ZIMBABWE RHODESIA: A Fragile Truce Takes Root

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Guerrillas return in triumph, but casualties continue

It was a heroes' homecoming. In two separate shuttles on a chartered Air Botswana plane, 84 senior officers of the Patriotic Front's ZIPRA and ZANLA guerrillas landed at Salisbury airport to the cheers of some 50,000 jubilant supporters. The youthful-looking soldiers, dressed in crinkly-fresh camouflage gear, were returning from their bases in neighboring Zambia and Mozambique to begin carrying out the Zimbabwe Rhodesia cease-fire accord. Thousands of black demonstrators waited all day under a blistering African sun. They reveled in the apparent success of the guerrillas' seven-year armed struggle for black majority rule.

WATCH OUT, BISHOP, THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN, proclaimed one hand-painted poster, in a gibe at the biracial former government's Prime Minister, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who will be the Front's main rival in the February elections. The raucous demonstration was both a sign of the guerrillas' broad-based popular support and a reminder of the volatile emotions that still threaten the fragile truce. "Zimbabwe out of the gun," rang an aggressive cheer.

Indeed no one expected Rhodesia's savage civil war to fade away quietly. In the first week following the signing of the cease-fire agreement, 80 Rhodesians were killed in continuing clashes and sporadic skirmishes between guerrillas and Salisbury security forces. Three Royal Air Force troops, members of the Commonwealth monitoring force, also died when their Puma helicopter crashed after accidentally striking a power line; they were the first casualties of Britain's sponsorship of the truce. In other provocations, guerrilla supporters were regularly abused by hostile blacks as well as by whites. On several occasions white police harassed marchers at newly legal Patriotic Front rallies and, in one case, fired tear gas on a crowd carrying flowers to the airport welcome. More ominously and mysteriously, two nephews of Patriotic Front Co-Leader Robert Mugabe were wounded in a hit-and-run shooting attack against his sister's house in Salisbury. From Mozambique, Mugabe reacted with deadpan menace: "Such assailants must remember that whatever they do, we can do better."

Potentially the worst blow to the tenuous cease-fire was the sudden death of General Josiah Tongogara, military commander of Mugabe's ZANLA forces, who was killed when his car crashed head-on into a truck while he was driving to his base camp in Mozambique. Officials there, as well as diplomats, judged the death accidental, but among some of his followers there was speculation that he might have run afoul of rivalries inside the guerrilla movement. A magnetic, ruthless soldier, Tongogara, 41, had played a key role in favor of a settlement, and British officials fear it might be jeopardized without him to help hold it together.