Mozambique: Victory for Flexibility

The cortege at the funeral of Mozambique President Samora Machel, killed in an October jetliner crash in South Africa, was led by two founders of the ruling Marxist Party, which won independence from Portugal in 1975 after a bloody eleven-year civil war. Last week the younger of the two men, Foreign Minister Joaquim Chissano, 47, was selected by the party's 130-member Central Committee to succeed Machel as President. In choosing the urbane, pragmatic Chissano over Vice President Marcelino dos Santos, who is a hard-line Marxist, the party signaled a continuation of Machel's flexible, westward-looking policies.

The new President will have his hands full, especially if he is to avert a confrontation between his desperately poor, war-racked country and Pretoria. Last week South African Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha charged that documents recovered from the crash indicated that Machel and officials in Zimbabwe had plotted the overthrow of Malawi's Hastings Banda, President of the only black African state that maintains full diplomatic relations with Pretoria. In the event of a coup, warned Botha, the "whole of southern Africa would pay a heavy price."