A Letter From the Publisher

By Richard B. Thomas

Months before his visit to Africa last week, Chief of Correspondents Henry Muller filed a request for an interview with Ethiopian Leader Mengistu Haile Mariam. Success seemed unlikely. Mengistu has been largely inaccessible to the Western press in the dozen years since he and fellow military officers overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie. Muller had reason to hope he might be an exception. Eighteen years earlier, he and his wife Maggie McComas, now an associate editor at FORTUNE, had gone to Ethiopia to teach school as Peace Corps volunteers. Just as Muller was about to embark, word was passed along from Addis Ababa that the interview was on. He quickly rearranged his plans.

That ability -- and willingness -- to adjust a busy schedule comes easily to Muller, a former Paris bureau chief and senior editor of the World section who took over as chief of correspondents and assistant managing editor last February. Not only had Mengistu agreed to the exclusive interview that appears in this week's issue but the government also placed a Soviet-built Mi-17 helicopter at the disposal of the TIME group, which included Nairobi Bureau Chief James Wilde and Photographer William Campbell. They were given a glimpse of Ethiopia rarely seen by Western journalists. On a side trip to Holeta (pop. 3,000), 27 miles west of Addis Ababa, Muller met the current headmaster of one of his old schools. Reports Muller: "We were best remembered, apparently, for having brought the school a duplicating machine."

Muller's Peace Corps experience did not contribute to a rapport with Mengistu, though. "I mentioned that I had found it moving to revisit the village in which I had taught and in which Mengistu had been educated," reports Muller. "The remark evoked no response, not the thinnest smile of recognition."

After that session, Muller flew on to South Africa to see at first hand the crisis that has intensified pressure in the West to impose broad sanctions -- the subject of this week's cover stories. He had a long meeting with Louis Nel, South Africa's Deputy Minister of Information, about the government's sweeping press restrictions. The month-old rules have complicated the work of Johannesburg Bureau Chief Bruce Nelan and Reporter Peter Hawthorne, but Muller left determined "that TIME continue to be able to provide its readers with honest, fair and accurate reporting from South Africa."