Progress in Africa

There has been encouraging progress on three major controversies in Southern Africa, raising hopes that the risks of expanded fighting, while still high, may be declining.

Final agreement was reported near on two of the issues: speeding independence for Namibia and ending the war in Angola. At the sixth round of negotiations led by the United States, the participants reported new steps along the difficult path of negotiating the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola and implementing the United Nations’ plan to bring independence to Namibia at last. Chester Crocker, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Africa, has been guiding these delicate negotiations. Their success would represent a major foreign-policy achievement for President Reagan.

The third area of conflict, Mozambique, also saw new progress with an agreement by President Pieter W. Botha of South Africa to meet Monday with Joaquim Chissano, president of Mozambique. They will confer in Mozambique near the Cahora Bassa Dam, a vast hydroelectric project that has been put out of service by the RENAMO terrorist gangs that have been waging a war of murder and destruction. The meeting will provide an opportunity to work out security agreements to restore the dam’s generation of power that is desperately needed by both Mozambique and South Africa. And it will also provide an opportunity to reestablish the cooperation promised in the 1984 Nkomati accords, broken by continued South African help to the terrorist forces in Mozambique.

These signs of movement in resolving problems in Southern Africa come at a time when world attention will be focused on the region by the nine-day visit of Pope John Paul II, commencing today, to Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique. Each of the nations to be visited is critically affected by the policies of South Africa and the efforts to resolve the issues of warfare in Angola and Mozambique and of nationhood for Namibia. The Pope wisely chose not to go to South Africa at this time, but he affirmed Friday his intention of making a separate trip there in the cause of justice. He has been an outspoken opponent of both racism and violence.

The negotiations earlier this week in Brazzaville, Congo, on Angola and Namibia will be followed shortly by yet another round, again in Brazzaville. The progress may very well have been facilitated by the withdrawal of South African troops at the end of August, ahead of the schedule promised in earlier talks, from positions in southern Angola. But a buildup of military equipment for the 50,000 Cubans helping the Angolan government, and the promise of continued military assistance from the United States to the UNITA guerrillas fighting the government in Angola, complicated progress on the agreement. There remains a serious risk of a return to widespread fighting. South African troops are massed along the Angolan frontier in Namibia. And movements by Cuban forces have stirred fears that they might use this period of negotiation for a major offensive against the UNITA guerrillas just when the future of UNITA’s relations with the government should be resolved by negotiations, not by more fighting.