Word: nkomo
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...downed Viscount crashed on the desolate Vuti African Purchase Tract, an area heavily infiltrated by black nationalist guerrillas. The airliner fell only 32 miles from the site where the other plane from Kariba crashed in September. Joshua Nkomo, the Zambia-based co-leader of the Patriotic Front guerrillas, claimed his forces had downed that plane while denying responsibility for the subsequent massacre; he maintained that the craft had been carrying military equipment. Nkomo's excuse last week was similar. He acknowledged that "if the plane was fired on, it can only have been our chaps." Alas, he said...
...Nkomo's logic seemed odd, the moral that Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith drew from the episode was only a bit less strained. He charged that the U.S. and Britain were in part responsible for the RH-827 tragedy because they encouraged terrorism by their failure to support the Smith-led government. The reaction of Co-Minister of Transport James Chikerema, a former guerrilla leader, was more straightforward. Said he: "It is a tragedy so serious that if it is established again that Nkomo's people did it, Nkomo should not weep if we retaliate...
After last September's incident, government troops raided guerrilla bases across the border in Zambia, killing some 1,500 people who they claimed were guerrillas and who Nkomo claimed were mostly innocent civilians. This time the Rhodesian reaction was equally swift: Rhodesian jets whistled down on several guerrilla bases in southern Zambia, bombing and rocketing the primitive rural camps. Rhodesia termed the raids successful, but what effect they will have on the war is another matter. The Patriotic Front forces of Nkomo and Robert Mugabe are now in control of large areas of the Rhodesian bush. Besides reserve forces...
...last month alone, making January the third worst month for casualties since the war began. Almost 90% of the country is under one form or another of martial law; most people travel by convoy, with or without military escort, and most are armed. The Patriotic Front, headed by Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, has 12,000 guerrillas inside Rhodesia and thousands more in neighboring Mozambique and Zambia. The prospect is that it will fight on as long as it thinks it has a chance of coming to power in Salisbury. Western governments and several other interested parties made overtures last...
...plan marks an attempt by the British to atone for their weak-willed opposition to Smith's "colonial rebellion," and by the U.S. to undo the effects of the Nixon administration's "tilt" toward the apartheid states in the early '70s. Unfortunately, it calls for the participation of Nkomo and Mugabe in negotiations for a political settlement, a proposition which could precipitate bloody civil war between the Front and domestic black groups after the fall of Smith. There is enmity between Nkomo and Sithole, and little love lost between any of the moderates and the Front; in fact, even relations...