Mugabe feeling the pinch

Press, 18 August 1981, Page 21

Mugabe feeling the pinch

By

ERIC MARSDEN

“Sunday times,” London

A black gardener I know, who makes a living by hiring his green fingers to three families in Johannesburg's northern suburbs, is heartbroken at the news that he must soon return to his native Zimbabwe. He has a wife and children in South Africa, but because he was not here before 1958 he is one of 20.000 Zimbabwean blacks whose work permits the South African Government is refusing to renew when they expire.

About 6000 of them are domestic servants and several thousand more are cooks and waiters working in hotels and restaurants, whose managers say the “Rhodesian" blacks are more cheerful and efficient. Already many are planning to go underground and stay in South Africa illegally. By clamping down on visas South Africa aims to force Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister. Robert Mugabe, to

tone down the hostile propaganda campaign against Pretoria and his open support for the exiled African National Congress. All previous attempts have failed. The ban was announced a few days after the apparently professional murder in a Salisbury suburb of 52-year-old Joe Gqabi. the A.N.C. representative in Zimbabwe, who was hit by 18 9mm bullets from a submachine gun as he reversed out of his drive in the formerly all-white suburb of Ashdown. Gqabi. who spent seven years in jail on Robben Island up to 1975, had fled from South Africa in 1978 after being acquitted in a major treason trial. At first Zimbabwe blamed South African agents for the murder, but the government rejected the allegation, say-

ing it was being made “to protect the real murderers,’’ whose exposure would be an embarrassment to the Zimbabwe Government. Security circles in Johannesburg maintain that Gqabi was killed by pro-Moscow elements in the A.N.C. as part of a campaign to strengthen Soviet control over the group. Meanwhile, Mugabe, on a visit to Washington, cabled assurances of support to the A.N.C. president, Oliver Tambo, and accused South Africa of deliberately delaying vital supplies to his country as a means of applying political pressure. Gqabi must have known the dangers of being a political exile. Only in February seven kilograms ohexplosives were found under his car in Salisbury. That time he escaped

but now, just six months later, he is dead. Exiles from South Africa live in dread of just such attacks and claim there has been an increase in hit-team missions in the past two years. They allege that South Africa' is behind the attacks, and certainly when a Lesotho Indian lawyer was kidnapped in February police found evidence implicating the Lesotho Liberation Army —

which is believed to have South African backing.

How’ever, South Africa denies responsibility for armed attacks, and has told Zimbabwe Ministers that they have themselves to blame for its economic reprisals. It says the ban on Zimbabwe workers resulted from a decree in Salisbury in February that recruitment for jobs in South Africa must be ended, and President Canaan Banana's statement that w T ork in the republic was

“akin to slave labour." Relations have deteriorated steadily since Zimbabwe’s independence.

In January, Mugabe alleged that Pretoria was recruiting former Rhodesian army men — up to 5000 of them — in an attempt to destabilise the southern Africa region and was making borders insecure by infiltrating saboteurs into Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

Then, when Zimbabwe and Mozambique signed a security pact, again in January, they claimed that the Mozambique Rebel Movement was financed by South Africa to launch attacks against President Samora Machel’s regime and into Zimbabwe. A.N.C. leaders in Swaziland have also complained that Portuguese speaking M.R.M. troops have raided their bases near the Swaziland border. In June A.N.C. officials in

Swaziland claimed that a counter-terror organisation was abducting black refugees to face trial in South Africa and bombing A.N.C. members’ homes.

Zimbabwe is backing international boycotts of South Africa while depending on South African railways for most of its imports and 25 per cent of its exports. This, along with Pretoria’s lingering resentment at Mugabe’s election win. compounds the problem.