Wedding Day in Salisbury

Black leaders take an oath and praise "new realities"

As newspaper placards in the streets of Salisbury proclaimed WHITE RULE ENDS last week, a small but highly significant ceremony took place in Independence House, Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith's official residence. There three black leaders, the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, Bishop Abel Muzorewa and Chief Jeremiah Chirau, joined the top echelon of government, the first blacks to do so in the breakaway colony's history. The three blacks took oaths of loyalty to "Rhodesia" (rather than to the present constitution) and were sworn in by a black Anglican bishop, the Right Rev. Patrick Murindagomo, rather than by white President John Wrathall. Said the bishop: "It was a happy occasion, like a wedding."

The ceremony formally established the Executive Council, the four-member group that is to govern Rhodesia for the next nine months, while the transition to black majority rule under Smith's "internal settlement" is worked out. Although some diehard whites hurled accusations of "sellout" at Smith, other whites--and many blacks--were enthusiastic. Sithole, who was once convicted of plotting to murder Smith and two members of his Cabinet, declared: "Zimbabwe [the African name for Rhodesia] is here."

Not quite. The country's name is still Rhodesia, and Smith will remain Prime Minister until a new constitution takes effect after a whites-only referendum some time before the end of this year. But Smith's powers will be diluted. The Executive Council will rule by consensus, with each member having veto power. Smith will be its first chairman, a position that will rotate every four weeks. Asked whether it was just coincidence that he happened to draw the first lot, Smith gave a nervous smile. "We agreed it would be better this way. We drew lots, and I won."

The council's first job is to decide on the composition of a ministerial council --the transition government's Cabinet, in which there is to be a black and a white minister for each of nine portfolios. Black Rhodesians will be watching closely to see to what extent the black ministers are able to exert real authority, since the Rhodesian bureaucracy could be effectively ruled for a long time by the white civil servants who have always run it. The council also faces hard decisions about how to bring about the internal settlement's promises of amnesties for guerrillas, the release of political detainees and rapid removal of racial discrimination. Only when Smith has won his referendum from whites--a process that he said last week, to the surprise of his black colleagues, may be delayed for six months--will he be able to tackle these areas of reform.

The internal settlement has been criticized both at the U.N., where it was condemned by the Security Council, and in Britain, the U.S. and the so-called frontline states of Zambia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Botswana and Angola. The principal reason: its failure to include the leaders of the Patriotic Front, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, whose Soviet-and Cuban-backed guerrillas, poised along the Rhodesian border, are now believed to number 12,000. The fear is that Smith's limited solution will not lead to peaceful black rule but to a black-against-black civil war among the rival political and tribal factions.

Smith told a group of touring U.S. businessmen in Salisbury last week that now that Rhodesia has committed itself to majority rule the free world should "deliver the goods"--meaning that the Salisbury government should be given diplomatic recognition and that the twelve-year-old Rhodesian trade boycott should be dropped. But U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young repeated Washington's position in Zambia: that the settlement would get "very little, if any" U.S. support because it promised "something less than genuine majority rule."

Young was in Africa on an eleventh-hour mission to try to persuade all of Rhodesia's nationalist factions to sit down for one last try at a comprehensive peace agreement. The Administration fears that if the Patriotic Front is excluded from any majority-rule agreement, the fighting will engulf neighboring countries as well and create an opening for Soviet, Cuban and South African involvement.

But would Nkomo and Mugabe agree to share power in Rhodesia under any circumstances? The black members of the new Executive Council suggested that there could be a "leadership role" in the new Rhodesian regime for Nkomo and Mugabe if they agreed to return to the country in peace. The chances for that seem remote, given the Patriotic Front's past denunciations of the internal settlement. But that agreement, Sithole maintains, is not subject to change. "We have generated new realities in this country," he says. "They have to be accepted as they are."

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