U.S. Rejects New S. Africa Autonomy Plan for Namibia

The U.S. government Friday shrugged off South Africa’s new plan to grant partial autonomy to Namibia, declaring the step to be “null and void” and insisting that it will have no impact on international negotiations to achieve independence for the remote desert territory.

“Any purported transfer of power that might take place now or in the future to bodies established in Namibia by South Africa is null and void,” State Department spokesman Bernard Kalb said.

Later, the department’s chief Africa specialist, Assistant Secretary of State Chester A. Crocker, said the United States will continue its efforts to mediate a Namibia settlement under the terms of U.N. Security Council Resolution 435, which calls for independence for Namibia after internationally supervised elections to select the new nation’s leaders.

Namibia has been governed by South Africa since the end of World War I under the terms of a long-since canceled League of Nations mandate.

Interim Government

On Thursday, South African President Pieter W. Botha announced in Cape Town that Namibia will soon establish its own interim government with its own legislature to govern the territory, also known as South-West Africa, pending agreement on full independence. South Africa will retain control of the territory’s defense and foreign affairs.

Crocker noted that Botha had said the action would not affect any matters already agreed to by South Africa.

“We clearly are not going to attach any importance” to the plan, Crocker said. “It can’t have an impact on agreements already reached.”

“If we don’t shift our stance and others don’t shift their stance on an internationally recognized settlement, you can’t get there any other way” than by the current round of negotiations, he said.

Western diplomats said the step appeared to be intended to create a situation that would have to be taken into consideration in any settlement, and would complicate efforts to reach agreement on independence.

Diplomats see the autonomy move as deliberately excluding the South-West Africa People’s Organization, which has waged a 19-year guerrilla war against South African control of Namibia, and which has wide support among the territory’s 1 million people. These diplomats believe the move will force SWAPO to deal with Namibia’s recognized political parties before they consolidate a hold on government.

Move ‘Irrelevant’

But Crocker said he did not consider the step to be a setback for U.S. diplomacy. He said the international community refused to recognize an earlier internal government in Windhoek, the Namibian capital, that resigned 18 months ago. He said the new government would be similarly “irrelevant.”

The current round of negotiations includes South Africa, the neighboring independent black-ruled nations and the so-called contact group of Western nations led by the United States.

South Africa has said it is prepared to grant full independence to Namibia as soon as Cuban troops are withdrawn from Angola, Namibia’s neighbor to the north. Angola has agreed to send home most of the troops within three years of Namibian independence, but South Africa is demanding removal of all of the Cubans within a few weeks of the independence agreement.

(In Lusaka, Zambia, the South-West Africa People’s Organization marked its 25th anniversary, saying the move to have an interim government in Namibia will foster civil war, Reuters news agency reported.

(An anniversary statement by the Namibian guerrilla group said the long independence struggle has “weakened the South African colonial regime’s resolve to fight, forcing it to attempt to turn our people’s struggle . . . into a civil war. This is the whole objective of the so-called interim government.”)