Pinning an Elusive Prime Minister

But a deal may be complicated by devastating raids

Diplomats in Washington and London who have dealt extensively with Rhodesian affairs agree on one thing at least: nailing wily Prime Minister Ian Smith to any deal is almost as hard as netting a rare African butterfly. Last week, at the conclusion of a 14-day U.S. tour aimed at promoting his "internal settlement" for the breakaway British colony, Smith apparently got pinned. U.S. and British officials announced that the Prime Minister and his three black colleagues on Rhodesia's governing Executive Council had agreed to their terms for an all-parties conference dealing with the country's future. That conference--the basis of Anglo-American plans for a peaceful settlement--would also have to include leaders of the black nationalist Patriotic Front, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, who are Smith's bitter enemies.

Bending to U.S. and British pressure, Smith and the black council members accepted an American-proposed agenda for talks that would have five basic objectives. They are: 1) provisions for holding free and fair elections; 2) cease-fire arrangements; 3) agreement on a transitional administration to guide Rhodesia to true independence and majority rule; 4) the formation of a single army to serve Zimbabwe (the black nationalists' name for Rhodesia); and 5) a constitution that, among its basic principles, includes guarantees of individual rights.

But the clever Smith scored some points too. The talks are to be "without preconditions," a reference to aspects of the Anglo-American plan for settling the Rhodesian crisis, which the Prime Minister had refused to accept. The objectives agreed on last week cover essentially the same areas as the Anglo-American plan but Washington may have difficulty convincing the Patriotic Front of this.

Even as Smith was consenting to the conference, U.S. officials conceded that "a serious complication" made it very uncertain whether Nkomo and Mugabe--not to mention their allies in the five front-line states of Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania and Botswana--would attend. While Smith was promoting the cause of his internal settlement in Houston, Texas, the Rhodesian armed forces carried out a devastating series of raids on military bases of Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) deep inside Zambia. In all, Salisbury claimed, its air and paratroop forces hit 12 different ZAPU camps and killed 1,500 guerrillas.

The biggest raid at Chikumbi, 14 miles north of Lusaka, caused political problems along with casualties. Flying out of the morning sun, Rhodesian fighter-bombers circled over Chikumbi for nearly 45 minutes. According to Nkomo, 226 men were killed and 629 were wounded in the attack on the base, which housed nearly 3,000 unarmed civilians as well as ZAPU fighters. Two hours later, Rhodesian forces struck another camp at Mkushi, northeast of Lusaka, killing at least 50 guerrillas.

Nkomo insisted that the Rhodesians had hit a refugee center for young, old and ill Zimbabweans at Chikumbi. "We even had some blind people there," he said after the raid. Medical teams in Lusaka who treated the casualties said most of the injured were young men of military age wearing green fatigue uniforms.

The raid was likely to cause friction between Nkomo and Zambia's President Kenneth Kaunda. Kaunda has allowed 10,000 ZAPU guerrillas to use his country as a base against Rhodesia, but he has kept most of their weapons, including sizable shipments received from the Soviet Union within the past six weeks, under Zambian lock and key in an effort to prevent shootouts. So the ZAPU guerrillas were virtually helpless when surprised by the Rhodesian raiders. Only as the first bombers appeared over Zambia did Salisbury warn the Lusaka airport control tower to keep other planes away from the airspace around the camp.

Kaunda, who only reluctantly reopened his border with Rhodesia earlier this month to prevent Zambia's economic strangulation, has good reason to worry about hosting a restless ZAPU force better equipped than his own military. Still, the raid, the locks and the frustrated reactions of the ZAPU leadership will make existing tensions worse. -

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