Salisbury's problem, as always, is that it cannot stop the war
Under a bright winter sun, twelve victims of a brutal massacre in eastern Rhodesia were buried last week in graves shadowed by the jacaranda trees of Umtali municipal cemetery. The victims were either white missionaries or the relatives of missionaries, and they included three small children and a three-week-old baby.
All had been killed in an attack by guerrillas based in neighboring Mozambique; several of the bodies had been mutilated.
The Rev. Ronald Chapman, head of the Elim Pentecostal Mission, where the massacre took place, prayed for mercy for "those who perpetrated this act of shame."
Later he spoke more bluntly. "I had to identify the bodies," he said. "I would not have treated an animal in the way these people were treated."
The Elim massacre—the most savage assault on whites in Rhodesia's history —was part of a rising tide of violence that threatens to engulf the breakaway British colony. Only days after Elim, two German Jesuits were killed by black nationalist guerrillas at St. Rupert's Mission, 90 miles west of Salisbury, bringing the black and white civilian death toll to almost 600 so far this year. The guerrillas have also suffered losses—not all of them in raids and counterattacks by the Rhodesian army. In nearby Zambia, a top lieutenant to Joshua Nkomo, one of the co-leaders of the Patriotic Front, was killed by a land mine last week, the result, said the Zambian government, of a factional rivalry within the Nkomo camp. The victim was Alfred Mangena, 35. His predecessor, Jason Moyo, had been killed by a letter bomb two years ago, also because of intra-Front rivalries, and Mangena himself had been wounded in an assassination attempt earlier this year.
At the beginning of the war, the killings of white missionaries had seemed, in most cases, to be merely part of the prevailing violence. The latest rash of murders suggests that the guerrillas are now killing missionaries in an effort to create panic among Rhodesia's remaining whites, particularly in rural areas. Since whites are now leaving the country at the rate of 1,000 a month, that brutal plan may be having some success.
More than most other whites in the country, the foreign missionaries face a cruel dilemma.
Although their schools, churches and health centers primarily serve Rhodesia's blacks, nearly 40 missionaries have been killed by the guerrillas since 1972; almost as many others have been expelled by a government that demands immediate reports on terrorist activity. "If you talk, you die, and if you don't, you go to prison," says an Irish Catholic sister who now works in Salisbury; her mission station was burned to the ground three months ago. Nearly 80% of all Catholic missionary work has come to a halt. Says a Protestant missionary: "We are now caretakers, not evangelists. I make no bones about it. We're running scared."