Rhodesia: The Desperate Mission

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Blustering, threatening and reasoning, probing for weak spots and grasping at straws, the Prime Ministers of Great Britain and Rhodesia played out their desperate bluffing game last week. At the end of the game, surely not far away, would come Rhodesian independence. The immediate question was how.

Without much doubt, Rhodesia's Ian Smith would end up seizing it, for his white supremacy regime was no more able to accept Britain's conditions for independence than was Harold Wilson able to compromise them. The terms are the minimum Wilson feels necessary not only on moral grounds but to prevent a Labor Party revolt that could topple his government—not to mention a walkout of African nations that could wreck the Commonwealth. He insists that Rhodesia's whites guarantee "unimpeded progress" toward majority rule by the blacks, who outnumber them 18 to 1, and that approval of independence be demonstrated by the vote of a majority of Rhodesians, both white and black.

Straw of Hope. Fearful above all of black rule, Smith has offered little more than window dressing in return. He seems willing to add to Rhodesia's legislature a senate of twelve African chiefs, but its powers would be dubious and most chiefs are government puppets, anyway. He suggests he might grant voting rights to 1,000,000 more Africans, but will not increase the number of House seats (15 out of 65) for which they can vote. He would even sign a treaty guaranteeing the sanctity of the present constitution that in theory will give Africans control of the government—if they wait 100 years or so. As if to show where its heart lay, his regime last week arrested former Prime Minister R. S. Garfield Todd, a onetime Anglican missionary and one of the blacks' stoutest defenders, and without either charge or trial, ordered him confined to his ranch, 250 miles from Salisbury, for a year.

Still, the consequences of Rhodesia's long threatened "Unilateral Declaration of Independence" were so potentially grave that the game of bluff went on. In Salisbury, Smith postponed for a day his Cabinet's decision on U.D.I. At last, he claimed it was finally made, but refused to announce what it was. Instead, he fired off a cable which, with measured stridence, told Wilson it was his last chance to avert "the implementation and consequences" of "our decision," demanded again exactly what he had been demanding before: independence under the present constitution. But there was one thin straw of hope in the message: "We again offer you a solemn treaty to guarantee our undertaking."