Hitting SWAPO Where It Lives

To win its way in South West Africa, Pretoria gambles

South African military commanders likened it to the Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon, and so it was--on a much smaller scale. Shortly after dawn one morning last week, some 200 South African paratroopers landed by helicopter at the Angolan town of Cassinga. The town lies 155 miles north of Angola's border with Namibia--the vast territory also known as South West Africa that Pretoria has ruled for almost 60 years under an international mandate. The assault force's goal: to deliver a crippling blow to SWAPO (for South West African Peoples' Organization), the radical nationalist organization whose guerrillas have been warring against the present territorial government in Namibia for eleven years.

Though the Angolan government claimed that only a refugee camp had been hit, the South Africans said they had badly damaged the SWAPO military headquarters at Cassinga, captured or destroyed large supplies of ammunition and wiped out several guerrilla posts near the border. Five of their men were killed in the twelve-hour raid, South African officials reported, while "large losses" were inflicted on the guerrillas.

The raid came only one day after a SWAPO attack on a hydroelectric station at Ruacana Falls on the Namibian side of the border. Other terrorist incidents this year have included the assassination last month of Chief Clemens Kapuuo, the black leader of a multiracial group that opposes SWAPO, the murder of several tribal leaders in Ovamboland, the planting of land mines and booby traps, and the hijacking to Angola of a bus with 73 passengers on board.

What is at stake is the kind of government that will come to power in Namibia. Under international pressure, the South Africans have agreed in principle to allow the territory to become independent. But they want to leave it in the hands of a moderate regime that will establish close ties with Pretoria and permit some kind of South African military presence to remain. The South Africans support the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance, a coalition of whites and moderate blacks, and oppose SWAPO, which is backed by most black African states and by the Soviet Union. In terms of popular support, the two groups are believed to be almost evenly matched.

To smooth the way toward independence, the five Western members of the U.N. Security Council have proposed a plan under which the U.N. would supervise Namibian elections later this year.

To everybody's surprise, the South African government has accepted the plan. SWAPO, on the other hand, is calling for a conference to work out some remainng details. The Western plan, for instance, would leave Namibia's security in the hands of the present South African police force during the transition period and would not require a reduction of South African troops stationed in the north until a "meaningful cessation of violence" had taken place. The plan would also defer to the new government the problem of Walvis Bay, the big harbor that geographically is part of Namibia but historically was separate--and which South Africa wants to keep.

In effect, South African Prime Minister John Vorster has been playing the artful dodger. He is trying to mollify the Western powers by accepting their plan, but, above all, he hopes to help the Turnhalle Alliance win the elections. If that happens, the South Africans may never have to withdraw their troops and may be able to keep Walvis Bay as well. So last week's raid was a calculated gamble.

Its chances of success were reduced at week's end when the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to condemn the South Africans' incursion and to demand their withdrawal from Angola.

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