Puzzling Package to Wrap

By George Russell

Getting rid of both South Africans and Cubans

Ever since his election, Ronald Reagan has sounded the theme of a new, "constructive" tilt in U.S. relations with racist South Africa. As the President has put it, "Can we abandon a country that has stood beside us in every war we've ever fought, * a country that strategically is essential to the free world?" Translating that concern into policy, however, has turned out to be a complex and tricky business. Just how much so became clear last week as fragments emerged of the evolving U.S. plan for handling an explosive issue that pits South Africa against black Africa: Who will rule Namibia?

South Africa administers mineral-rich Namibia (pop.: 1 million, including 100,000 whites) under a 1920 League of Nations mandate that the U.N. formally revoked in 1966. Since then, Pretoria has had to fight a low-key guerrilla war against some 8,000 members of the Marxist-dominated and Soviet-armed South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO). South Africa values Namibia as a buffer zone against Marxist Angola, a SWAPO haven. With 20,000 troops in Namibia, the South Africans have launched sharp punitive raids against SWAPO camps in Angola.

Under the Carter Administration, the U.S. actively joined international efforts to make South Africa relinquish Namibia. In 1978, with U.S. approval, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 435, which called for South African military withdrawal from Namibia and elections for a national constituent assembly under the aegis of a U.N. peace-keeping force. Last December it looked as if South Africa would grudgingly go along. A month later, it changed its mind. Among other things, the South Africans apparently feared that SWAPO would win control of Namibia at the polls, in the manner of Marxist Robert Mugabe last year in neighboring Zimbabwe.

Secretary of State Alexander Haig remains as eager as ever to see the Namibian problem settled. But U.S. views on how to do so are now markedly different. One big reason: the assumption, in the words of a high State Department official, that U.N. Resolution 435 "is a leaky ship that's not going anywhere."

Washington's new plan for Namibian independence calls for assembling an "expert panel" to write a national constitution that would guarantee rights to the white minority. Only then would national elections be called. The framework of the scheme was outlined by Haig to South African Foreign Minister Roelof Botha during Botha's May visit to Washington.

Perhaps more important are differences between the Reagan and Carter Administrations about ridding Angola of the 12,000 to 20,000 Cuban troops that have remained there since they helped leftist forces win the civil war in 1976. Carter policy implicitly accepted an Angolan claim that the Cubans would leave after the South Africans pulled out of Namibia. The Reagan Administration, on the other hand, is under heavy pressure from Republican hard-liners like Senator Jesse Helms to make Cuban withdrawal a prior condition for the Namibian settlement. Helms also wants the U.S. to force Angola into sharing power with the guerrilla group backed by South Africa known as the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).

Without going nearly that far, the Administration did begin to work out an "empirical relationship" between Namibia and Angola. Nonetheless, Haig was hesitant to commit himself publicly to a Namibia- Angola policy that would be as difficult to put into effect as the one advocated by Helms. Indeed, when details of the new U.S. thinking were leaked, the six "front-line" black-ruled countries in southern Africa -- Angola, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Tanzania -- loudly insisted that U.N. Resolution 435 was the only legitimate route to Namibian independence.

Such veteran Africa hands as Lord Carrington, Britain's Foreign Secretary, have told Washington that if there is to be any Namibia-Angola "linkage" it will have to involve a Namibian settlement first, and pressure for Cuban withdrawal afterward. In West Germany, Foreign Ministry officials are openly derisive about the prospects for linkage. Says one: "What on earth are they smoking back in Washington? This is blue-sky stuff."

Maybe. But while Haig likes the anti-Soviet, anti-Cuban approach, he is also a pragmatist. Thus the State Department's current thinking is to discuss the issues together without explicitly making them part of a diplomatic package. Haig this week is sending Deputy Secretary of State William P. Clark to South Africa and Namibia. The prospect is for more lengthy negotiations over Namibia, which should suit the South Africans fine.

Their basic policy is, as always, to buy time in handing over one of the continent's last colonial vestiges.

-- By George Russell.

Reported by Marsh Clark /Johannes burg and Roberto Suro/Washington

* Reagan was hyperbolizing. The government of Jan Smuts did fight beside the U.S.

in World War II, for example, but almost all leaders of the National Party that took power in 1948 had been violently opposed to Smuts' stand at the time.

With reporting by Marsh Clark/Johannesburg, Roberto Suro/Washington

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