MILLIONAIRE PLANS MOZAMBIQUE RESORT.

Byline: Donald G. McNeil Jr. The New York Times

In this remote and beautiful corner of the world, representatives of a conservative Louisiana millionaire used to hand American cash to a rebel movement so cruel that it kidnapped children for its assassination squads.

Today, a representative of the same man is handing children little American and Mozambican flags. Mozambique's flag is the only one in the world with an AK-47 assault rifle on it, and the socialist government that the businessman was trying to undermine won the war and the elections two years ago.

But that's ancient history. Now James Ulysses Blanchard III wants to build an $800 million ecotourist's paradise here in this wilderness of lakes and savannas edged by 60 miles of crystalline sands and Caribbean-blue waters.

His plans include a floating casino, thatched game lodges perched high over watering holes, a marina, a golf course with hippos in the water hazards, and an antique steam train that would pull rolling hotels made of Orient Express-style sleeping cars through herds of noble elephants and leaping antelope.

He may succeed in building his Disney World in the bush. Biologists consulted by the Frelimo government, his old foe, seem favorably inclined toward his plans for the 4,000-square-mile area. And it may be the only way to save the ecosystem, which the 1992 Rio summit conference on biodiversity named as one of the 200 most remarkable on the planet.

Mozambique's unspoiled coastline, as long as the stretch from Seattle to San Diego, was once the playground for generations of white Rhodesians and South Africans.

Now, after 17 years of destructive civil war, this desperately poor country is helpless to resist the hordes rushing in to exploit its natural wealth and beauty: South African tourists zipping up the beach in Land Rovers, running over the nests of leatherback turtles and plundering the reefs of coral and tropical fish.

Dirt-poor war refugees sneaking back in to slash and burn tiny cornfields out of the rare vegetation. Mozambican military officers arrogantly hunting the reserve's last few elephants.

"My budget is $50,000 U.S.," said Mateus Chambal, the director of the elephant reserve, who lives in a half-burned-out compound in the middle of the park and whose near-dead Land Rover leaks water he draws by hand from a well. "It came from American and European organizations because of the biodiversity conference, and it will run out in June. If we don't get more, we will have to abandon the reserve."

The irreplaceable flora of the park is largely intact. But its mega-fauna suffered badly during the war between Frelimo and Renamo. About 500 of the 600 elephants are dead.

All the rhino were poached. One local environmentalist claims to have seen the last one mowed down in the dunes by a Cuban helicopter, which then swooped in to saw off the horn. "Pretty much everything else went into people's pots," said Donald Beswick, who runs the Mozambique desk for the Endangered Wildlife Trust.

The trust, an environmental organization, doesn't outright endorse the Blanchard plan "but we certainly aren't anti-it," Beswick said.

Animals are the first step in the five-year plan, which was drawn up by the same consultants who created the Pilanesberg wildlife reserve and Sun City casino complex 100 miles from Johannesburg. The $9 million budget for game restoration reads like a cargo manifest for Noah's Ark: 500 zebras at $500 each plus 30 white rhinos at $21,800 apiece, shipping included, in year one, plus assorted giraffes, wildebeest and other animals. In year two, the first predators, 10 brown hyena, are to be introduced.

Not until year four does the item that worries the locals appear - 25 lions at $4,070 apiece. The footnotes remind potential investors that endangered species, including wild dogs and black rhinos (at $58,000 apiece), may be donated, which would save money.

John R. Perrott, the project's general manager in Mozambique, actually wants the first restocking to be of crocodiles in the Maputo River, the area's western boundary. "Great game scouts," he says. "Real tough on poachers."

Perrott, a burly former pipeline engineer and big-game hunter who has worked everywhere from Alaska to Tanzania, has some ideas even more radical than the plan's. He wants to import the last remaining Bushmen from the Kalahari Desert.

"People make fun of me for that," he says. "But I'm not talking about just a tourist attraction. I say let the little guys in and let them hunt. Their homeland in Botswana is being wiped out by cattle fences."

Blanchard foresees raising the $800 million over at least five years, at first from investors he knows and millionaires who want private homes inside a Big Five game park. Then he hopes to offer stock to emerging market funds and attract hotel chains like Club Med and Sheraton who see potential in a "beast and beach" package.

The displaced subsistence farmers and fishermen - who probably number fewer than 10,000 - also will get shares of the corporation and first crack at the 12,000 projected jobs as game trackers, construction laborers, chambermaids and the like.

The architect of all this, Blanchard, is a 52-year-old man of many interests - prominent among them gold, guns and right-wing politics - and of unquestionable daring. He buzzed President Nixon's 1973 inauguration in a Cessna trailing a "Legalize Gold" banner. "That was fun," he says. "They flew jets up to chase us out."

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO

Photo Maputo Elephant Reserve director Mateus Chambal, left, and project director John R. Perrott discuss plans for a Mozambique resort. The New York Times