Why are President Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance supporting Communists and terrorists in Africa and trying to topple one of the few pro-Western governments remaining on that Continent? That has to be one of the many mysteries of the present Administration.
Joshua Nkomo, the guerrilla leader of Zambia, has publicly admitted that Cubans are training his 6,000-man army in Zambia. He claims credit for the shooting down of Rhodesian commercial airliners. The last crash took the lives of 59 innocent men, woman and children, all civilians.
Last September, Castro was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to confer with Nkomo and with Robert Mugabe, the leader of the guerrillas invading Rhodesia from Mozambique. Nkomo hinted that he is seeking Cuban military help to fight against the Rhodesian people.
Dana Brown, a lifetime expert on Africa who recently returned from Rhodesia, says that “every road in Rhodesia is mined or ambushed. No one can move in safety day or night. Dozens of people are being killed daily. The targets most often hit are children, women, old and defenseless people, farmers, ranchers and people in isolated areas with no defense.”
Brown points out that the reason these innocent people have no defense is “because President Carter insists on sanctions which prevent Rhodesia from buying defense weapons.”
Not only is our State Department trying to prevent the black and white people of Rhodesia from defending themselves from Communist terrorists, but our State Department is trying to force the Rhodesian people to accept into their government those Communist terrorists who, during the past five years, have murdered thousands of Rhodesian blacks and whites and destroyed countless homes and ranches.
Even Henry Kissinger has pointed out that our government is now “totally supporting” these guerrillas who are “equipped by the Soviet Union and trained by the Cubans” in their war against Rhodesia.
The State Department, in letters on this subject, calls the terrorists Nkomo and Mugabe “important African nationalist groups” and demands that they be accepted as “meaningful participants in the political life of the country.”
The peculiar pro-Communist policy of our State Department cannot be explained in terms of black versus white. There is no trouble between the blacks and whites inside Rhodesia. They are all united to fight against the Communist aggressors coming in from Zambia, Mozambique, and Botswana.
Every month the terrorists murder more than 500 blacks and 50 whites. The terrorists are Cuban-trained and armed with sophisticated Russian weapons such as mines, automatic rifles, missiles, and mortars.
The responsible blacks in Rhodesia are just as opposed to having a government of Communist or Cuban terrorists as Prime Minister Ian Smith. The black Rhodesian government leaders rejected the U.S. State Department’s demand for United Nations-supervised elections that would allow the terrorists to participate.
The Rhodesian black leaders, Bishop Abel Muzorewa and the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, are members of the biracial transition government that is going ahead with its own plans to hold parliamentary elections.
Secretary of State Vance is also setting up friendly contacts with Communist Angola, where the Marxist Neto came to power in 1975 wth the help of Cuban troops and has since killed thousands of Angolans, black and white. In a speech on African policy at the annual meeting of the Junior Chambers of Commerce, Vance said that the United States will work with Angola.
The U.S. State Department policy is distressingly clear. It is glad to work with a Communist regime such as Angola, and it joins and backs Communist-Cuban terrorists trying to overthrow an anti-Communist government such as Rhodesia. The unanswered question is, why?
