Unhappy Holiday

South Africa takes over again

"Degrading." A "futile exercise." With those brusque dismissals, Dirk Mudge, 55, a blunt-spoken rancher and politician, rang down the curtain last week on the latest act in southern Africa's longest-running shadow play: progress, or more accurately the lack of it, toward independent self-government for the vast and arid territory of Namibia. For more than three decades, South Africa has ruled Namibia in defiance of world opinion and United Nations resolutions. For the past four years Mudge and fellow members of his multiracial Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (D.T.A.) exercised nominal authority over local affairs in the territory. Now all 41 D.T.A. members were resigning from Namibia's 50-seat National Assembly, leaving control in the hands of. a South African administrator-general. The reason offered for the D.T.A. defection was, as critics of South Africa have maintained all along, that the local government was no more than a fac,ade for decisions actually taken in Pretoria, South Africa's capital.

The immediate cause of Mudge's pull-out was a dispute over national holidays. Four of ten red-letter days on the current Namibian calendar are of South African origin, and Mudge had proposed keeping only dates of purely local significance. Among the holidays to be dropped was the Dec. 16 Day of the Vow, a commemoration of an 1838 victory by white Afrikaners over the Zulu nation in the Battle of Blood River. Members of Namibia's white minority (75,600 out of a total population of more than 1 million) complained, and South Africa vetoed the legislation. As Mudge retold it, that was only the latest in a long series of occasions on which South Africa had ignored, modified or nullified the actions of the assembly's executive organ, the Ministers' Council. Said he: "We will never again take part in any form of government in the territory that is being controlled by Pretoria. What we now want is a meaningful government, not one which has been patched together [by South Africa]. Our priority is elections that will get us international recognition."

South Africa's response to Mudge's departure was a bland assurance that direct rule from Pretoria would be imposed only temporarily. But no mention was made of new elections to fill the vacant seats in the assembly at Windhoek, Namibia's capital. That omission was greeted cynically by Western diplomats. Said a European representative at the U.N.: "The game Pretoria is playing is obvious. It wants to procrastinate as much as possible."

Many foreign governments pin blame for South Africa's recalcitrance on the Reagan Administration. Last year the U.S. began insisting that Namibia's independence be linked to the withdrawal of an estimated 30,000 Cuban troops from neighboring Marxist-led Angola. Only a year ago, many diplomats were optimistic that South Africa would succumb to pressure from the U.S., France, Britain, West Germany and Canada to allow U.N.-supervised elections that would lead to independence. Since then, South Africa has embraced linkage as an excuse to defer free elections. Little wonder: such a vote would probably be won by the South-West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO), the Marxist-dominated guerrilla movement that is leading an armed independence struggle in the territory. At a stormy meeting two weeks ago in the capital of another black neighbor, Zimbabwe, Chester Crocker, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, was berated by Zimbabwe's Prime Minister, Robert Mugabe, who called the linkage idea "blackmail." Said Mugabe: "The U.S.'s insistence on this linkage has given solace to the South African regime." The Zimbabwean leader declared that the U.S. position had "introduced a stumbling block that may well impede the decolonization process, albeit temporarily."

Despite such bitter criticism, there is at least one faint sign that the U.S. approach might succeed. South African and Angolan representatives are expected to meet soon in the Cape Verde Islands to discuss not only the Cuban troop withdrawal, but South Africa's frequent raids into Angolan territory in search of SWAPO rebels. Whether the talks will contribute to a settlement is another matter. The bleak assessment from General Constand Viljoen, commander of the 20,000 South African troops fighting against SWAPO in Namibia, is that his occupying forces will not be withdrawn from the territory this year. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.