Savagery and Terror

Salisbury's problem, as always, is that it cannot stop the war

Under a bright winter sun, twelve victims of a brutal massacre in eastern Rhodesia were buried last week in graves shadowed by the jacaranda trees of Umtali municipal cemetery. The victims were either white missionaries or the relatives of missionaries, and they included three small children and a three-week-old baby.

All had been killed in an attack by guerrillas based in neighboring Mozambique; several of the bodies had been mutilated.

The Rev. Ronald Chapman, head of the Elim Pentecostal Mission, where the massacre took place, prayed for mercy for "those who perpetrated this act of shame."

Later he spoke more bluntly. "I had to identify the bodies," he said. "I would not have treated an animal in the way these people were treated."

The Elim massacre--the most savage assault on whites in Rhodesia's history --was part of a rising tide of violence that threatens to engulf the breakaway British colony. Only days after Elim, two German Jesuits were killed by black nationalist guerrillas at St. Rupert's Mission, 90 miles west of Salisbury, bringing the black and white civilian death toll to almost 600 so far this year. The guerrillas have also suffered losses--not all of them in raids and counterattacks by the Rhodesian army. In nearby Zambia, a top lieutenant to Joshua Nkomo, one of the co-leaders of the Patriotic Front, was killed by a land mine last week, the result, said the Zambian government, of a factional rivalry within the Nkomo camp. The victim was Alfred Mangena, 35. His predecessor, Jason Moyo, had been killed by a letter bomb two years ago, also because of intra-Front rivalries, and Mangena himself had been wounded in an assassination attempt earlier this year.

At the beginning of the war, the killings of white missionaries had seemed, in most cases, to be merely part of the prevailing violence. The latest rash of murders suggests that the guerrillas are now killing missionaries in an effort to create panic among Rhodesia's remaining whites, particularly in rural areas. Since whites are now leaving the country at the rate of 1,000 a month, that brutal plan may be having some success.

More than most other whites in the country, the foreign missionaries face a cruel dilemma.

Although their schools, churches and health centers primarily serve Rhodesia's blacks, nearly 40 missionaries have been killed by the guerrillas since 1972; almost as many others have been expelled by a government that demands immediate reports on terrorist activity. "If you talk, you die, and if you don't, you go to prison," says an Irish Catholic sister who now works in Salisbury; her mission station was burned to the ground three months ago. Nearly 80% of all Catholic missionary work has come to a halt. Says a Protestant missionary: "We are now caretakers, not evangelists. I make no bones about it. We're running scared."

The plain fact is that the internal settlement, which was ratified three months ago by former Prime Minister Ian Smith and three black moderates, is not working, and for the reason widely forecast: it left the Patriotic Front guerrillas on the outside looking in. Says an adviser to Bishop Abel Muzorewa, the most popular of the black politicians in the interim government: "The root cause of the problem today is that the country has no leader. For 13 years the whites had Smith, and before that there was a succession of strong white leaders. In earlier times, before the Europeans arrived, the blacks had strong chiefs. We don't have four leaders today; we have none. Smith has given up the strings of power but no one has taken his place."

On a range of matters, the interim government has worked reasonably well. A dispute flared briefly over the firing of a black Justice Minister who complained publicly that there were so few blacks holding senior positions in the civil service and police. Since then, according to veteran civil servants, the level of cooperation between black and white ministers sharing the same portfolio has been generally high. But the real test is whether the blacks on Rhodesia's governing Executive Council--Bishop Muzorewa, the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole and Chief Jeremiah Chirau--can pull off a ceasefire; the evidence so far strongly suggests they cannot. They still routinely invite Patriotic Front Leaders Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo to return home and participate in free elections, but with little result. Nkomo replied recently that he would turn the ballot boxes into military targets. Free elections were supposed to be held before the end of the year, but with the military situation getting worse by the day, the voting seems more remote than ever.

What happens next? Presumably, Ian Smith now recognizes that his principal black partners in the interim government, Muzorewa and Sithole, are of no practical use to him in ending the war. There is pressure on the government to participate in a round of all-party talks, as proposed months ago by the British and American governments. The first priority of such a meeting would be to bring about a ceasefire. Presumably, neither Mugabe nor Nkomo would accept one unless they thought they had a very good chance of dominating a new government. Smith has consistently expressed skepticism about the value of further talks with the black nationalists, despite his private conviction that Nkomo would be the best black Prime Minister of a new government.

Under the terms of the Salisbury Agreement, the white electorate must vote in a referendum whether to accept that settlement. As a last-ditch maneuver, Smith could conceivably use this provision as an excuse to declare the March 3 agreement null and void and to restore himself as Rhodesia's Prime Minister. The risk of that course, obviously, is that it might well drive the black moderate leaders and their supporters over to the guerrillas' side. -

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