AFRICA: U.S. Policy Under Attack

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Critics charge the Administration with being rigid and unrealistic

I love the rhetoric. Keep it coming. Meanwhile, we're all waiting for the action." So said one African diplomat in Nairobi last week, acidly summing up the reaction of many of his colleagues to Jimmy Carter's three-day visit to the continent and to the President's keynote speech in Lagos. In that well-intentioned address from the Nigerian capital, Carter called for a fair and peaceful transmission of power from the governing white minorities in southern Africa to black majorities; at the same time he issued a tough warning against the growing Cuban and Soviet presence in Africa. To the dismay of Administration officials, the speech got a lukewarm reception from many of the listeners for whom it was intended. Even South Africa's leading black paper, the Johannesburg Post, buried the story on an inside page and did not bother to make an editorial comment.

This week the Administration is attempting to move beyond words to concrete action. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance flies off to Africa for a series of meetings with parties directly involved in the unsolved Rhodesian crisis. His basic goal: to convince the Presidents of the so-called front-line states, the two key black nationalists who head the Patriotic Front, and the black leaders who have accepted Prime Minister Ian Smith's internal settlement for Rhodesia that the main hope of avoiding a protracted civil war remains the Anglo-American proposals. Both Smith's Salisbury agreement and the Anglo-American plan predicate eventual black-majority rule. The difference is that Washington and London—neither of which really trusts Smith's assurances of positive transition—would step in under their proposal to supervise such essential instruments of government as police, courts and army.

In Washington as well as in many African capitals Carter's policy toward the continent, and particularly toward the treacherous problems of southern Africa, has come under attack. "Our foreign policy as it applies to Africa is in total shambles," says Illinois Congressman Edward Derwinski of the House International Relations Committee. "As usual, it's too little too late." In a trenchant editorial on the President's Lagos speech, the Washington Post accused Carter of succumbing to Nigeria's "uncomplicated fervor" for a guerrilla victory by the Patriotic Front forces, headed by Joshua Nkomo of Z.A.P.U. (Zimbabwe African People's Union) and Robert Mugabe of Z.A.N.U. (Zimbabwe African National Union). Meanwhile, the Nigerian joint communique failed to mention any progress achieved from Smith's internal settlement, which the Post called "more democratic, moderate and multiracial than any government the guerrillas might construct." To gain, in effect, revolutionary credentials, the President appeared to be holding Salisbury "to lofty moral and political standards, while often appearing to wink at the failings of the Popular Front."