TANZANIA: Nyerere's Appeal for Help

The U.S. and Britain must try to halt the Rhodesian slaughter

"We will win in Rhodesia. But you can help us shorten the war." With those words, Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere urged the U.S. and Britain to renew and strengthen their efforts to bring peace to Rhodesia. The call came against a backdrop of increasingly violent warfare in that embattled country, where Cuban-trained black nationalist guerrillas are now using Soviet-supplied mortars, armor-piercing machine guns and heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles to battle Rhodesian forces equipped with helicopters, heavy artillery and Belgian automatic weapons. More than 1,000 soldiers and civilians died in September's fighting, about the same number as during the first eight months of the year. Two weeks ago, Rhodesian troops staged a four-day raid into Mozambique, killing hundreds of guerrillas in training and staging camps. The incursion could lure Cuban advisers stationed there into a more active role in the fighting.

As the battlefield toll mounted, hopes for a negotiated transition to black majority rule dimmed. The secret contacts in Zambia through which Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith had hoped to persuade Guerrilla Leader Joshua Nkomo to join the multiracial interim government collapsed last month, after Smith accused Nkomo's men of slaughtering ten defenseless survivors from a civilian passenger plane shot down by the guerrillas. Discouraged U.S. diplomats conceded that the massacre had also dealt an all but fatal blow to the joint British-American plan for a peaceful Rhodesian settlement. As Nkomo has recently warned, "The only way left is war."

That ominous prophecy worries no one more than Nyerere. As elder statesman of the five black "frontline states" (Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, Angola and Botswana) that want to erase the last vestiges of white rule in southern Africa, Nyerere's support for efforts to bring peace to the area is pivotal. Because of Nyerere's staunch support for liberation movements, Smith has unfairly dubbed him "the evil genius on the Rhodesian scene." That sobriquet overstates Nyerere's influence with the guerrillas; it also fails to convey the Tanzanian leader's desire for peace.

In an interview with TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief David Wood last week, Nyerere called on the U.S. and Britain to make an all-out effort to bring Smith to the bargaining table. Said Nyerere: "You Americans have power. Don't use it to support that regime. Put your weight behind liberation." Without such a peace initiative, Nyerere warned, Rhodesia could be headed for an Angola-style civil war between rival nationalists. The end result: a new Zimbabwe that might be far more repressive than present-day Rhodesia.