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139 chapter 6 Carter and Southern Africa A Balance Sheet The Birth of Zimbabwe In April 1980 Carter scored a major foreign policy success: the birth of Zimbabwe .¹ For three years, the administration had been trying to strong-arm Rhodesia ’s Prime Minister Ian Smith into accepting free elections based on universal suffrage and with the participation of the country’s two guerrilla movements, Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU and Robert Mugabe’s ZANU. Smith tried to dodge this plan by striking a deal with those black leaders who agreed to preserve white privilege. In other words, he sought an internal settlement in Rhodesia similar to the one Pretoria wanted to impose in Namibia. Policy toward Rhodesia provoked little controversy in the United States in 1977, but things changed in the spring of 1978, when Smith reached an agreement with Bishop Abel Muzorewa and two other black leaders that assured, the CIA said, “continued white domination of the military, police, judiciary and civil service.” Many in the U.S. Congress and the American press demanded that Carter endorse this internal settlement and lift the mandatory sanctions that the UN Security Council had imposed on Rhodesia in the late 1960s. Their ranks swelled after Smith held elections in Rhodesia in April 1979 that supported his internal settlement. Black turnout was high, and international observers reported that the voting had been largely free and fair. (A few days before the elections, the CIA had predicted that “Government pressure and intimidation by the black parties [that had joined Smith] and their auxiliary forces should result in a fairly high turnout.”)² “Carter faced a choice,” Nancy Mitchell writes: “bow to the will of the US congress by accepting the results of the first multiracial Rhodesian elections or defy congress by declaring the election invalid. Carter chose to defy congress, explaining that the election was not acceptable because the guerrillas fighting 140 Carter and Southern Africa against the white minority regime in Salisbury had not participated in them. The uproar was immediate.”³ In their recollections, top Carter officials—from the president down—explain that their firm support for universal suffrage in Rhodesia stemmed from their concern for basic human rights.⁴ But when one reads the available documents , it becomes evident that a specter haunted Washington—“the looming possibility of a Cuban factor in the Rhodesian/Southern African situation.”⁵ U.S. officials feared that if the guerrilla war against Smith continued, the Cubans might send troops to Mozambique, which was enduring devastating military raids from the Rhodesian regime, and to Zambia, at the request of Presidents Samora Machel and Kenneth Kaunda. Vance told a group of senators in May 1978: “My own view is that if we are going to support the internal settlement . . . it would result in the fighting continuing. As a result of the continuation of the fighting, the likelihood of the Cubans and the Russians coming in in a major way would be very substantially increased. That is why I feel so strongly that we must continue to try to find the way to somehow bring these people together. If we don’t, I really believe there is a strong likelihood that the battle will continue . . . . What I can see happening in the situation is this: The fighting continues . You find attacks from Rhodesia into Zambia against the ZAPU troops. Kaunda then turns himself to the Cubans because he has nowhere else to turn.” Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Dick Moose added, “He [Kaunda] would ask for antiaircraft units to begin with and then, there you go.”⁶ This was not a scare tactic to prod a reluctant Congress to support the administration ’s policy. U.S. officials feared that the Cubans might intervene directly in Rhodesia, and their fears were shared by the British, who were the Americans’ junior partners in southern Africa.⁷ “I will say that the United States draws the line in Southern Africa,” Deputy National Security Adviser Aaron told Brzezinski on April 13, 1978, as he prepared to meet Castro’s envoy, José Luis Padrón. “The intervention of Cuban combat forces into the struggle in Rhodesia and Namibia will have the most serious adverse consequences for direct US/Cuban relations. Intervention in Southern Africa will directly affect the interests of the United States and its principal allies, and Cuba would have to be prepared to confront the consequences.”⁸ Castro’s successful intervention in Ethiopia heightened these fears. “It will also make more likely increased Cuban involvement...

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