Word: rhodesians
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Neighboring Mozambique provides landlocked Rhodesia with its principal outlet to the sea. The Portuguese territory is also a major infiltration route for black Rhodesian insurgents returning home from training camps in Tanzania. Black rule would mean a certain end to the virtual carte blanche that Rhodesian security forces now enjoy to go guerrilla hunting in the Mozambican bush. More important, a new government in the territory's capital, Lourenço Marques, might well refuse to transport Rhodesian goods by road and rail to Indian Ocean ports-meaning economic disaster...
...able to go its own way with remarkable success. Guerrilla movements were generally unable to mobilize the territory's 5.7 million blacks against the white-dominated government. Sanctions voted by Britain and the United Nations were largely ignored by countries that saw profits in Rhodesian tobacco, beef and chrome. But 18 months ago, a guerrilla movement called ZANU (for Zimbabwe African National Union) caught hold on the rich agricultural plateau overlooking the Zambezi valley in the north. Since then, a bitter guerrilla war has claimed nearly 500 lives...
According to the Rhodesian government, the dead include 13 white civilians, 102 black civilians, 45 Rhodesian and South African military men, and 311 guerrillas-20 of them killed last week. Three Rhodesian air force planes have been lost in the past two months. The government claims that all three losses were due to accidents, but rumors persist that a rebel missile accounted for one of the planes (a Canberra light bomber) and that rifle fire brought down the other two. The guerrillas get funds from the Organization of African Unity and from China and Russia, which also supply arms...
Although southern areas of Rhodesia are still virtually free of guerrilla activity, even the limited scope of the resistance thus far has put severe strains on the 2,500-man white army and the 1,000 blacks of the Rhodesian African Rifles, who are supported by 45,000 army and police reservists as well as 5,000 South African police. Reserve call-ups have severely depleted the labor force, a problem exacerbated by the refusal of white trade unions to allow the training of blacks in many crafts...
...This scheme satisfies neither the colonialists nor the colonials. General Francisco Costa Gomes, the armed forces commander in chief, made a sudden flying visit to Angola to reassure the 750,000 white settlers there that "Mother Portugal" would not abandon them. He was obviously concerned about heading off a Rhodesian-style breakaway by the oil-rich colony. Gomes also offered the liberation fighters a cease-fire until self-determination can be negotiated. The guerrillas' response was immediate: "We refuse to be considered as black Portuguese," said Georges Paulo Texeira, spokesman for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola...