Sweet Talk

Machel looks west--and south We are Marxists, but riot in the religious sense of the word," an adviser to Mozambique's President conceded last year. That may be putting it mildly. Last October, during a fence-mending 18-day tour of Western Europe, President Samora Machel, 50, was presented with a medal from Queen Elizabeth, and persuaded the British government to waive his country's payment of a $30 million debt. In Portugal, Mozambique's longtime colonial master and Machel's bitter foe during a ten-year struggle for independence, the former guerrilla commander declared that the two countries were bound "in a friendship of steel." Upon returning home, he gave his blessing to the accreditation of an American ambassador less than three years after expelling four U.S. diplomats on charges of spying. And last week in their capital city of Maputo, which has been blasted three times by South African raids, Mozambique officials began formal talks with their counterparts from South Africa.

The series of meetings between the sworn archenemies may have been prompted more by economic necessity than ideological choice. With a per capita gross national product of $140 (compared with around $14,000 in the U.S.), Mozambique remains one of the world's poorest nations. Ongoing problems of mismanagement, corruption, lack of skilled workers and faulty agricultural planning have been compounded by the worst drought in 50 years. Over the past six months as many as 100,000 have died of starvation; 4 million of the country's 12.5 million people still do not have enough to eat. When food aid is sent from abroad, it is frequently blocked by the 10,000-member Mozambique National Resistance (M.N.R.) movement. The insurgents, reportedly backed by South Africa, have been devastating towns and terrifying citizens in nearly all of Mozambique's ten provinces for five years.

Machel, who became last year the first African President to visit Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov, has not received a great deal of assistance lately from Moscow, which is still furious with him for his peace-seeking European safari. The Soviet Union did, to be sure, give Mozambique $450 million in military and economic aid between 1978 and 1982. In return, however, it appropriated the country's lucrative fishing industry, along with the income it produced.

That leaves South Africa as the source not only of Mozambique's political unease but also of its potential economic stability.

Mozambique still receives most of its consumer goods and industrial supplies from its hated neighbor to the south. Though the number of Mozambicans working in South Africa's mines has fallen by 65% since 1975, some 50,000 are still laboring there, bringing in $70 million every year.

In addition, more than half of the goods passing through the port of Maputo come from the white-ruled republic. Another way for Mozambique to rake in South African rands would be by reopening its doors to tourism, a subject discussed in Pretoria and Maputo last week. Since Mozambique won independence in 1975, wealthy South Africans have been denied access to its big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing and summer houses overlooking the sea.

Economic issues were, however, overshadowed by matters of security during last week's talks. At the close, a joint statement on "good neighborly relations" suggested that Mozambique would prevent the black nationalist African National Congress from attacking South Africa from within its borders, while South Africa would not aid and abet the M.N.R. But good intentions alone may not be enough to dispel old enmities.

"That the two ideologically opposed neighbors have met at all is notable in itself," editorialized South Africa's largest daily newspaper, the Johannesburg Star.

"Miracles take a little longer."