SOUTH AFRICA:Ian Smith, the former Rhodesian prime minister who led a white-minority government and fought a civil war to suppress black nationalism in the country now known as Zimbabwe, died yesterday. He was 88.
Smith died of a stroke at a nursing home near Cape Town, South Africa, according to Sam Whaley, who was a senator in Smith's Rhodesian Front government and now lives in Harare, Zimbabwe. "It's the passing of an era," Mr Whaley said. "Ian Smith was a man of grit and courage."
Smith became prime minister of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1964 as the leader of the white supremacist Rhodesian Front party. He vowed never to allow majority rule in the southern African nation.
"There will be no African rule in my lifetime," Smith told Time magazine in an interview in 1964. "The white man is the master of Rhodesia, has built it, and intends to keep it." At the time of the interview, whites constituted less than 5 per cent of the population of Southern Rhodesia, a nation formed from a group of tribal lands seized in the 19th century by British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes.
In 1965, Smith renamed the country Rhodesia and unilaterally declared independence from Britain, the first nation to do so since the US replaced the British monarch as its head of state in 1776.
The independence declaration drew international condemnation and UN economic sanctions, which ultimately led to the collapse of Rhodesia and the birth of Zimbabwe in 1980.
British prime minister Harold Wilson initiated talks to persuade Smith to reverse the declaration and transfer power to Rhodesia's black majority. The talks, held in 1966 and 1968, failed.
"Smith was a formidable opponent, but he lacked any vision," Wilson later said of him.
Civil war broke out in Rhodesia in 1972, pitting Smith's army against black liberation movements of Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union, or Zapu, and the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, the military wing of Zanu, the current ruling party led by Robert Mugabe.
Beleaguered by an expensive war and sanctions, Smith reluctantly accepted US secretary of state Henry Kissinger's proposals for a settlement. "The proposals which were put to us do not represent what in our view would have been the best solution for the Rhodesian problem," Smith said.
"Regretfully, however, we were not able to make our views prevail. The British and American governments, together with major western powers, have made up their minds as to the kind of solution they wish to see in Rhodesia and they are determined to bring it about."
Three years after Smith conceded the principle of majority rule, Rhodesia held its first multiracial elections in 1979 and Bishop Abel Muzorewa became the country's first black prime minister. The poll, in which Zanu and Zapu refused to participate, failed to end the war and fresh elections were held in 1980 after a deal, known as the Lancaster House Agreement, was reached in talks hosted by the British government. Mr Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since then. Smith retired from politics in the early 1990s. - (Bloomberg)