observers, it is not unlikely that two poorly trained, poorly equipped and poorly disciplined armies may wind up slogging away at each other for years to come. -

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