A glimpse of .peace?
Xan Smiley
The Fijians may come to Zero. The announcement sounds absurd, but fits nicely into the Lancaster House game of riddles. The sunny-tempered, even-handed, sporting Polynesians are front-runners for a place in the ring-holding team of Commonwealth referees who will be asked to blow the whistle when (and if) the next Zimbabwe general election takes place. 'Zero', of course, is grim white-African shorthand Zor Zimbabwe Rhodesia, that push-mepull-you of nations where — as Pretoria's harsh new leader P. W. Botha puts it — the 'winning team plays on and on till it loses'.
But indeed, strange as it may seem, the Fijians may yet arrive. Last time I saw them was 15 years ago, playing rugby, grass-skirted and under a mixture of moon and floodlight, braving the shiny-wet tar mac esplanade of Edinburgh Castle. Nkomo might have smiled, but 1 doubt whether either Mugabe or the bishop would have.
It all seems ludicrously irrelevant. Yet the prospect of Fijians and an all-party agreement at Lancaster House, an idea that would have been dismissed a year ago as a quaint fantasy, can no longer be derided. The pundits have gone quiet, bewildered, still predicting doom, because it is somehow safer to do so. After all the bitter years, the suggestion of agreement, with Mugabe and Smith both there, let alone all the other tricky and more promiscuous bedfellows, sounds peculiar. Where is the catch?
The fact is — assuming, as I write, that Lord Carrington does, with only a few stitches left, cobble together a more or less universally acceptable constitution by the end of the week — we are now in sight of the most widely accepted accord ever reached on Zimbabwe since the 1961 package, which was almost immediately repudiated by its key black signatories. The enormity of the advance which Carrington hopes to announce this week cannot be shrugged off by the caveat that the current participants have still to decide how to implement the emergent constitution —and may indeed fail to do so. It may seem inconceivable that a pack of deadly enemies should suddenly wish to bury the machete and the AK47 at the pleading of an imperial metropol that lost its effective power over Zimbabwe in 1923. Why now, and not three years ago in Geneva? Furthermore, the guerrillas appear to be on winning streak: why should they wish to relent?
The answer is that the war since then has totally jumbled the equations. It has not simply forced the Salisbury authorities to make real concessions. It is a military and political paradox that in an important sense both sides are losing. The slow strangulation of the whites is obvious. But in conventional military terms the guerrillas are continuing to suffer huge losses. (Perhaps over a quarter of all cadres who have infiltrated since 1972 have been killed, excepting the immense new host of guerrillas that has swept in this year and for the most part have been lying low.) Whatever is said about the bishop's popularity, the April election showed that the vakontana ('the boys') are a long way from real military control of the country. More to the point, the battered and starving civilians who more or less supported the vakomana a year ago are now utterly exhausted by both sides: given imaginative political leadership and a glimmer of peace, they can be `turned' in almost any direction. Indeed, the internal leaders had a fleeting chance of exploiting that opportunity, but — well abetted by the incompetence and stupidity of the Smith old guard — they fluffed it thoroughly. Even so, the gradual erosion of the bishop's support has definitely not meant a commensurate bolstering of the guerrillas. Militarily and politically, there is a growing void which the constitutional deliberations of Lancaster House could just fill.
But this whiff of optimism could rapidly be blown away by the lingering stench of personal rivals all huffing and puffing sweatily for unfettered power. A much loved ploy in certain Western multinational and political circles is the `Nkomo flip'. Strategy: Big Joshua, his popularity firmly rooted in the Ndebele/Kalanga people, though he has sensibly kept his executive mainly in the hands of the four times more numerous Shona, boosts his vote by a clever alliance with the small Shona parties of James Chikerema and Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, with Mugabe dumped. `Chik' and Sithole are notoriously unreliable colleagues, but between them they might muster 15 per cent of the vote: their capacity for holding the key to coalitions could be crucial. The Nkomo Flip Theory argues that with Nkomo back in Zimbabwe, the bishop will be outflanked and Mugabe isolated and 'neutralised'.
So far, however, the Patriotic Front leaders Nkomo and Mugabe look keen to stick together. Indeed the Front's cohesion at Lancaster House has appeared stronger than that of the bishop and his friends. The burly Nkomo has temporarily decided that his would-be flip might flop. For the British, so long as the Patriotic Front holds together and Sithole and Chikerema threaten to join anyone, the idea of welcoming the conference's breakdown so that Britain can back the bishop in a fight to the finish is becoming increasingly unwholesome.
The bishop, on the other hand, has been forced by the British into rupturing some awkward friendships — notably that of Ian Smith. The isolation and political destruction of the white leader has been one of the remarkable events of the conference so far. Carrington, according to an eyewitness, has brought the old fox to bay with `Stalinist precision'. The bishop's delegation has lacked the strategic bite of Mugabe. But now at least it is unencumbered by Smith. The white leader may hint in private that he could still persuade 21 out of the 27 other white MPs in Salisbury to vote against ratification of a 'sell-out' agreement in Lancaster House.
But that is highly unlikely. Even the white MPs, few of them noted for their diplomatic wisdom, recognise that the ability of the bishop — prodded by the British— to blot out Smith may help restore some of the sagging credibility of the internal parties. Now they can better argue that the March '78 internal agreement was a useful vehicle for evolutionary change, an essential halfway house to which the whites could be more or less gently dragged before being shoved by the momentum of events into the real black Africa.
The sharp contradictions of the internal settlement (i.e. black rule is acceptable so long as it pleases the whites) are being resolved, and Smith finally achieves irrelevance. There he was, telling the world that the bishop and the 'black majority' were in charge, for which the only real proof was for the bishop to give Smith the chop. By trying to retain white blocking power Smith provoked the bishop and even Smith's fellow tribesmen to turn against. him. The white chief has been hoist by his own petard. As the symbol falls, it will become easier for the British and the outside world to deal kindly with the bishop. True, he is still largely dependent on a white-run army and civil service, but they are fast beginning to realise that their salvation lies less in legislative blocking mechanisms than in peace.
As I have argued, the weakness and exhaustion of all the protagonists in Zimbabwe, and the fickleness of the people's allegiances, are giving the British more room for manipulating the contestants in London. But perhaps most imporaint of all is the continued willingness of the black frontline states to help impose peace upon Zimbabwe. Most pundits, accustomed to preaching disaster, now feel comfortably sure that the problems of the 'transition' — who should control the various gunmen during a fresh election? — will prove insuperable.
It is here that the brick-by-brick technique of Carrington may reap rewards. The key frontliners — Kaunda of Zambia, Nycrere of Tanzania, Machel of Mozambique — may be so heartened by constitutional progress so far, that they may be the readier to squeeze concessions out of the guerrillas to enforce their participation in elections. Are the frontline presidents then prepared to risk the guerrilla-backed parties losing an election? If that happened, would the frontliners snuff out the guerrilla bases? My guess is Yes — with a bit of help from their friends. There is another frontline state of no less weight: South Africa. Would Pretoria allow the guerrilla-backed parties to win an election? There are fierce debates inside the laager, whose outer rim some Afrikaner generals would like to extend north to the Zambesi rather than to the Limpopo. But Prime Minister Botha — tough, ruthless and now looking as pragmatic as his predecessor — is loath to have South Africa dragged into a full-scale guerrilla war that is not directly of its making, yet South African public opinion could hardly tolerate an outright guerrilla victory on the Zimbabwean battlefield. The risk of a Patriotic Front win at the polls would be unappetising but distinctly, if marginally, more palatable. The Afrikaner attitude, though crucial, is not the most immediate of Carrington's worries, for he faces howls of derision from the backwoods boys at Blackpool. But he can justifiably tell them that the Lancaster House negotiations are at their most delicate juncture. It appears that the Foreign Secretary has cunningly and deliberately timed them. The message will be: don't rock the party boat, when we've just had our first ever glimpse of the shore.
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