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Ian Smith, 88; last white leader of Rhodesia was staunch foe of black rule

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Times Staff Writer

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.

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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.

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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. . . .

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“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.

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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.

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“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.”

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

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