Some Planes Arrive

For more than a month, the action stirred by Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence has centered in London and Salisbury. Last week the focus shifted to another capital: Lusaka, where Zambia's moderate black African President Kenneth Kaunda was caught in an ever tightening bind.

As Rhodesia's northern, black-ruled neighbor, Zambia is expected by other black-nationalist regimes in Africa to lead the fight against Ian Smith and his white-minority government. Kaunda certainly wants to defeat Rhodesia's whites, but not in a racial war. He wants white troops to go into Rhodesia to bring down Smith. But Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson is nowhere near ready to face the prospect of the Queen's white British troops shooting Rhodesia's white British troops. And Kaunda admits that if he asked for Russian help, he would stand a very good chance of being captured at the same time he was being rescued.

Sullen Twins. Then there are more immediate economic worries. Smith & Co. have it in their power to isolate landlocked Zambia from its markets and to cut off electrical power in the rich Zambian copper fields around Ndola. Rhodesians control the turbines and generators of the giant Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River, which forms the border between the two countries. Completed in 1960 under the now defunct Central African Federation, Kariba supplies both Zambia and Rhodesia with power, ties them together like sullen Siamese twins. For two weeks Kaunda has demanded that Britain at least send troops to "neutralize" the Kariba power station on the Rhodesian side of the river, arguing that Smith's soldiers would not fire on Britons if they marched across the dam. Harold Wilson is not so sure.

Instead, he offered to send a token force--a squadron of R.A.F. fighters and a battalion of the Royal Scots--to the copper belt, some 250 miles north of the dam. Kaunda accepted the air protection (Zambia has only ten military aircraft of its own), but rejected the offer of troops unless they were sent directly to the dam. Into the copper-belt center of Ndola at week's end swooped ten British Javelin jet fighters, accompanied by big-bellied Argosy and Beverley transports carrying the squadron's maintenance supplies. A brace of Britannia turboprop transports arrived at Lusaka itself. To the south, Smith was sardonically amused. "It is in our interest to have law and order maintained in Zambia," he deadpanned in a television interview.

Outlawed Stamp. Not quite so funny were the new economic sanctions that Wilson slapped on Rhodesia. In addition to the embargo on Rhodesian tobacco and sugar (the nation's major crops), Britain also banned imports of asbestos (a $30 million export item last year), copper, lithium, chrome, iron, steel and meat. That made the embargo 95% complete. Simultaneously, Wilson ordered a halt to interest payments, dividends and pensions from Britain to Rhodesian residents, thus damming a flow of income that totaled some $25 million last year. He even outlawed Rhodesia's bright new independence postal stamp as British postage. If Smith was scared, he wasn't showing it: with rich, like-minded South Africa backing him up, he was counting on shifting Rhodesia's trade to the south, thus easing the sting of the British embargo.

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