Guerrillas Mozambique

Rightist guerrillas killed at least 63 people and wounded 78 in an attack on an army-escorted civilian convoy north of Maputo, hospital and government officials said Sunday. The attack Saturday on the main road near Maluana, 32 miles from the capital of Maputo was blamed by government officials on the guerrillas' Mozambique National Resistance. On Sunday, 32 charred and burning trucks and buses lined the road for almost a mile.

Peace talks between the government of Mozambique and guerrillas resume in the Italian capital Monday in hopes of ending one of Africa's bloodiest civil wars. The last round of talks ended in December with a limited cease-fire along the Beira Corridor, which links the Indian Ocean with Zimbabwe. Now, with reports of more rebel attacks on civilians inside the country, the key issue is a countrywide cease-fire.

Mozambican rebels ambushed a convoy of vehicles on the African nation's main north-south highway and killed at least 51 people, the official news agency AIM reported. Survivors said another 30 people were wounded. About half the 50 vehicles in the convoy were trapped in the ambush 50 miles north of the capital of Maputo, the agency said.

There was still a crowd at the ferry landing outside this port center late on the day that Manuel Antonio crossed over with his retinue. Those with him were part of his "spirit army," mostly teen-age boys he had mysteriously "immunized" against bullets, the better to cleanse the countryside of the rebel guerrillas who have waged a 15-year war of devastation in Mozambique.

The elderly were gunned down by the score, hospital patients were shot dead in their beds and babies were killed as they nursed at their mothers' breasts. More than 380 people, mostly women and children, died in the massacre at Homoine, one of the worst in Mozambique's decade-long civil war, and the death toll continues to rise as more bodies are found, as more of the critically wounded die.

South African President Pieter W. Botha travels today to war-ravaged Mozambique, where South Africa is regarded as both the hostile backer of right-wing guerrillas and an economic powerhouse whose cooperation is badly needed by its poorer neighbor. Botha and Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano will hold a day of talks at Songo near the Cahora Bassa hydroelectric dam--a stalled project to harness the mighty Zambezi River that symbolizes the complex relationship between their two states.

Zimbabwean and Mozambican soldiers combined to recapture five towns in Mozambique held by anti-Marxist rebels since late last year, Zimbabwe radio reported from Harare. More than 100 guerrillas of the Mozambique National Resistance, including a communications general identified only as Antonio, were slain in the assaults by air and ground forces, the radio said. Their was no mention of casualties among the soldiers.

Guerrillas fighting the Marxist government of Mozambique killed as many as 380 people in a town 300 miles north of Maputo, the capital, Mozambican news media reported. Radio Mozambique said at least 155 bodies were recovered after the massacre in the town of Homoine, but the national news agency AIM gave the toll as 380, including many elderly people, women, children and patients at a district hospital.

Mozambique's guerrilla war will top the agenda when President Joaquim Chissano meets President Bush in Washington next Tuesday. "A review of the process toward achieving peace in Mozambique will be at the top of our list," Melissa Wells, the U.S. ambassador in Maputo, said. The visit, Chissano's first to the Bush White House, comes at a crucial time for the African nation. In addition to the 14-year-old civil war, Chissano faces a wave of strikes by workers dissatisfied with a U.S.

Right-wing rebels ambushed a train, killing 47 people and wounding more than 50, Mozambique's state-run news agency AIM reported. Several survivors were kidnaped, it said. The train carrying mainly miners returning from their jobs in South Africa was six miles from the border town of Ressano Garcia, and about 44 miles northwest of Maputo, when rebels of the Mozambique National Resistance detonated a remote-controlled mine that derailed six passenger cars, then opened fire.

Mozambican sources said Saturday that seven Americans and two other foreigners detained last week in northwestern Mozambique were traveling with supporters of the right-wing Mozambique National Resistance movement, which has waged a debilitating guerrilla war against the Marxist government in this former Portuguese colony for more than a decade. These sources and U.S.

Mozambican right-wing rebels said Monday they have killed about 100 soldiers in an offensive aimed at forcing the government to hold direct peace talks. In a statement released in Lisbon, the Mozambique National Resistance said that nearly all the government soldiers were killed last Thursday in a battle at the Magude barracks, about 65 miles north of Maputo, the capital.

In a massive sabotage operation that began last April, right-wing Mozambican rebels have destroyed 674 pylons on a power transmission line linking the Cahora Bassa Dam in northern Mozambique to South Africa. The figure was given by Ian McRae, director of South Africa's state-run power company and chairman of a three-nation committee charged with repairing the power line.

South African President Pieter W. Botha traveled into black Africa on Monday to promise that his government will not support the right-wing guerrillas whose attacks have devastated Mozambique's economy. His talks with Mozambique's President Joaquim Chissano were held beside the Zambezi River at the mighty Cahora Bassa Dam--a white elephant since rebels whom Botha's government is widely accused of backing damaged the power lines that took its electricity to South Africa.