Mugabe should never have ruled Zimbabwe says former British Foreign Minister David Owen

Nkomo tried in the summer of 1978 to engineer a place to come in as chairman of the internal settlement’s executive committee at the expense of Robert Mugabe. In a secret meeting with Ian Smith in Lusaka in the presence of President Kaunda and Joe Garba, the personal representative of President Olesegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, probably the most powerful single African figure at that time – the meeting was fully supported by the UK – I had told the US Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, of the initiative but it was agreed that the US would remain sufficiently distant so that if the meeting failed they would not be damaged.

Mugabe was deliberately not invited, and Kaunda ruled out any involvement of Julius Nyerere and Samora Machel of Mozambique, feeling that the latter would have difficulty managing at a meeting in which at that time he could not speak fluent English. Nkomo called for a second meeting, perhaps sensing that Ian Smith was not fully on board, claiming he wanted to involve Mugabe.  News of the meeting inevitably leaked and Nyerere was deeply hostile to it despite Garba briefing him in Dar es Salaam. The initiative was killed off by the shooting down of a Viscount aircraft with Nkomo claiming responsibility.

Tensions within the Patriotic Front were very visible at the Lancaster House Conference brilliantly chaired by my successor, Peter Carrington, at the end of 1979. Unfortunately Tongogara, the Zanla chief, was killed in a car accident on 26 December 1979. There is conflicting evidence as to whether that was an accident or an assassination, and Stuart Doran describes the background very well:

“It is clear that Tongogara’s meetings with ZIPRA and Nkomo and his inclusive approach, coupled with an open desire to lay down arms – neither of them popular positions within ZANU’s central committee – provided a motive for Tongogara’s elimination. A preference for Nkomo over Mugabe, if the central committee understood that to have been Tongogara’s attitude, supplied yet greater incentive. And Dabengwa also believed that Tongogara was opposed to the plan to use ZANLA to ensure an electoral victory, seeing this as the decisive factor in his death. But concrete evidence that he was assassinated has never emerged.”

There are many different interpretations of what actually happened once the Lancaster House conference was over. Doran describes how, after weeks of relentless pressure during the elections, the British position manifested itself in the approach of Christopher Soames, Carrington’s inspired choice as the last Governor of Southern Rhodesia:

“Slowly, the balance between international and internal considerations that had guided the British approach during Lancaster House began to shift. It had been difficult to reconcile the two when they were so often in conflict; the internal objective of a moderate, multiracial government friendly to the West had, for example, been problematic given that the external goal of achieving wide international support required the backing of countries which supported the PF and its ostensibly radical agenda. The solution had been to accept and sell compromises such as the adoption of Nkomo as a moderate and the notion that limited international recognition for the new government (with some – hopefully temporary – damage to Britain’s international relationships) would suffice. Such considerations continued to be in play, but undoubtedly the weight given to international factors had incrementally begun to increase under Soames, while there had been a decrease in the weight given to Britain’s internal aims.

“This was most clearly seen in the changing attitude to ZANLA’s clear and sustained breach of the ceasefire.”

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