The Betrayal of Rhodesia By Nigel Jackson

     A report in The Australian (12-13 May) headed ‘Mission to kill Mugabe foiled’ provides further insight into the internal treachery that led to the downfall of Rhodesia and the subsequent despotism of Robert Mugabe. Earlier Ian Hancock and Peter Godwin in Rhodesians Never Die (Pan Macmillan, 2007) dealt extensively with the critical role played by Rhodesia’s head of intelligence, Ken Flower, who was secretly disloyal to Ian Smith and the Rhodesia Front government of 1965-1977. The Australian’s report by Valentine Low, originally published in The Times in London, claims that attempts in 1979 by the Rhodesian SAS to assassinate Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, leaders of the two main African nationalist parties (or terrorist organisations, as some would say), were foiled by internal leaks to the British, who then tipped the targeted men off in time for them to escape the assassins. 

     Low is quoting a new book, We Dared to Win: The SAS in Rhodesia by Hannes Wessels and Andre Scheepers. David Owen, British foreign secretary in 1979, is said to have confirmed the story thirty years afterwards, including the role of Flower. His justification – that ‘Mugabe was at that time… the genuine choice of the Rhodesian people’ – is highly suspect. Would Mugabe have needed to resort to bestial acts of terrorism if that was the case? Despite the scepticism of Hancock and Godwin, I think that The Australian League of Rights was correct to support independent Rhodesia in those crucial years. The tragic history of that nation merely confirms the ongoing truth of Saint Paul’s famous statement that Christians are opposed to hidden evil in high places. Australia at the present time appears to be being white anted as was Rhodesia then.