Reagan’s African Win

Washington is the setting for many strange encounters, but none stranger of late than the mid-April meetings of Manuel Alexandre Rodrigues, the Angolan Minister of the Interior, with two of our highest-ranking government officials. On April 14, Rodrigues met with the Vice President for one hour, a meeting that was listed on Mr. Bush’s appointment calendar simply as “Meeting”—no name, no agenda. The Vice President’s office is tight-lipped about what went on except to say that the visit was “friendly” and “part of a continuing dialogue.” One day earlier, Rodrigues met with Secretary of State George Shultz. (The State Department also is refusing substantive comment.) Not bad for the first co-adjutor of a brutish strongman, José Eduardo dos Santos, head of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and president of Angola, a nation with which we have no official diplomatic relations. The reason for this strange encounter of the diplomatic kind? Astonishingly enough, to set a timetable for the withdrawal of Cuban troops.

What are the implications of a Cuban pullout? First, the Republic of South Africa will be required to leave Namibia, and todosoon the same timetable as governs the Cuban exit from Angola. These are the terms of an agreement fashioned in early 1982 between, on the one side, National Security Advisor William Clark and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker, and on the other, South Africa’s Prime Minister Pieter Botha and Foreign Minister Roelof “Pik” Botha.

JM

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John McLaughlin

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Washington is the setting for many strange encounters, but none stranger of late than the mid-April meetings of Manuel Alexandre Rodrigues, the Angolan Minister of the Interior, with two of our highest-ranking government officials. On April 14, Rodrigues met with the Vice President for one hour, a meeting that was listed on Mr. Bush’s appointment calendar simply as “Meeting”—no name, no agenda. The Vice President’s office is tight-lipped about what went on except to say that the visit was “friendly” and “part of a continuing dialogue.” One day earlier, Rodrigues met with Secretary of State George Shultz. (The State Department also is refusing substantive comment.) Not bad for the first co-adjutor of a brutish strongman, José Eduardo dos Santos, head of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and president of Angola, a nation with which we have no official diplomatic relations. The reason for this strange encounter of the diplomatic kind? Astonishingly enough, to set a timetable for the withdrawal of Cuban troops.

What are the implications of a Cuban pullout? First, the Republic of South Africa will be required to leave Namibia, and todosoon the same timetable as governs the Cuban exit from Angola. These are the terms of an agreement fashioned in early 1982 between, on the one side, National Security Advisor William Clark and Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker, and on the other, South Africa’s Prime Minister Pieter Botha and Foreign Minister Roelof “Pik” Botha.