End of an Uneasy Truce

Fearing a coup plot, Mugabe dumps Nkomo from the Cabinet

For years they were rivals. But for the 24 months since the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party (ZANU-P.F.) of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe came to power in 1980, he and Joshua Nkomo, 64, the portly, outspoken head of the opposition Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), have coexisted uneasily. Last week their shaky truce was shattered. Nkomo was unceremoniously stripped of his rank as Minister Without Portfolio in the Mugabe government, a post he was demoted to a year after Nkomo's party won 20 parliamentary seats in the 1980 elections (vs. 57 for Mugabe's). The accusation against Nkomo: conspiring to overthrow the government by force of arms.

The occasion for Nkomo's ejection from the Cabinet was the alleged discovery of arms caches on property owned or controlled by Nkomo and ZAPU in the Bulawayo area, in the southwestern part of the country. Government security forces unearthed other buried weapons and military equipment near Gwelo in central Zimbabwe and Umtali in the east. The arsenal included 25 SA-7 missiles, more than 7,000 Soviet-made automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, machine guns and more than 2 million rounds of ammunition. Said Mugabe: "The arms were being hoarded to try to overthrow my government."

Police first grew suspicious when ZAPU insurgents, who had fought grudgingly alongside ZANU forces during their seven-year guerrilla war against the white-dominated, government of what was formerly Rhodesia, did not turn over all their arms as required when the strife ended in 1979. After a series of armed robberies in the Bulawayo area last year, police arrested a number of former ZAPU guerrillas and persuaded them to reveal the location of the caches.

Mugabe also claimed that Nkomo held two secret meetings shortly after the 1980 elections with South African officials to seek Pretoria's support for a coup attempt against Mugabe. The South Africans, charged Mugabe, refused Nkomo's request at both meetings. The Prime Minister also maintained that Nkomo had met with "other parties" to plan a strategy to overthrow his government. Among them: Member of Parliament Wally Stuttaford, 64, who has been detained by the Mugabe government since December on suspicion of having approached ZAPU to plot a joint coup attempt.

Mugabe said ominously that "the law will now take its course" against Nkomo and dismissed three other key ZAPU party members, though he stopped short of firing four others. The apparent attempt to confine the sackings to a few ZAPU leaders for the moment undercut increasingly vocal complaints from opposition critics, especially among Zimbabwe's 210,000 whites, that Mugabe is moving to establish a one-party state.

As news of Nkomo's dismissal circulated, security around Salisbury was noticeably tightened and crowds of pro-Mugabe demonstrators took to the streets to hail the Prime Minister's decisive action, Nkomo was denying knowledge of the buried weapons or any coup plotting. "It's a political vendetta," he told TIME at his home outside Salisbury. "This young man Mugabe is trying to hide two years of failure. He can come here and shoot me if he likes. I will survive, and he will see me creating history in this country." Indeed, after two decades of struggle for Zimbabwe's independence, Nkomo is unlikely to give up his political prominence without a fight. |

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