Word: machel
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Even as Mozambique steps up its efforts to train Rhodesian guerrillas and help them infiltrate and harass the white-ruled nation, it is itself slipping deeper into an economic and political morass. President Samora Machel's decision last month to close his border with Rhodesia and proclaim a "state of war" deprived landlocked Rhodesia of vital rail links to the sea, and is forcing it into a virtual siege economy. But the move will also cost Mozambique at least $50 million a year in Rhodesian transit and rail revenues and up to $30 million annually brought back by Mozambican...
...country's new economic troubles pose a dilemma for Machel, who was already facing rising dissent at home over one of the harshest austerity programs ever imposed by an African government on its people. When Mozambique won its independence from Portugal last June, its future looked relatively bright compared with that of Lisbon's other African territories. Unlike Angola, which became engulfed in a civil war among three liberation movements, Mozambique had only one major force fighting for independence - Frelimo (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique). Frelimo leaders made seemingly sincere requests to whites to stay...
Breakneck Pace. Unpersuaded, more than half of the 220,000 whites left before independence. As a result, Mozambique is almost without skilled and professional workers. There are now fewer than 1,000 trained administrators and only 15 medical doctors for a population of 8.5 million people. Machel, 42, a onetime medical orderly who led the struggle for independence and became the country's first President, set about at breakneck pace to convert Mozambique into what he calls "Africa's first Marxist state." All land was nationalized. The large colonial plantations, which supported more than half of the population...
Thousands of people have been packed off to "reeducation centers," where Machel's brand of Marxism is taught with a heavy and sometimes brutal hand. Machel does not coddle even his own supporters. He has warned that many workers might have to toil for as long as three years without pay "for we are without funds to reward your labors." After independence, Frelimo soldiers were given the choice of leaving the service without pay for their years in the guerrilla movement or of staying in the service-also without pay. Says Machel: "We cannot tolerate a bourgeoisie in Mozambique...
...London last week for three days of talks with British Foreign Secretary James Callaghan. Gromyko helped work out a withdrawal of South Africa's remaining 1,000 troops in southern Angola in time to blunt a U.N. Security Council showdown over the matter. Meanwhile, Mozambique President Samora Machel, whose country would of necessity be the staging ground for any Cuban involvement, assured Britain that he has no intention of inviting them in. African leaders stress that they want Rhodesia liberated by Rhodesians...