Weaning Mozambique.

AT THE GLAMOROUS main intersection of old Lourenco Marques (now Maputo) the names of the grand cafes are still there in peeling paint: Scala, Continental. Inside, hundreds of poorly dressed, solemn black people sit: not drinking, not eating. Some dozen have before them glasses of muddy-looking milk, the only beverage available. Although signs on the walls blazon PASTELARIA, the only pastries available are a few buns.

Maputo, capital of the People's Republic of Mozambique, was once the sparkling Riviera of Africa, with cafes, villas, beaches, fountains, well-tended gardens, avenues, tourists. After 13 years of Marxist government and 11 years of civil war, it is now a picture of desolation and decay.

It is as if the Soviet-backed regime had dropped a new kind of neutron bomb that destroyed only consumer goods. John Orr's, the Bloomingdale's of Mozambique, is virtually deserted. Glass cases display forlorn photographs of yesteryear's merchandise, and on the second floor a Donald Duck cutout, a relic from happier days, directs you to a dozen sad children's sweaters. Plumbing is cut off. Elevators don't work. Telephones don't work. Electricity, as throughout Maputo, is a matter of chance. The total stock of this huge, once sumptuous department store could be packed into a small van.

Maputo is a city at war. We see no taxis, no buses. Truckloads of soldiers rumble through the streets. The industrial zone of Maputo is officially operating at a capacity of "under 20 per cent"; it looked to me as if the figure should be 5 to 10 per cent. Abandoned railroad cars, filled with peeling plywood and shattered glass, inhabit the hollow shell of the city's train station. On the outskirts of Maputo half a million people live in reed huts, refugees from the civil war in the countryside, compared to which Maputo is paradise.

The official U.S. Embassy guide ("Welcome to Maputo") warns that "overland travel outside the major cities can be extremely dangerous" and strongly advises against it. Mozambique government officials travel by air; the planes often have to be chartered from South Africa (although Mozambique's airfields are filled with Soviet military aircraft). These government officials and their wives, however, are always beautifully dressed, as natty as Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev. Spruce, also, are the Soviet-style wall slogans (THE VANGUARD OF THE PROLETARIAT), and the present names of once splendid avenues: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, Kim 11 Sung, Salvador Allende, Ho Chi Minh. There is no Avenida George Washington.

Yet the great debate over Mozambique is whether the United States can, for the first time in history, entice a Communist country out of the Soviet Union's orbit. After almost three hours of conversation with Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano, who still believes in th"scientific teachings of Marxism-Leninism" (and after similar discussions with his Foreign Minister and the head of the Bank of Mozambique, among other high officials), I think not.

The Soviet Union is generous with military aid to its client states. In a continent where cynics hold that "ten good men" are enough to overthrow most governments, abundant military hardware plus a palace guard of at least three thousand Cubans (infantry), East Germans (intelligence and security), and Soviets (military advisors) seems enough to keep the Chissano government in power, at least in Maputo. I have seen in the capital husky young Russians in tight groups of a dozen, all male: to the eye of a former military officer, military men in civilian clothes.

Politics of the Tin Cup

BUT THE Soviet Union is niggardly with economic aid. So a hungry, battered Mozambique has "turned to the West" for economic assistance. Its leaders are the very same men whose messianic Marxism produced the catastrophe from which they now seek deliverance, mind you, but-practicing now the politics of the tin cup-they have persuaded Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker and Senator Nancy Kassebaum, ranking Republican on the U.S. Senate Subcommittee for Africa, that they have mended their ways, seen the light, and can be weaned away from the Soviet Union. After the long conversations I had with these same Mozambicans, I can only conclude that Secretary Crocker and Senator Kassebaum would not know a Marxist if one punched them in the face.

At the United Nations, Mozambique diligently votes to condemn the United States and has never, ever criticized the Soviet Union. In last November's vote in the General Assembly condemning the Soviet Union (not even by name) for its invasion of Afghanistan, Mozambique was one of five countries listed as "absent." The other four were Rumania, South Yemen, the People's Republic of Cape Verde, and Seychelles, now ruled by Albert Reno's Marxist-Leninist People's United Party. All in all, it seems a most original way of displaying what President Chissano described to me as Mozambique's "true non-alignment."

No one is quite sure what we are getting for all this "weaning." Yet we keep weaning away to beat the band. Since 1981, under Ronald Reagan, we have given the People's Republic of Mozambique $241 million in direct aid and backed international aid for another $154 million. For 1987 we gave $85 million in emergency food aid alone, all of this to be channeled through the very Marxist regime that caused the mischief to begin with. And this on the basis of flimsy "reforms," voracious begging, and pious promises to be better.

AND YET vast amounts of American aid are now going to "wean" the same Marxist-Leninist clique that has ruined Mozambique. Inheriting, in 1975, an increasingly prosperous economy, it reduced the country to an absolute shambles. Mozambique's growth rate since 1981 has been a negative 8 per cent per year. Its debt is gigantic and unserviceable-the interest alone is 2.2 times the country's exports. Meanwhile, exports, far from providing expendable hard currency, are at one-eighth the level of the country's imports. Agriculture, which occupies 85 per cent of the labor force, provides only 12 per cent of Mozambique's food needs. (These figures were given me by the governor of the Bank of Mozambique.) Nearly half the population of Mozambique is threatened by famine. Emergency food relief, furthermore, whether governmental or private, is entirely controlled by Maputo, which to date has not allowed a single ounce of food to be delivered to rebel-held territory.

Those in Washington assiduously courting Maputo ignore one fundamental fact: the spectacular advance in the field of Renamo, the anti-Communist Mozambique National Resistance. U.S. intelligence sources estimate that the rebels of Renamo control at least onethird the country's population and as much as 85 per cent of its territory, a far larger portion than either the Mujahedin in Afghanistan or Jonas Savimbi's UNITA in Angola. Renamo is in fact the world's fastest-growing anti-Communist insurgency. From a mere two thousand guerrillas in 1981, it has grown to almost twenty thousand today, or twice the- size of the Communist Frelimo movement when the Portuguese packed their bags in 1975. Before my red-carpet reception in Maputo, I had visited (unbeknownst to my Marxist hosts there) the other side of this war-the territory held by Renamo.

Renamo has absolutely paralyzed the country's rail and road traffic. Outside of a few major cities, nothing moves except by military convoy: not manufactured goods, not raw materials, not agricultural produce, not people. So to get to rebel country I cross into Mozambique farther north, from Malawi.

Renamo guerrillas are everywhere, striking at will throughout the country. I have seen the bridge they blew up at Sena over the Zambezi, the longest bridge in Africa. They blew up the country's main oil pipeline, which runs from Zimbabwe to the west straight across Mozambique to Beira on the coast, four times in a single recent month. It was out of action almost half the month. Troops from Zimbabwe, the only reliable forces at Maputo's disposal-sent by Harare at ruinous cost in an attempt to win Zimbabwe a secure "corridor" to the Indian Ocean-patrol timidly in large units, stick to the main roads, and scurry back to their bases before dark. This is not a winning strategy. Renamo owns the night.

Renamo, in fact, seems unbeatable, which is why the archbishop of MaPuto, Joss Maria dos Santos, recently issued a pastoral letter making an impassioned plea for negotiations with the rebels, saying that the only way peace could come to this stricken land was by establishing a "dialogue" with Renamo. Archbishop dos Santos's appeal for negotiations, signed by nine bishops-which caused an absolute uproar in Maputo-was greeted in America by a news blackout. The Anglican Church also supports negotiations. In private, so does Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe. For Zimbabwe will never have its secure corridor to the sea as long as there is war in Mozambique.

IT IS NOTEWORTHY also that the new U.S . ambassador to Mozambique, Melissa Wells, apingher Marxist hosts, calls the insurgents "bandits," whereas Archbishop dos Santos in his pastoral letter called them by their proper name, Renamo, the Mozambique National Resistance. Actually, the government unfailingly calls the rebels bandidos armados, "armed bandits," which, since few bandits operate by means of moral suasion, seems a pejorative code for what the government fully recognizes to be an organized insurgency.

To the central question, Are the armed bands roving Mozambique indeed bandits? the best answer would seem to be another question: Do bandits drink diesel oil? Bandits by definition are in it for the money. But oil from a blown-up pipeline just runs off into the ground-not a very profitable line of work for a bandit. One would think this ,sort of activity was rather obviously dimed at a completely different objective.

In recent months, Renamo has taken to conducting punitive raids across the border into Zimbabwe, leaving such messages on walls as: IF MUGABE INTERFERES WITH US, WE WILL INTERFERE WITH MUGABE. Over the Christmas holidays, a full 100 per cent of Zimbabwe's army had to be deployed along the Mozambique frontier, an extensive battle array to deploy against mere bandits.

Renamo had certainly blown the daylights out of one town I visited in Mozambique, a former district capital of perhaps five thousand inhabitants, now deserted except for a company of guerrilla infantry. There was not a roof in the whole town, not a pane of glass in the bullet-riddled buildings. The elegantly dressed Marxist-Leninist clique in Maputo-who claim the insurgency is entirely South Africa's doing-should see this ragtag Renamo army. The guerrillas are all in their late teens or early twenties. They have no uniforms and are dressed in all kinds of mad oddments of clothing; many are in sandals, some are barefoot. Their weapons are old Soviet AKs and grenade launchers, which they say they capture from demoralized government soldiers. Yet guerrilla morale seems high. For communication, the rebels I met used an ancient, hand-cranked radio-telephone. I saw only one motor vehicle, a motorcycle. The way you make your way through rebel territory in Mozambique is you walk. If South Africa is giving Renamo support it is doing so at an extremely low level.

Renamo would be doing even better if, like Savimbi in Angola and the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, it had the advantage of being on the Approved List of anti-Communist insurgencies receiving American heat-seeking Stinger missiles, which are at present wreaking havoc, for example, against MiGs and Soviet helicopter gunships in Afghanistan.

Why isn't Renamo on the Approved List? Is it Renamo's alleged ties to South Africa? Well, Jonas Savimbi in Angola gets infinitely more aid from Pretoria without tarnishing his reputation in Washington. Last fall South African artillery saved Savimbi's UNITA troops ftom a heavily armed and determined attack by Marxist-Leninist government forces in the area of the Lomba River. Also, Savimbi has a secure base at Jamba in southeast Angola for the simple reason-unofficial but not exactly the world's deepest secret-that South Africa provides it with air cover.

Is it that Renamo lacks "democratic credentials"? But what kind of democratic credentials do the Mujahedin in Afghanistan have? I have read Alfonso Dlakama's National Resistance Program as well as Renamo's Provisional Economic Manifesto, and they compare favorably with the "Constitution" of Savimbi's UNITA-far less a constitution than a political program: Guerra e Morte ao Inimigo da Patria! Renamo's growing ranks include many defectors from the ruling Frelimo clique in Maputo. A high Western diplomatic source, whom I cannot name, told me that the Frelimo clique has "conspicuously displayed its failure to win popular support."

Renamo's success has prompted some recent eddies, if not real movement. When I talked with him in Maputo, Chissano flatly refused to meet with representatives of Renamo, claiming for a time barely to know who they were. But during his recent visit to Washington, thanks to a vigorous briefing of President Reagan by Grover Norquist, advisor to Governor Pete du Pont, Chissano is said to have promised Ronald Reagan to talk with Renamo.

IF CHISSANO has actually done so, it is a well-kept secret. During Melissa Wells's confirmation hearings, Senator Jesse Helms made an issue of the fact that Secretary of State George Shultz meets with the Communist-dominated African National Congress, but the State Department had no contact at all with the anti-Communist rebels in neighboring Mozambique. Word from within the National Security Council is that we are now at last considering high-level contact with Renamo.

The crucial policy question is when Renamo will make the Approved List of Reagan Doctrine insurgencies. "Just give us five Stingers and you will see!" a Renamo official said to me. Congressional support for sending Stingers to Renamo seems to be growing, some knowledgeable observers claiming that Renamo today is where Savimbi was two years ago.

The "weaning" policy, in my view, was giddily misguided from the start. Indeed, the Renamo rebellion has become increasingly popular in precisely the years that we have been doing all our weaning.

Continued American support for the tottering Maputo regime seems unlikely to persuade convinced Marxists to scrap an ideology and a Soviet lifeline that are its main assurances of remaining in power. And to expect them to institute democratic reforms after an economic recovery is, to say the least, naive. In any case, recovery is not in the cards. Western investors will not invest, and Mozambique will not arise from the ashes, as long as the civil war goes on. And, far from abating, the rebellion is growing.