A Black is Fired

Will the settlement survive?

We've only traded one kind of isolation for another," grumbles a white merchant in Salisbury. "Whatever the cross is between Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, that's where we are."

The transition from the Rhodesia of the past to the Zimbabwe of the future has now been under way for almost two months, but the durability of Salisbury's "internal settlement" remains in doubt. The biggest challenge facing the ruling Executive Council, composed of Prime Minister Ian Smith and three black moderates, is how to bring the guerrilla armies of the Patriotic Front into the electoral process, and thereby end the continuing civil war. But in the meantime, the council has been having problems within its own ranks.

The difficulty began three weeks ago, when the new black co-minister of justice and law-and-order, Lawyer Byron Hove, 38, gave an interview. Hove is a colleague of Bishop Abel Muzorewa's, the most influential black member of the council, who had brought him home from London to serve in the new government. Noting that there were few blacks in the higher ranks of the present police force, let alone in the judiciary, Hove declared: "I don't think there is a single African in the upper echelons of my ministry." The reason, he said, was that the previous white government had wanted to keep not only political power but the best jobs in the hands of its own people.

Hove's comments were both true and reasonable, but they rubbed some whites the wrong way. Hove's white co-minister of justice, Hilary Squires, angrily attacked Hove and was soon joined by the army and police commanders, both white. The council thereupon reprimanded Hove unanimously and, after the police force threatened to strike in protest, fired him.

That set off an uproar among blacks, particularly in Muzorewa's party. The bishop, evidently surprised at the depth of the black response, claimed that he had not been present when the council voted to oust Hove. The dismayed Hove flew back to London, and the Patriotic Front's co-leader, Joshua Nkomo, announced from his base in Zambia: "The council members only have powers to sack each other." They will soon realize, he said, "that they have been taken for a ride."

Perhaps. But so far the government has not fallen apart. Last week the council announced a unilateral cease-fire under which guerrillas are guaranteed the right of safe return and of participation in elections. The plan stopped well short of what the guerrillas are demanding, however. It contained no provision, for instance, for absorbing any returning guerrillas into the Rhodesian armed forces.

The council also rescinded the decade-old laws banning the guerrilla parties' political wings that are based inside Rhodesia. Both wings have been operating there more or less openly under different names anyway, and the radicals scornfully rejected the council's offer. The gesture of legalizing the parties' status, said Josiah Chinamano, the leader of Nkomo's group, was "a waste of time."

The Patriotic Front seems no more interested in seeking power through democratic means than it has in the past. But the Carter Administration still hopes that Smith and his black colleagues will sit down at an all-parties peace conference with the front and agree to the U.S.British plan for internationally supervised transition to majority rule through free elections. Some Washington officials thought the Hove affair, by undercutting the credibility of the internal settlement, might encourage Smith and his colleagues to join such a conference. It could also spur the Salisbury government to avoid similar embarrassments in the future and to broaden its popular support. Last week the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, another black council member, said flatly that the next two months would probably tell the story on whether the internal settlement is going to work or not.

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