Word: machel
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...high political drama, and the setting did it full justice. On a remote strip of bush along the border between their two countries, with the Lebombo mountains as a backdrop and hippos snorting in the nearby Nkomati River, Prime Minister P.W. Botha of apartheid South Africa and President Samora Machel of black-ruled, Marxist Mozambique last week sat down together for the first time and faced something other than the prospect of killing. As a crowd of 1,000, including representatives of black African states, watched from the tiers of a hastily constructed grandstand near the border town of Komatipoort...
Mozambique President Samora Machel has long been one of the most implacable foes of South Africa's apartheid system. Returning the sentiment, South African Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha has seldom bothered to hide his hostility toward his country's Marxist, black-ruled neighbor. But when both men finally met in Mozambique's capital of Maputo last week, it was to shake hands and talk peace. After eight hours of discussions, negotiating teams for the two sides emerged to announce that they had agreed to sign a joint security pact...
...Machel, the decisive impetus toward accommodation was a growing fear that South Africa might unleash its vastly superior muscle against Mozambique. In the past year South Africa has conducted major military operations against guerrilla strongholds of the South West African People's Organization (SWAPO) in Angola and has staged periodic raids on A.N.C. bases in Mozambique. Despite its battlefield successes, however, South Africa has been growing weary of the regional struggle, which is expected to consume some 10% of this year's national budget and has brought a mounting toll of casualties...
...Machel looks west-and south We are Marxists, but riot in the religious sense of the word," an adviser to Mozambique's President conceded last year. That may be putting it mildly. Last October, during a fence-mending 18-day tour of Western Europe, President Samora Machel, 50, was presented with a medal from Queen Elizabeth, and persuaded the British government to waive his country's payment of a $30 million debt. In Portugal, Mozambique's longtime colonial master and Machel's bitter foe during a ten-year struggle for independence, the former guerrilla commander declared...
...Machel, who became last year the first African President to visit Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov, has not received a great deal of assistance lately from Moscow, which is still furious with him for his peace-seeking European safari. The Soviet Union did, to be sure, give Mozambique $450 million in military and economic aid between 1978 and 1982. In return, however, it appropriated the country's lucrative fishing industry, along with the income it produced...