2 Key GOP Senators Challenge U.S. Backing for Mozambique

The Reagan Administration’s decision to support the Marxist government of Mozambique as the best way to modify the regime has created a bitter policy dispute, pitting two powerful Republican senators against the Administration and the Democratic majority in the Senate.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz traveled to Capitol Hill on Tuesday for a meeting with Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (Kan.) and Jesse Helms (N.C.), but he failed to resolve the conflict.

“Neither side gave any quarter,” a Helms aide said following the meeting.

Helms, often accused of conducting his own foreign policy, has insisted on recognition of the rightist Mozambique National Resistance rebels. Because the State Department refused, he has blocked for more than nine months the confirmation of a career California diplomat, Melissa Wells, as ambassador to Maputo.

In recent weeks, Dole has expressed his support for the rebels during appearances before conservative groups, apparently in an effort to gain their backing for his potential Republican presidential campaign. Many political observers, predicting that the senator would take a more centrist stand, were surprised by the move.

Shultz permitted a low-level diplomat to meet a Mozambican rebel representative earlier this month to discuss the case of a U.S. missionary nurse believed to be held by the rebels, but Helms held this action to be insufficient.

State Department spokesman Charles Redman pointed out that the meeting took place only to receive information about the hostage, Kindra Bryan. He said it in no sense constituted a negotiation with the organization, which Helms has demanded as the price for dropping his objection to Wells’ confirmation.

Adding a twist of power politics, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, stepped in to place a hold on a North Carolina federal judgeship candidate backed by Helms. Although Kennedy did not spell out the link, it was clearly understood by all those involved that the judiciary nomination will not win Senate confirmation unless Wells’ name also is cleared.

An Administration official who spoke on condition that he remain anonymous vehemently attacked the rebel group, also known as Renamo, as “an instrument of destabilization against the black states of southern Africa and the transport routes through Mozambique that they rely on.”