to THE AGE
John Howard often talks good sense, but his statement that Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe was ‘just as odious as the white regime he so despised’ (‘John Howard lauds the fall of Mugabe’, 18/11) is a gross misrepresentation of the nature of the Rhodesian governments between 1965 and 1978.
The Rhodesian Front rule under Ian Smith was an unusually noble political order and it is a tragedy that it was sabotaged by a combination of African terrorists, international meddlers and foolish idealists. Smith and his colleagues rightly sought to maintain law and order and civilized standards in their land, after observing the disasters that had occurred in other ‘liberated’ African nations, most notably the Belgian Congo. They recognized that fruitful advancement of Rhodesian Africans needed to be achieved slowly; and had they been left alone, these peoples would have fared far better than they did under Mugabe.
NJ, Belgrave, Vic