Mozambique Revolts

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.

The Security Council decided unanimously Wednesday to send about 7,500 troops, police and civilians to monitor a cease-fire and election in civil war-torn Mozambique. It will be the fourth major peacekeeping force established by the United Nations this year and will be the 13th deployed in trouble spots around the world. The U.N. Operation in Mozambique will oversee an accord signed in Rome Oct.

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.

Mozambique's government and rightist rebels signed a formal cease-fire Sunday, ending 16 years of civil war that took 600,000 lives. The accord, and the free elections that are to follow in one year, would formally end the last shooting war of a region where ethnic and political tensions escalated into Cold War conflicts. President Joaquim Chissano, an ex-Marxist, and Renamo rebel leader Afonso Dhlakama embraced repeatedly at the ceremony.

The Mozambique government imposed large increases in food prices, and a government newspaper said the increases were made necessary by a guerrilla war ravaging the economy. Rice went from 9 cents to 60 cents a kilogram (2.2 pounds), corn flour from 9 to 32 cents, sugar from 11 to 59 cents. To partially offset the increases, the government raised the minimum wage for industrial workers from $17 a month to $29, except in factories losing money.

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.

Mozambique President Joaquim Chissano and rebel leader Afonso Dhlakama sealed an accord Friday to end 16 years of civil war by Oct. 1, ending three days of talks with an emotional embrace. "This is a historic day for the people of Mozambique and Africa. . . . Please, no more deaths. No more war," Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, who brought the two foes together for the first time, said after the signing ceremony.

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.

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 first word of the catastrophe brewing in this former mining town deep in the interior came from a band of 50 naked, starving men. They emerged from the bush one day at an emergency feeding center at Gile, 40 miles east, unclothed except for strips of tree bark and begging for seeds and farm implements. There are 20,000 of us in Morrua, they told a stunned worker from World Vision International, the Monrovia, Calif.

The Central Committee of the ruling Frelimo Party has endorsed President Joaquim Chissano's recommendation to abandon the country's one-party socialist state in favor of a multi-party system and a market economy. Frelimo has ruled since independence from Portugal in 1975, and endorsed the measure in an apparent bid to rectify a rapidly deteriorating centralized economy and end a bloody civil war with right-wing rebels of the foreign-sponsored Renamo movement.

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.