Last Deal

Showdown at Lancaster House

As in the last deal of a high-stakes poker game, the London talks on Zimbabwe Rhodesia finished their fifth week with the chips piled high and the hole cards down. But the players left the table with the cards unturned as British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, chairman of the Lancaster House Conference, abruptly suspended negotiations. That was Carrington's response after a second refusal by Patriotic Front Co-Leaders Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo to accept a British-drafted constitution. The talks could not resume, said Carrington, until the guerrilla leaders approved the latest plan "without ambiguity."

The British negotiator had brought things to a head a week earlier by presenting a "final" constitutional proposal: it guarantees 20% of the parliamentary seats to Rhodesia's white minority of 212,000, but strips it of its effective control of the military, judiciary and civil service. While avoiding the word ultimatum, Carrington insisted on the accord of both parties by Oct. 8.

Before that deadline was up, Zimbabwe Rhodesia's Prime Minister Abel Muzorewa accepted the British draft unequivocally. He then repeated his demand that the British meet their "legal and moral obligation to immediately lift [economic] sanctions and lead us to international recognition." The only dissenter in Muzorewa's twelve-man party was former Prime Minister Ian Smith. He denounced the British pact as "madness" and flew back to Salisbury to rally white support against it.

When the talks resumed, the guerrillas offered a constitutional plan of their own that rejected four key features of the British proposal: certain entrenched guarantees for whites; continued citizenship for immigrants who settled in Rhodesia after the 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence; pensions for former officials of the Salisbury regime; and compensation for any property seized by a future Zimbabwe government. Carrington promised to study the document, but insisted that his plan was the only possible basis for settlement and gave the guerrillas another 48 hours to accept it.

In the meantime, the Foreign Secretary visited Blackpool to defend the negotiations before a turbulent Conservative Party conference. Heckled and jeered by pro-Rhodesia right-wingers, Carrington withstood their demands for an immediate lifting of sanctions and pledged not to allow "any party to unilaterally determine the outcome of the London conference." Carrington's speech received a standing ovation and his position prevailed in a conference resolution; it called for an end to sanctions and recognition of the breakaway colony "as soon as practically possible."

Having weathered the storm within his own party, Carrington held firm when Nkomo and Mugabe insisted that they still could not agree on a constitution. He offered no further compromise, beyond the suggestion that Britain and other Western governments, certainly including the U.S., would be willing to help bear the financial burden of compensating dispossessed white landholders.

The guerrillas thus found themselves in an increasingly awkward and isolated position. Should they persist in rejecting the British draft, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government may recognize the Muzorewa government and proceed with elections under the British constitutional plan. That would leave the guerrillas little choice but to "achieve peace through the barrel of a gun," as Mugabe put it last week. With 40,000 troops under arms, the Patriotic Front can carry on the seven-year-old civil war indefinitely--a prospect almost no one favors. Thus the hope was that Mugabe and Nkomo might present a flexible new interpretation of Carrington's final offer that the British and the bishop could accept. But time was running out. The hands have been called, and all sides must show their cards.

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