Edging toward each other

With less power for whites

"Failure is now out of the question." said Salisbury's jubilant Foreign Minister David Mukome as the second week of talks over the future of Zimbabwe Rhodesia came to a close at London's Lancaster House. Other members of the conference were more restrained in their optimism. Still, progress had been made. By a vote of 11 to 1 (former Prime Minister Ian Smith was the lone dissenter), Bishop Abel Muzorewa's delegation accepted a British proposal for a new Zimbabwe Rhodesian constitution, on one condition: that Britain end economic sanctions against its breakaway foreign colony.

The vote was a significant breakthrough for Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington and his fellow British negotiators. Muzorewa had come to London vowing not to surrender the guarantees of white political control that he and two other black leaders had accepted as an essential part of last year's "internal settlement" with Smith. The Bishop then agreed to a British proposal calling for the reduction of white seats in the 100-member Parliament from 28 to 20 and the elimination of the blocking mechanism, under which whites can veto constitutional changes for the next ten years. Smith, the leader of the country's 220,000 minority whites and a man who as Prime Minister had once vowed to resist majority rule "for a thousand years," found himself isolated even among his fellow white delegates. They reluctantly consented to the terms of the British proposal.

Lord Carrington still faces the problem of selling the British proposal to Patriotic Front Co-Leaders Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, who control 20,000 armed guerrillas inside Zimbabwe Rhodesia. At week's end, the Front leaders had refused to say whether they would accept any safeguards for the white minority. Indeed, one guerrilla spokesman waspishly branded Muzorewa's acceptance of the British plan as "an agreement between a master and puppet."

Nkomo, however, did suggest that whites might be assured of some parliamentary seats if electoral boundaries were redrawn.

Once Muzorewa had accepted the constitutional changes, the Patriotic Front offered a proposal for power sharing and the organization of security forces during the transitional period before new elections. Nkomo and Mugabe suggested an eight-man transitional governing council, composed of four guerrilla representatives plus four other members representing Britain and the present Salisbury government, with the British member acting as chairman. They also called for a joint Patriotic Front-Salisbury "transitional defense committee" to oversee the country's security force, and suggested a U.N. peacekeeping mission instead of the Commonwealth force favored by Carrington and Muzorewa.

The Bishop expressed "strong reservations" about the transition plan. Whitehall saw it as a "step forward," but objected to the fact that the proposed eight-man council would give the Patriotic Front a share in government before it had earned one in elections. As for the composition of a new Zimbabwe Rhodesian security force, the British view was that this matter should be resolved after new elections, and not before. Meanwhile, even as the talks went on in London, the brutal civil war claimed additional victims: two Salisbury M.P.s--one black, the other white--died at the hands of Patriotic Front guerrillas.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.