In the chamber of the U.N. Security Council last week, there was an unsettling sense of history repeated. The gallery was crowded, and delegates representing most of the world's nations stood in knots on the floor as British Foreign Secretary George Brown began to address the Council. His mission was the product of failure. He had come to ask the U.N. to impose mandatory economic sanctions on Rhodesia, and in the minds of many diplomats present was the ghost of the old League of Nations —which began to fall apart 30 years ago when it proved unable to enforce economic sanctions against Mussolini.
The failure of British policy toward Rhodesia was equally apparent in London, where the House of Commons held its stormiest session since the Suez crisis of ten years ago. For the first time since Labor took control of the government two years ago, the Conservatives were in open opposition on the Rhodesia question. Wilson, charged Tory Deputy Leader Reginald Maudling, was leading Britain "into one of the greatest disasters in its history."
Basis for Settlement. The tragedy is that only a few days before, a solution to the long Rhodesian crisis had seemed almost within grasp. Meeting on board the British cruiser H.M.S. Tiger, Wilson and Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith had taken only two days to hammer out a "working document" that, Wilson announced, "should serve as the basis for a settlement."
The document called for constitutional amendments that would give Rhodesia's overwhelming black majority an immediate minority voice in the government, yet preserve white rule for a period that Wilson estimated would last about ten years. A Royal Commission composed of Rhodesians would draft the necessary amendments, which would be submitted to "Rhodesians as a whole" for approval. In the meantime, censorship would be lifted, political prisoners freed and "normal" political activity permitted. The Rhodesian Parliament, whose hard-line white-supremacist majority might try to block the new constitution, would be dissolved and all legislative powers handed over to British Governor Sir Humphrey Gibbs, pending new parliamentary elections within four months. Smith himself would continue as interim Prime Minister, but half of a new "broad-based" Cabinet would be chosen from outside his ruling Rhodesian Front Party, and two members would be blacks.