Smith tries to reassure anxious white voters

Press, 17 January 1979, Page 8

Smith tries to reassure anxious white voters

NZPA-Reuter Centenary (Rhodesia) Rhodesia will face a fight to the finish with nationlist guerrillas if the biracial Government’s plans for majority rule fall through, the Prime Minister (Mr lan Smith) has said. Addressing anxious white families in Centenary, a rich farming area of northern Rhodesia, where the guerrilla war began with a homestead attack more than six years ago, Mr Smith said he had reason to hope that Western Powers would recognise the mainly black Government planned to follow one-man, one-vote elections next April. “But if in the end all of this fails then we will have to fight — to fight it out,” he told a largely silent group of about 150 men, women, and children, several of them with guns at their hips to protect against a surprise guerrilla attack. “But don’t let’s say we are going to fight it out in any case,” he urged. “That’s okay for some — but what about all the children?” Mr Smith visited Centenary, about half way between Salisbury and a hostile Mozambique border, as part of a campaign to secure a “yes” vote

from 90,000 white voters in a January 30 referendum on the transitional Government's black-rule Constitution. The scheme aims to set up national unity administration which will be 28 per cent white and offer the minority a large continuing say in running the country. The Prime Minister said he believed the British and United States Governments would be morally obliged to recognise the new country of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), to remove crippling trade sanctions and to put pressure on the Patriotic Front guerrillas

to stop fighting once a black-dominated Government had taken power. The Patriotic Front, based in Zambia and Mozambique, is fighting the transitional Government and has pledged to smash the planned April poll. Mr Smith's speech appeared to leave many members of his audience unconvinced that they were approaching the end of the war. But most told reporters they believed the Centenary conununity would vote “yes” in the referendum. In Lusaka, a Government spokesman has said that Zambian troops have killed the leader of a 30man Rhodesian commando unit which crossed into Zambia under the Victoria Falls railway bridge at Livingstone. The spokesman said Zambian soldiers guarding the northern banks of the Zambesi River, the frontier between the two countries, clashed with the Rhodesian commandos | early on Sunday, killing I rhe unit’s black leader. The Rhodesian incursion, the latest of nu- : merous similar operations, ; came only one day before ! the Chinese Vice-Premier, : Mr Li Xiannian (Li Hsien-Nien), visited the scenic falls 370 km south- i west of Lusaka during an I official trip to Zambia.