Rhodesia puts poll forward

Press, 7 April 1979, Page 8

Rhodesia puts poll forward

NZPA-Reuter Salisbury One-man, one-vote elections by blacks and whites for a black-dominated Government in Rhodesia will begin on April 17, three days ahead of schedule, a Government Gazette notice announced yesterday. Reporters were told that voting would take place throughout the country over five days, from April 17 to 21, and that the result should be known by April 26 or 27. The biracial transitional Government, which is holding the election in the face of opposition from the rival Patriotic Front guerrilla ali Hance, had originally named •April 20 as election day. The starting date had been! brought forward in an at-} Itempt to throw out of gear! any Patriotic Front plans to! disrupt the election, Govern- 1 ment officials said. The elections, which will involve for the first time ail Rhodesia’s formerly disenfranchised black adults, will produce a black Prime Minister to replace the present white Prime Minis- • ter (Mr lan Smith) who three years ago pledged Rhodesia would never see black rule “in a thousand years.” And it will produce a black President as titular head over a two tiered-black dominated-Parliament — a House of Assembly and a nominal Senate. But in terms of a Constitutional accord hammered lout March last year whites (will continue to hold 28 of the 100 National Assembly (seats and a quarter of the Cabinet posts. Whites, who represent 3 ;per cent of the 7M population, Will control for at (least five years the armed 7 ‘

forces, the civil adminis- ; tration, and the Judiciary. * Their 28 seats will give > the whites an effective veto ’ bloc against efforts by the 72 black members to tamper with the new Constitution, which features important . safeguards for the future of whites and other minorities in a black-ruled Zimbabwe- ■, Rhodesia, as the country will be known. But the guerrilla leaders, i Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, who reject the accord as a sell-out to black interests, have vowed to J press on with their six-year war that has cost 15,000 lives, sabotage the elections, and topple the government * that emerges. Mr Nkomo. the burly for- - mer lay preacher whose ? (headquarters are in Zambia, ■ and Mr Mugabe, the in- J(tellectual Marxist whose ■ bases are in Mozambique, (have more than 8500 Com- / munist-armed fighters inside Rhodesia and thousands ? more on the wings. Sharply ideologically and ’ ethnically opposed, the two * have failed in all previous < efforts to merge their forces i but fight separately for ; - singular goal — total blac' majority rule with a futur ’ for whites but no specit £ privileges. Mr Nkomo, backed by th ‘ Soviet Union, is one of tl » minority Matabele trib while Mr Mugabe, backed t China and the Soviet Uniot is of the majority Shorn *- tribe. “We should never talk ir £ terms of what we will give ■- the blacks and what we will give the whites," Mr Nkomo, * founder of contemporary black nationalist politics in < Rhodesia once said. “We - should only talk in terms of 1 what we will offer all the J peoples of Zimbabwe.” .< r