the imperialist powers The Labour Foreign Secretary, Toay Crosland, announced in London on 29 September that Britain would soon convene a round-table conference on Zimbabwe's future. According to September wardian, the objective of the conference (expected to open around 12 October) will be 'to set up an interim administration of white and black Rhodesians to lead country hrough its two-year timetable to majority rule.' Chaifing the talks will be Britain's UN ambassador, Ivor Richard described by Guardian as "a ight-wing member of the Labour Party, a former minister who served at the Ministry of Defence, with a reputation for strong hostility to the Soviet Union'.
Within hours of Crosland's stateKissinger announced his support for the British initiative. Meanwhile, Ted Rowlands, the Minister of. State at the Foreign Office, has been puring southern Africa since September to win support for the conference from both the "front-line' governmicals (Zambia, Botswana, Tanzania, Mozambique and Angola) and the Smith regime.
But will the Zimbabwean nationalists accept this new British attempt to interfere in their country's affairs? One Zimbabwean leader, Dzinashe Machingura, the deputy political commissar of the Zimbabwe People's Army (ZIPA), has already responded with a forthright "no'. Addressing a ess conference in Maputo, Mozambican capital, on 30 September, Machingura said:
*As far as we are concerned, we do not accept British responsibility for convening a conference because they are, in our opinion, a colonial power and what we are fighting inside Zimbabwe is British colonialism. And now they again are part and parcel of a scheme which is aimed at depriving the Zimbabwe people of their sovereign right to genuine and complete independence, and as such we do not accept British responsibility.' this will defuse the explosive developments in southern Africa and thus protect the imperialists' massive economic and strategic interests in industrialised South Africa itself.
The recent wave of black uprisings in South Africa's cities have made a neo-colonial settlement in Zimbabwe an even more pressing matter for the NATO powers. As Crosland put it in a speech to the Labour Party conference on 30 September: "The stakes in this matter are awesomely high.' Delegates to the Labour conference British Government's over Zimbabwe. In fact, (including Tribune and Militant supporters) lined up give overwhelming National Executive (NEC) 'Emergency Rhodesia' which backed the Government's convening of a "Constitutional Conference outside Rhodesia to form an interim Government'.
Nonetheless, voted (nearly unanimously) in support of another resolution posite 44) which criticised the Government sharply for its continued economic and military collaboration with the racist regime in Pretoria. Composite expressed "its concern at the reported breaches of the arms embargo of South Africa and the continued military collaboration with the apartheid regime in violation of United Nations resolutions and Labour Party policy.
The resolution called for 'the strict application of the British arms em3333 and then supplied to the Smith regime, thus circumventing sanctions. So much for the Government's "arms embargo".
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Kissinger, is now taking the centre of the stage in drive to impose a neo- colonial 'settlement' of the crisis in Zimbabwe.