The Rhodesia Settlement
Mozambican support. As Governor, Christopher Soames showed great courage in accepting his near impossible task. Cartoonists enjoyed depicting him having to be rescued by helicopter from the roof of Government House, as the Americans had been in Saigon. We passed some of the worst hours of our lives as small contingents of British soldiers were sent into remote and extremely dangerous rural areas to set up assembly places for the guerrilla forces. The cease-fire came within a hair’s breadth of breaking down on several occasions and Ian Smith attempted to stage a revolt, only to be over-ruled by the Rhodesian commander, General Walls, and the head of intelligence, Ken Flower. We spent our days with one or other, or both of them. For Walls came under intense pressure from his troops and some of his colleagues to kick over the traces, but never did so, while Flower understood that the only alternative would be a disastrous end to the war. Walls protested that half the numbers Mugabe had delivered to the assembly places were youths armed only with sticks. ‘Any self respecting terrorist has an AK47!’, he observed to me. Mugabe had kept back thousands of his troops to ensure that the villagers voted the right way. They engaged in a lot of intimidation, causing us to threaten to disqualify the worst affected areas from voting unless it diminished, which it then did. But the Rhodesian special forces had engaged in plenty of dirty tricks of their own, while South African military intelligence tried to blow up Mugabe. When it came to the election, the UN representative, Perez de Cuellar, later Secretary General, was sufficiently impressed by the sight of British policeman in their shirt sleeves supervising the polling for him to declare the elections free and fair before the results were known, which few others were willing to do. The result showed Nkomo winning all the seats in Matabeleland and Mugabe winning a massive majority against Muzorewa in all the Shona speaking provinces. We had expected Mugabe to win more votes than anyone else, though not to the extent he did. The world press had more than half convinced themselves that we had been hoping to establish a government without Mugabe, though that would have led to an immediate resumption of the war. In reality our objective had to be to form a coalition government incorporating representatives of the Rhodesians, Nkomo and Mugabe, which was what we did. As Christopher Soames had promised him if he won the election, Mugabe was designated Prime Minister. An appeal from General Walls to Thatcher to invalidate the election was dismissed forthwith. Duff and I were summoned to a crisis meeting with the Rhodesian commanders, at which Walls declared ‘The enemy is 3
