Oud-premier Rhodesië (88) overleden

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Op woensdag 21 november 2007 10:06 schreef vanRillandBath het volgende:

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Je weet het maar nooit met links hoor, ze houden er rare denkbeelden op na. Want nu zijn ze immers verlost van die nare ,,blanke onderdrukkers''.

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Op woensdag 21 november 2007 01:33 schreef Diederik_Duck het volgende:
In Zimbabwe wel natuurlijk. Mugabe . We mogen Smith wel visionair noemen wat dat betreft.

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Op woensdag 21 november 2007 12:46 schreef Diederik_Duck het volgende:

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Inderdaad. Blanken in zuidelijk afrika zijn een uitheems element, en dat moet uiteraard ausgerottet worden .

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Op woensdag 21 november 2007 14:24 schreef EdvandeBerg het volgende:

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Als je het over Zuid-Afrika hebt; de zwarten die er nu wonen zijn ook oorspronkelijk uitheems. De oorspronkelijke bewoners (Hottentotten) waren heel dun gezaaid en de zulu's, xhosa's enzo kwamen vanuit het noorden naar beneden zakken in dezelfde tijd dat de blanken waren.

Dus bijna alle hedendaagse bewoners zijn uitheems, alleen kwamen de blanken van verder.

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Op woensdag 21 november 2007 14:14 schreef Montov het volgende:

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Visionair als in een groot voorbeeld voor Mugabe, bedoel je zeker. De overeenkomsten tussen de twee zijn typerend.

Schermen over de kwaliteit over het onderwijs tijdens Smith is een beetje hetzelfde als het hebben over goede gezondheidszorg in Cuba.

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Op dinsdag 20 november 2007 23:44 schreef vanRillandBath het volgende:

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Bron: NRC

Moge de beste man in vrede rusten.

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Ian Smith, 88; last white leader of Rhodesia was staunch foe of black rule
By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 21, 2007
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Ian Smith, the last white minority leader of Rhodesia, who vowed that blacks would not rule his country "in a thousand years," died Tuesday in a clinic outside Cape Town, after recently suffering a stroke. He was 88.

To many white Rhodesians, Smith was a savior who vowed to preserve white minority rule and protect their interests against rising African nationalist sentiment. They saw as heroic his unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965, when Britain was pulling out of its African colonies.

But to the blacks who fought a bitter war of independence, many of whom spent years in jail (including President Robert Mugabe), Smith was a ruthless despot who banned black nationalist parties, had leaders arrested and introduced harsh laws curbing civil rights.

In his latter years, Smith believed that he was more popular among black Zimbabweans than Mugabe, who has ruled since blacks won the right to vote in 1980.

With Zimbabwe now in severe economic decline, suffering the world's worst hyperinflation and one of the lowest rates of life expectancy, Smith liked to say that his government had offered blacks better education, housing and healthcare than Mugabe's.

"I was proud of Rhodesia. I have difficulty saying I'm proud of Zimbabwe," Smith said in 2000.

Smith's father was a Scottish butcher who settled in Africa to farm in 1897. Born in 1919 in Shurugwi, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, Smith was educated in South Africa and became a World War II fighter pilot for the British with the Royal Air Force. He fought for five months with Italian partisans in the Ligurian Alps against the Nazis. He was shot down in combat, and the resulting injuries left his face badly scarred. He later had plastic surgery to repair the damage, but the operation left him with a stern and stiff expression.

He became a farmer in southwestern Zimbabwe and married Janet Watt in 1948, the same year he was elected to parliament as a Liberal. In 1953 he joined the ruling United Federal Party but broke away in 1953, forming a party that merged with another to form the Rhodesian Front party. By then he was a staunch opponent of black majority rule.

"When the white man first came here, the blacks couldn't read or write. They didn't even have their own written language. They wouldn't let their children go to school. They hadn't even invented the wheel," Smith said in 2000, expressing views that are still echoed by some white Zimbabweans today.

Smith became leader of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1964 and grabbed international headlines with his declaration of independence the following year.

Britain tried to negotiate, offering Smith terms that would have delayed black majority rule until after 2000, but he rejected the deal. With blacks barred from voting, Rhodesia never won international recognition and faced United Nations sanctions for 14 years. The only supporter Smith could turn to was South Africa, with its policy of apartheid.

Smith's nationalist opponents fled to neighboring countries, where they recruited and trained guerrilla fighters, launching a war in 1972 to oust the regime and take back the land from whites.

In the long, bloody struggle about 30,000 to 40,000 people died. South Africa initially sent combat police to help defend Rhodesia but tired of the war that was destabilizing its northern border and withdrew financial support, forcing Smith's regime to relinquish power in 1979. He tried to stay on as part of the government of national unity, but negotiations at Lancaster House in London led to Mugabe winning the 1980 election.

Smith's memoirs record his favorable impression on meeting Mugabe after the election, when the incoming leader invited Smith to meet with him. He had always regarded Mugabe as a terrorist who would lead the country to a Marxist dictatorship.

"I was welcomed most courteously," Smith wrote in his 1997 book "The Great Betrayal." "He said he appreciated the vital need to retain the confidence of the white people so that they could continue to play their part in building the future of the country. . . .

"He behaved like a balanced, civilized Westerner, the antithesis of a communist gangster I had expected. If this was a true picture, then there could be hope instead of despair."

But according to Martin Meredith's 2002 biography of Mugabe, "Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe," Smith's mood soured as black ministers began criticizing whites in speeches.

"In his private talks with Mugabe, Ian Smith protested time and time again at what he called 'the ongoing campaign of recrimination against our white community,' " Meredith wrote.

Eighteen months after he took power, as Mugabe advocated a one-party state, Smith visited him, warning that this would deter investors.

"It was their last meeting. 'He was obviously displeased and our parting, unlike previous occasions, was distant. He stood his distance,' " wrote Meredith, quoting Smith.

From then on, Smith took any opportunity to slam the regime. "He became perpetually gloomy, telling all and sundry that Zimbabwe was sliding towards a one-party Marxist dictatorship," wrote Meredith.

Smith's attacks on the government had made him popular among whites. In 1985, the last election where seats were reserved for whites, his party won 15 of the 25 white seats before Mugabe abolished the white-reserved seats.

Smith retired to his farm in southwestern Zimbabwe, but in 2000 he enjoyed a brief political revival after the Mugabe regime began its controversial policy of seizing white farms, which destroyed the country's biggest export industry (commercial farming) and plunged the economy into crisis.

At the time, Smith's own farm was under threat of seizure and he was meeting with opposition members and journalists from all over the globe.

So unpopular was Mugabe by then, said political analyst John Makumbe of the University of Zimbabwe, that he almost made Smith look good.

Smith "is poison and should never be allowed in any governing chamber in this country," Makumbe told The Times in 2000. "But people are so furious with Mugabe that you even hear Africans say Ian Smith is better than Robert Mugabe."

Smith argued that Mugabe's land seizures had nothing to do with redistributing land to blacks but was designed to intimidate people into voting for the ruling party.

"It really has nothing to do with land," Smith said in 2001. "The [Mugabe] government originally had 9 million acres, bought and paid for, but they gave a lot of it out to the comrades and the Cabinet ministers, who just took the best land. They stole it, just walked onto it."

In 2002 Smith was stripped of citizenship and he later moved to Cape Town. His wife and son predeceased him. He is survived by two stepchildren.

In his last years, he never lost an opportunity to air his vehement opposition to Mugabe, whom he described as a communist.

Communists, he said, "never have a leader in waiting. But once a decision is made by the Politburo, no one dares step out of line. That's how it works. Whether it's Marxism, whether it's fascism, whether it's Nazism, they're all the same. They are all one-party dictatorships and their main function in life is to stay in power. That's all, you just stay in power.

"If you allow yourself to be removed from power, then you've bungled it."

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Op donderdag 22 november 2007 10:19 schreef Xith het volgende:
Dit is als vragen: Wat is beter, gebeten worden door een hondsdolle kat of hond?

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Beide waren/zijn geen engeltjes, als i.p.v Mugabe een echte leider was opgestaan was het allemaal nog beter.

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Ook leuk dat links hier zo wordt gebashed, , en diederik_duck, ook al zijn je posts altijd al van laag niveau,

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het zijn juist de rechtse hoeken die voor eigen volk eigen bodem zijn (even je eigen drama zin terug: maar blijkbaar geldt dit niet voor Afrika, hypocriet rechts!) , links was toch van de multikul?

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Op donderdag 22 november 2007 10:48 schreef Diederik_Duck het volgende:

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Alles is gelijk zeker? Onder Smith had iedereen te vreten, onder Mugabe niet. Dat is toch een hoe zal ik het eens noemen substantieel verschil.
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i]Nog [/i]beter? Jij denkt dus dat het hartstikke lekker gaat in Zimbabwe?! Een inflatie van wat is het? 8000% ofzo. Agrarische productie gekelderd tot bijna nul, van de graanschuur van Afrika tot afhankelijk van voedselhulp. Ach, een niemendalletje....

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Ach, dat komend van iemand die niet in staat is tot begrijpend lezen...
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Je snapt me duidelijk niet eens, maar ik ben de beroerdste niet, ik zal het voor je spellen. In Europa is het de nazi hoek die is voor Blut und Boden ideeen/de toepassing daarvan. Links (en overigens ook rechts!) beschouwt dat - volkomen terecht! - als zeer verwerpelijk. Echter wordt er merkwaardigerwijs altijd een heel andere toets aangelegd als het gaat om de vraag wie er recht heeft op de Afrikaanse grond. Dan is het opeens niet van de blanken (die er ook al generaties wonen...)

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maar van de zogenaamd 'autochtone' (en tussen aanhalingstekens, immers komt een grote groep van de huidige bewoners in zuidelijk afrika ook van elders - de echt autochtone groep - bosjesmannen e.d. - wordt door eenieder gelijkelijk achtergesteld) zwarte bevolking.

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Een standpunt dat fel wordt verdedigd vanuit (een deel van de) linkse hoek - de hoek die in Europa nu juist zo'n groot tegenstander is van Blut und Boden ideeen! Zou het niet beter zijn in Afrika gewoon te streven naar een samenleving waarin iedereen - ongeacht kleur! - gelijkelijk kan participeren? Een samenleving waarin ieders rechten (waaronder het eigendomsrecht...) gewaarborgd worden middels een fatsoenlijke democratische rechtsstaat? Zoiets als we in Europa ook kennen? Zeg het maar...

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Op donderdag 22 november 2007 11:28 schreef Xith het volgende:
Oh god, nu heb ik het voorrecht om on dierediks schijnwerpers te staan...

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Je kent het gezegde geloof ik wel? Beide waren slecht, dat de een slechter was dan de ander maakt de ander nog niet goed.

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En weer zet je woorden in mijn mond, mijn nog kwam voor op je geliefde overleden premier.

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Hoe kan die 'Nog' nou slaan op Mugabe's beleid als ik zeg IPV (In plaats van).

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Ik zal het even makkelijker voor je uitspellen ( kijk ik kan ook zo reageren)

Als NA de oud-premier een echt, goede leider was opgestaan, in plaats van (!), Mugabe, dan was het land nu in een NOG betere staat dan dat het was onder de oud-primier.

sevvy?
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Sorry, hier onderbreek ik je even. Ik zie mezelf, en ik geloof dat jij me ook zo ziet, als Links. Echter vindt ik niet dat de blanken daar zomaar daar verdreven konden worden. En naast SCH ken ik ook niemand die ik als Links zie en die dat ook vindt. Misschien kun je me laten zien welke linksen dit wel goed vinden?

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Je hoeft me niets over Afrika uit te leggen hoor.
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Ian Smith has sadly been proved right

By Graham Boynton
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 22/11/2007

Ian Smith only once doubted the wisdom of his decision to declare UDI and lead Rhodesia into a 15-year civil war to protect white rule.

That moment of doubt occurred in April 1980, during a meeting with Robert Mugabe, who the previous day had taken office as the first Prime Minister of Zimbabwe.

Mugabe had summoned Smith to Government House and Smith was surprised to be greeted with a warm handshake and a broad smile; after all, the country's new Marxist leader had promised his people that, come liberation, he would have Smith publicly hanged in Harare's main square.

At that meeting, Mugabe told Smith he was acutely aware that he had inherited from his old adversaries, the whites, a jewel of a country, and he praised its superb infrastructure, its efficient modern economy, and promised to keep it that way.

Smith, completely disarmed, rushed home in a state of excitement, and, over lunch, told his wife, Janet, that perhaps he had been wrong about a black government being incapable of running his beloved Rhodesia.

As he told me years later: "Here's this chap, and he was speaking like a sophisticated, balanced, sensible man. I thought: if he practises what he preaches, then it will be fine. And for five or six months it was fine…"

The simple, trusting banality of Ian Smith's words may, in fact, offer more clues to the catastrophe that has been Rhodesia/Zimbabwe over the past half-century than any number of political or academic tracts.

The point is Mugabe was not the sophisticated, balanced, sensible man Smith had briefly hoped for. Even as he was shaking Smith's hand, he was plotting the destruction of another group of political enemies, the Matabele, and was soon to send Korean-trained troops into Matabeleland to conduct a campaign of torture and murder that has still to be fully exposed.

It is estimated that between 10,000 and 20,000 civilians were murdered and as many again disfigured and tortured in what the Matabeles call the gukuruhundi, the washing away after the storm.

The sensible chap, in fact, turned out to be the type of African leader that "good old Smithy", as his supporters called him, had campaigned against throughout the UDI years. He became the embodiment of corrupt, violent, amoral African dictatorship - just as Smith had warned his supporters.

Let us not forget the context of Smith's determination to hang on to white rule in the 1960s.

At the time that he claimed to be defending "civilised standards", Rhodesians had already witnessed the flight of Belgian refugees from the Congo; Idi Amin had trashed Uganda, and Mobutu Sese Seko was about to introduce an even more brutal and dysfunctional regime in neighbouring Zaire; immediately to the north of Rhodesia, Kaunda's Zambia was in a mess, riddled with corruption and economically mismanaged, and Malawi was being similarly misruled by the eccentric despot Hastings Banda. So why, Smith argued, would Mugabe be any different? Why, indeed.

Smith was a simple man and it was his rather humourless, one-dimensional Rhodesian-ness that at once made him a hero among his own people and a figure of derision among his enemies. I spent hours interviewing him for a book I was writing in the early 1990s and he never once smiled or told a joke. He was the same dour, Calvinistic character whom I had so strongly opposed as a young white liberal growing up in Rhodesia, and who at the time represented all that was wrong about white minority rule in Africa.

At our meetings, he spoke endlessly about how Rhodesians had been more British than the British, how Churchill - had he been alive - would almost certainly have emigrated from corrupt, liberal England to Rhodesia, and how this small community of decent, fair-minded whites had been betrayed by, well, just about everybody he could think of - the Tories, Labour, the Afrikaners, the OAU, the UN. Not surprisingly, he called his ponderous autobiography The Great Betrayal.

It was easy to mock Ian Smith, but he was right - both about the betrayals and about the quality of most African politicians.

He has particular resonance this week, as heads of the Commonwealth convene in Uganda, a country with an interesting democratic history.

However ponderous, however humourless and unsophisticated he was, Smith had run a successful emerging African country and, although the whites were the main beneficiaries, there was increasing prosperity among the black population.

Above all there was a sound, intelligently managed economy, free from the post-colonial blight of corruption.

Today, Zimbabwe is a failed state with a non-functioning economy, a once-flourishing agricultural sector now moribund, and a population on the brink of starvation. According to a UN Development Programme index, life expectancy there today is one of the lowest in the world. So much for liberation.

Although the first 20 years of Mugabe's rule saw a slow, somewhat even-paced decline, the calamitous collapse has been achieved in little more than half a decade, an extraordinary feat of self-destruction when one considers that it took more than a century for Ian Smith's white antecedents to carve a modern, functioning, European-style society out of raw African bushveld.

But that has been the story of post-colonial Africa and, although this week's obituaries will largely dismiss Smith as a colonial caricature, a novelty politician from another age, if you were to go to Harare today and ask ordinary black Zimbabweans who they would rather have as their leader - Smith or Mugabe - the answer would be almost unanimous. And it would not be Mugabe.

It is perfectly ironic that Mugabe's deputy information minister, Bright Matonga, when told of Smith's death this week, described him as a man "who brought untold suffering to millions of Zimbabweans". Those words surely apply more to his own leader than to Ian Smith.

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Op woensdag 21 november 2007 15:00 schreef Diederik_Duck het volgende:

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Wat een onzin... Onder Smith was er genoeg te eten, en liep de economie behoorlijk. Onder Mugabe heeft iedereen het treurig.

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Op donderdag 22 november 2007 18:49 schreef Kingstown het volgende:
Hé...dat zeiden ze over Hitler ook dat hij zulke goede autowegen had aangelegd en dat de economie behoorlijk liep....your point?

Anyway....het was Thatcher die Smith heeft laten vallen en zover ik weet was Thatcher niet echt links te noemen....bottomline....beide zijn/waren dictators.

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Op donderdag 22 november 2007 01:43 schreef StefanP het volgende:
In de ogen van links is het natuurlijk prima dat er miljoenen zwarten onder eigen bewind verkracht c.q. vermoord worden of sterven van de honger, dan dat er voortspoed en veiligheid zijn onder blank bewind.

Smith was iemand die precies wist wat er komen zou onder een zwart bewind - en hij heeft gelijk gekregen. Laat het echter maar aan links over om zo iemand de hel in te wensen, terwijl ze met vreugde naar de honger en doden in Afrika kijken.

Rhodesie is uit het niets opgebouwd door blanken. De zogenaamde 'littekens' van het blanke, 'racistische' bewind bestaan uit spoorwegen, kerken, scholen, ziekenhuizen, gerechtsgebouwen, bruggen en dergelijke. Zeg eens Floripasje, waarom hoor ik je daar niet over? Weet je uberhaupt wel wie Ian Smith is en wat hij betekend heeft voor Rhodesie? Of klets je maar een eind in de rondte? Je bent natuurlijk veel meer fan van Mugabe en z'n bende criminelen die tijdens hun oorlog tegen de staat niet schuwden om baby's aan een stok te rijgen en burgers te verminken? Walgelijk.

Er bestond niet eens apartheid in Rhodesie - behalve in de ogen van journalisten die 15000km verderop woonden. Het is te smerig en laf voor woorden hoe de cultuurrelativisten een land weten te vernietigen om hun eigen geweten op te schonen. Ach ja, hetzelfde verhaaltje als de salonsocialisten die voor anderen bepalen dat ze in de multiculturele troep moeten wonen, terwijl hun eigen kinderen naar de witte school gaan.

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Op donderdag 22 november 2007 10:19 schreef Xith het volgende:
Dit is als vragen: Wat is beter, gebeten worden door een hondsdolle kat of hond?

Beide waren/zijn geen engeltjes, als i.p.v Mugabe een echte leider was opgestaan was het allemaal nog beter.