Zimbabwe Mugabe's Win

The first general election since Zimbabwe won independence from Britain five years ago might prove to be its last. Nearly 3 million black voters flooded the polls last week to provide Prime Minister Robert Mugabe with a solid victory, and a mandate for continuing toward his stated goal of transforming Zimbabwe into a one-party, Marxist-Leninist state.

At week's end the results appeared to give Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front six additional seats in the country's 100- member Parliament, bringing the party's total to 63. The tally makes it doubtful that Mugabe will be able to win the unanimous parliamentary backing now needed to impose one-party rule. But it does bring him closer to the 70 parliamentary votes that will be needed under the constitution to switch to a one-party system after 1990.

Mugabe's chief rival, Joshua Nkomo, fared well only in Matabeleland, the western homeland of his Ndebele tribe, where resentment of Mugabe's predominant Shona tribe runs high. Although Nkomo's party, the Zimbabwe African People's Union, won all 15 of the Matabeleland constituencies, redistricting had eliminated five seats that ZAPU held in the previous Parliament. Elsewhere, Mugabe's victory removed from Parliament three minority opposition parties, including pre-independence Prime Minister Abel Muzorewa's United African National Council, which had held three seats.

Zimbabwe's 100,000 whites gave former Prime Minister Ian Smith a lopsided victory over more moderate candidates in the country's whites-only election the previous week. Smith, who engineered Rhodesia's break from Britain between 1965 and 1979, is still regarded as a white supremacist by many blacks. In the new Parliament, Smith's Conservative Alliance of Zimbabwe party will control 15 of the 20 seats reserved for whites under the constitution.

Following Smith's win, Mugabe lashed out angrily at the disproportionate parliamentary representation accorded whites. He promised 200,000 supporters gathered in the Harare township of Highfield that "we will not live with that indignity and insult for very much longer." Branding the whites who supported Smith as "racists of the past," Mugabe also warned ominously of a "cleanup operation so that we remain only with the whites who want to work with the government."