Sunday 4 October 2020

Rhodesia: Ruminations on a Former Colonial Settler State

A member of the Rhodesian Special Forces unit, the Selous Scouts in training (PHOTO CAPTURE from Getty Images).

The following is part of the text of my thoughts about the comments posted at my YouTube Channel in regard to a newsreel I uploaded over four months ago which was a 1977 report on the training and activities of the Rhodesian Army Special Forces unit known as the Selous Scouts.

. The Content of the Newsreel

The original source gives very little details except to name the news reporter, identify Major Ronald Reid-Daly and provide short descriptions of what is happening in the reel. The title of upload and the brief elaborations within the text are my creation.

I will go into details later about the allegations of Selous Scouts involvement in False Flag operations. Needless to say, some comments here which have dismissed this as anti-Rhodesian “BBC Marxist Death Cult Propaganda” are wide of the mark. The ITN report gives a sympathetic portrayal of the Selous Scouts. Any rational person can hear the allegations regarding the massacre of the missionaries to Major Reid-Daly and his denial. I uploaded a short interview with Reid-Daly conducted by another news agency and the same question was put to him, and the same denial was issued. There was good reason for him to be asked based on circumstantial evidence. What is more the subsequent failure of a Selous Scout operation involving the bombing of churches in Salisbury in 1980 and to which I alluded to in the description box vindicates that line of questioning.

If anyone simply sees this newsreel as merely “anti-Rhodesian” then it speaks of an inflexible and ineradicable mindset of indoctrination -the very mindset which such people accuse both their real and perceived opponents of having.

. Rhodesia: A Colonial Settler Project Against Which Rebellion Was a Perfectly Natural Reaction

Rhodesia was a colonial settler project. This involved subjugation, land expropriation and the imposition of a caste system within which the subjugated Black Africans were exploited by Whites of mainly British descent.  The social and economic system may have appeared a benign one to the Rhodesians who favourably compared it (and still do so) to the Apartheid system in neighbouring South Africa, but it was nonetheless a system based on the Whites monopolising access to the country’s natural resources and keeping the Africans whose lands they acquired by force in their place.

Judging by many comments made by supporters of the late Rhodesia on this upload, it may come as a shock to more than a few, but human history is replete with societies who have rebelled against such a state of affairs. This was the case with Algeria, Palestine, the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe, and Kenya. And where the native populations who were looked upon variously as “Untermensch” or “uncivilised” (the White Nationalist term today would be “low I.Q.” peoples), avoided extermination, they fought back to reclaim their native lands.

The Black Africans of what came to be the territory of Rhodesia were no different from Catholic Irish resisting British colonisation; the Muslim Algerians resisting French domination, the Black African Kenyans resisting the British or the Palestinians resisting the militias of the Jewish Agency in Palestine and the State of Israel once it was established.

This allusion to Marxist-thinking as the root of the evil which stimulated Black Africans to fight against the Rhodesian “paradise” is as absurd as it is lazy in its construct. The fact that the Soviet Union and China gave aid and support to liberation movements in Africa and Asia, and to some extent in Latin America, was more an accident of history. Resistance against any colonial settler entity such as Rhodesia, is an ineluctable facet of the human psyche.

The Poles and other Slavs who were referred to as subhuman by the Nazis were not concerned about Hitler’s assertion that Germany’s Slavic neighbours owed all the achievements in culture to the German race. The Irish who were lampooned as ape-like, rowdy, and prone to fecundity did not care too much about British-English civilisation which under Cromwell had massacred them. It was under British rule after all that the devastating famine took place. Today, this mentality persists in Irish Republican communities who perceive Israel as an unjust and oppressive colonial settler state and support the Palestinian cause, while the Unionists take the opposite view. 

The Kenyans correctly wanted their land back, as did the Algerians and as do the Palestinians. Why do Old Rhodesians resent the idea that the Blacks would want their land back? As with the aforementioned peoples, the Black African resented the paternalistic and oppressive system, and resisted.

Cecil Rhodes, the man who gave the country its name, was at the heart of the system through which Black African workers were brutally exploited. If such a statement strikes any one as being somehow “Marxist”, it proves the point of the distorted lens through which some Old Rhodesians choose to view the world. The massacres of Ndebele people prior to and after the Rudd Agreement using maxim guns was a deliberate cruelty which went further than the prosecution of war. It was genocide.

Land expropriation, labour exploitation, and genocide: that was the foundation of Rhodesia.

. The Insurgency in Rhodesia: False Flags, Black Propaganda and Psychological Warfare

I note comments relating to the news reporter’s reference to the murder of European Roman Catholic Missionaries in 1977 as having possibly been an operation carried out by the Selous Scouts have been met by disbelief and recourse to the tired mantra of the “biased Marxist media”. As I wrote in the description box, the Scouts specialised in irregular warfare with its methods including “infiltration, assassination, abduction, torture, sabotage and blackmail”.

For those who are ignorant of the concept of the “False Flag” operation i.e. the carrying out of a mission designed to discredit the opposition, I would simply ask you to find out about “Operation Susannah”, an operation conducted by Israeli Military Intelligence in 1954. Known as “The Lavon Affair”, it was a botched attempt by the Israelis to disrupt closer relations between Nasser of Egypt and the Americans and the British. The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was part and parcel of this sort of playbook. You are also invited to find out about “Operation Northwoods”, a diabolical plan approved by the Pentagon which sought to stage terror attacks on American soil to blame on Cuban Communists in order to present an opportunity to invade and overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. Again, read up on the Anni diPiombo (or “Years of Lead”) in Italy from the late 1960s to the middle 1980s when NATO’s Gladio network enabled Fascist-sympathising militias to murder innocent civilians in order to blame Marxist and Anarchist groups. The bombs in Piazza Fontana (1969) and Peteano (1972) provide examples of this diabolical “Strategy of Tension” (“La Strategia della Tensione”). The Bologna bomb in 1980 was also an example although there was no question from the outset that it was the responsibility of a neo-Fascist group.

Now interestingly, Major Reid-Daly served in Malaya where Frank Kitson, the exponent-in-chief of the counter-insurgency doctrine of the British Army, was developing (after his experience in Kenya) his methods which encompassed the aforementioned specialisms of the Selous Scouts, added to which was the use of “Black Propaganda”. Kitson used his colonial experiences in Northern Ireland against the Irish Republican Army. Feel free to search for information on the activities of the Military Reaction Force (MRF) which apart from assassinating suspected Republican guerrillas, murdered innocent civilians in order to blame the IRA.

Anyone who researches the murder of the missionaries will find out that it was not an open and shut case for affixing responsibility to any of the parties. As in all wars, a propaganda war was being fought, and Rhodesia was no exception. Using the dark arts of false flag operations was evidently part of this. In fact, as I mention in the description box, two Black African members of the Scouts who were involved in planting explosives in churches in Salisbury in February 1980, were themselves accidentally blown up by one of their bombs. The aim of this Selous Scouts operation was to make it seem that operatives working for the military wing of Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF organisation had planted the bombs (ZANU literature was left at the various locations) because as a Marxist, Mugabe (the Jesuit Marxist) was “against” Christianity. This was an attempt to discredit Mugabe’s political party in the run up to the elections in what was to become Zimbabwe.

Therefore, it is not inconceivable that Black members of the Selous Scouts disguised as African guerrillas were used to conduct the massacres of the missionaries in order to present the African militias as anti-clerical.

At least one comment refers to the “savageness” of the guerrillas when dealing with “uncooperative” African villagers. I do not know the ins and outs of every single facet of the Bush War in Rhodesia, but that commentator and others reading this should be aware of cruelties practised by the Rhodesian side. There is a film I have yet to upload about a British mercenary hired to combat poaching. This man was allowed to shoot at Black Africans at once a 6PM curfew came without considering whether his target was a poacher or late getting home. And to claim his bounty, he did not have to produce a dead body, only the right ear from it.

The Selous Scouts acted with savagery, killing innocent civilians in neighbouring countries -not by mistake i.e. the euphemistic “collateral damage”, but as a means of psychological warfare. A good example of this was in the Scouts raid on a ZANLA camp, situated at Nyadzonya-Pungwe, Mozambique in August 1976. They got to the camp by disguising their armoured vehicles in the colours of the Mozambique Army (a classic False Flag tactic) and, according to Major Reid-Daly, massacred up to a thousand.

It was seemingly an impressive tally, except that the Selous Scouts had shot many guerrillas who were unarmed as they stood in formation for a parade. The camp was formally registered as a refugee camp with the United Nations. Guerrillas were present, but the Scouts raiding party saw fit to set fire to the camp hospital following which all the patients were burned alive.

The thinly veiled racism among some of these comments seek to promote the idea of savagery being the preserve of Africans while forgetting European-originated depravity. It is interesting how the brutalities inflicted on Africans by European colonial powers prefigured those visited on their fellow Europeans including Jews during the period leading up to World War 2 and of course during the war itself: the genocide against the Namaqua and Herrero by Kaiser-era German colonisers, and the use of bodily parts in experiments are just two. The Boer has not forgotten the British concentration camps and neither have the Ethiopians who endured Italian camps in Somaliland and who were massacred by Black Shirts in Addis Ababa in 1937.

In the case of Rhodesia, how can the facts of the brutal counter-insurgency campaign employed in the 1970s be ignored? Bulldozers and flamethrowers were used to defoliate 54,000 square miles of countryside. The “Free Fire Zones” set up by the Rhodesian Army meant that any Black African found within them would be shot on sight. There were curfews imposed on the Black population (effectively martial law) and there was internment and forced resettlement.

There was a campaign of terror which did not stop with killing Black African guerrillas - many of whom were not killed in action but tortured prior to being murdered- it also extended to Black African civilians.

. The Insurgency in Rhodesia: A Lost Cause

Some of the commentators on this page are Black. They have objectively stated that the Selous Scouts were a formidable fighting force. I have acknowledged this fact in the description box. But they were fighting a lost cause. The frequent references to being “betrayed” by the British (and the Americans) has a hollow ring to it. It is redolent of the “stab in the back” rationale popularised by German Nationalists in the aftermath of World War 1.

The war in Rhodesia, as was the case with the wars in Angola and Mozambique, came at the tail end of the decolonisation of Africa. The Selous Scouts doubtlessly had many victories, but so did the French military in Algeria, the British in Kenya and Aden and the Portuguese in southern Africa.

Rhodesia would have collapsed without the support of the British whose kith and kin policy essentially held sway right to the end. They did not invade Rhodesia after UDI. The British bypassed sanctions by supplying Rhodesia with oil through Mozambique until the Portuguese withdrew.

. Modern Day Racial Warfare & Identity Politics

It seems to me that those who yearn for old Rhodesia have fused their ideological raison d’etre with the present-day manifestations of identity politics. They are White Nationalists or in the parlance of many on the mainstream political left, “White Supremacists”. The use of the term White Supremacist is in many ways an objective one. White Rhodesians after all enjoyed a great amount of privilege; real, tangible privilege. Not the asinine expressions utilised in today’s “Culture wars” where terms such as “White Privilege”, “Black Privilege'', “Jewish Privilege” and so on are frequently used. They enjoyed a standard of living which owed a great deal to the subjugation and exploitation of the indigenous Black African population. The linkage with White Supremacy comes from the use of the old Rhodesian Flag as a source of militant White identity as was the case with the mass murderer Dylann Roof. There was also the case of the Alberta-based Canadian soldiers who were discovered to be selling White Nationalist-Supremacist flags, badges, and literature.

. Conclusion.

The truth is that Rhodesia was no beacon of democracy which offered its Black African population a vision for the future. Rhodesia collapsed under the weight of its contradictions. Some such as quite a number of commentators on this post can gloat about the failings of the political leaders of Zimbabwe, but the truth is that they are living in denial about the nature of the system and the fact that that system was doomed to failure. And as was the case with the French-Algerian Pieds-Noir and the Boer, they must face up to this. 

© Adeyinka Makinde (2020).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.



14 comments:

  1. The South African CIO also spread biologicals in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, using both Anthrax and Ebola. One pubic health official said that he had run into Marburg too. See book Rhodesian Front War by Henrik Ellert.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The notion that Mr. Makinde has that the Black population of Rhodesia simply sought its freedom in the "ineluctable" way of any people 'oppressed' by colonial powers. This is at best a half-truth. Do you think the Russians and Chinese would be pouring huge amounts of military support were they not convinced on the evidence that their Marxist ideas were not taking root in a fertile soil? Remember,the collectivism of aboriginal peoples fits neatly into a Marxist framework. So what you say? Just this. The force arrayed against White Rhodesians was so overwhelmingly superior in numbers and materiel that ANY measures had to be considered in their desperate struggle, unaided and in fact betrayed by those who should have supported them.

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  3. Our town was Mazabuka, modern day Zambia. Although I've never been, my family made their abode there where big dad was in the colonial service, hms, overseeing education. He spent the majority of his life, and love, throughout Africa.
    Freedom has to be the ideal of all people. Metaphysical as well as political, in order to live a meaningful life. But there cannot be political freedom without institutions to guard it. There cannot be institutions without righteous individuals to keep them.
    It's hard to be righteous without education or understand the responsibility that freedom calls for.
    The coin ops of Malaya, Algeria, Vietnam and surely Rhodesia were terrible. What kind of war is it when you must instill more fear in the population than your opponents? A type of war in which humans cannot prevail. Only demons.
    An insurgency, no matter how morally just, is always legally wrong (a house divided cannot stand). And talk of freedom everywhere is propaganda without concern for the personal sacrifices it calls for.
    Freedom is the hard road, and it only gets harder. Those who equate freedom with access to material goods are delusional.
    Colonialism was unjust. But modern nation states require modern institutions, which in turn require modern individuals. I live in Africa now and i can tell you, ask anyone where they'd like to live and it's in the west.
    Why? There are no functional institutions here on par with western standards. It's obvious why.


    I really like your blog. Thank you.

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  4. The RSF did not need to undertake "false flag" atrocities, as the terrorists committed sufficient all by themselves.
    That's aside from the fact that to do so would have been alien to them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. @ bloosn, you are grossly mistaken.

      The Rhodesian security forces, most notably through the Selous Scouts did commit “False Flag” atrocities as part and parcel of their modus operandi. As mentioned in this post, the Rhodesian “Bush War”, as is the case with a multitude of wars, had a psychological dimension in regard to which the Selous Scouts with their expertise in “pseudo operations” consistently undertook missions which relied on deception, and such deception was utilised to either kill a large number of the insurgent enemy (Black Nationalist, Marxist militias) or to kill specific civilian targets in order to blame the Black African insurgents.

      You have chosen to ignore the example of the Selous Scout False Flag operation conducted in February 1980. Named “Operation HECTIC”, it involved two Black African Selous Scouts named Lieutenant Edward Piringodo and Corporal Morgan Moyo bombing churches in the Salisbury area. Piringodo and Moyo used explosives captured from the guerrillas to blow up two churches, taking care to leave behind ZANU literature near the ruins caused by each blast. However, both Scouts died after a third bomb they were carrying prematurely exploded inside the car they were driving. They were near an Anglican church at the time of the final explosion which took their lives.

      “Operation Hectic” was designed to discredit Robert Mugabe’s ZANU at the forthcoming elections by making his organisation appear to be anti-Christian and anti-Church. The irony is that although influenced by Marxist-Leninist thinking, Mugabe did not totally cast off his Jesuit upbringing. For goodness sake, he even named one of his younger children, a son Bellarmine, after a not-very-well-known Catholic Saint.

      This mission makes the allegation that the Selous Scouts carried out atrocities against African villages and Catholic missions extremely credible. They would have used Black African members of the force in the way Piringodo and Moyo were used to disguise themselves as guerrillas to carry out such atrocities.

      Again, why would they do this? To discredit the Black African guerrillas in the international court of public opinion.

      Do I discount the fact that the disputed atrocities may have been committed by Black African guerrillas?

      No.

      But Old Rhodesians need to remove their rose-tinted lenses and confront the brutalities perpetrated by their side. Glenn Cross’s 1999 book, “Plague Wars” gives a good account of this aspect of the war. An academic article written in 2002 by Ian Martinez for Third World Quarterly which was titled “The History of the Use of Bacteriological and Chemical Agents during Zimbabwe’s Liberation War of 1965-80 by Rhodesian Forces” is also very enlightening.

      Delete
    2. Response to "bloosn" (Part 2):

      Tracing the funding of the diabolical chemical warfare shows that it originated from Britain from where money was funnelled through Saudi Arabia and South Africa before reaching Rhodesia. The “British-betrayed-us” mantra by Old Rhodesians forgets that the “Kith and Kin” attitude remained strong.

      You are wrong to write that engaging in “False Flag” operations was “alien” to them. The Rhodesian military began to develop counter-insurgency chemical warfare in the early 1970s. The authorities acquired double-agents within the structures of the guerrillas who soaked clothing and food in toxic organophosphates. This meant that many newly recruited revolutionaries died on the journey to guerrilla training camps in Zambia and Mozambique. This meant that those who had not yet engaged in attacking the Rhodesian state (they could have given up or been told they were not guerrilla material) were preemptively murdered in a cruel manner. Also, because the double-agent perpetrators could be easily fingered, they were themselves killed.

      A Defense Intelligence (DIA) cable from Harare to Washington D.C. in 1990 revealed that a member of the Selous Scouts admitted in 1978 that they (the Selous Scouts) had “tried both chemical and biological warfare techniques to kill terrorists”.

      The end justifies the means you might say, but the Rhodesian authorities did not seem to mind that their chemical warfare programme was by the end of the 1970s causing health problems among the civilian population.

      You need to remember that in 1979, Rhodesia recorded the largest recorded outbreak of anthrax. Ken Flower, Chief of Rhodesia’s Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) and a CIO officer named Henrik Ellert confirm that the Ian Smith-led regime used biological and chemical weapons against the guerrillas, against rural Black Africans to prevent their support of the guerrillas , and against livestock like cattle in order to reduce rural food stocks.

      The upshot is that such chemical warfare and many of the methods specifically adopted by the Selous Scouts were war crimes.

      War crimes? Yes, use of chemical warfare in which the Selous Scouts played a significant role contravened The Hague Convention (1907) and the killing of livestock in Black African areas infringed Common Article III of the Geneva Convention.

      Delete
    3. Response to "bloosn" (Part 3):

      Those captured Black African guerrillas who the Selous Scouts could not “turn” were either subjected to an extrajudicial execution or were used as human guinea pigs in biological experimentation, which of course inevitably led to their deaths.

      Again, as I mentioned in my piece, the Scouts’ commander Lt. Colonel Reid-Daly was a veteran of the Malaya conflict during which time he would have seen and imbibed the more nefarious aspects of counter-insurgency employed by the British Army. While I mentioned Frank Kitson’s name, the true exponent of what came to be known as anti-Maoist rural counter-insurgency warfare, was applied in Malaya by General Robert Thompson.

      The Selous Scots were created in 1973 to precisely conduct an “ungentlemanly war”. And truth be told the unit were known for “murder, rape, smuggling and poaching” and its members gained a reputation as “psychopathic killers” and “vainglorious extroverts”.

      The Selous Scouts were instructed to poison watering holes, stagnant water, slow moving streams and other bodies of water near guerrilla camps inside Mozambique, near the border. In one operation, the Selous Scouts poisoned a well in Mozambique which led to the deaths of at least 200 civilians because the well was the only source of drinking water in the area. The Scouts were also instructed to spread cholera. This also caused deaths among innocent civilians in Mozambique, but was discontinued because the agent dissipated quickly in water, and it could spread back to Rhodesia including areas where the Scouts were operating.

      The deaths of cattle and these poisoning incidents were used as Rhodesian government propaganda to blame the guerrillas.

      The recollections of the likes of Ken Flower and Henrik Ellert in regard to Selous Scouts atrocities are highly relevant because the Scouts were directly under the control of the CIO and not the Rhodesian Army. What is more, the Rhodesian government had a tight control over the media which facilitated the psy-ops motives of the Selous Scouts. The White population, were thus subject to brainwashing by government propaganda which included a great deal of disinformation.

      So I repeat, you are grossly mistaken. Or, perhaps, are in denial.

      Delete
    4. You are correct: the RSF did not need to commit atrocities, but they did so anyway. War crimes. Poisoning wells. DIRTY WAR.

      Delete
  5. @ bloosn, you are grossly mistaken.

    The Rhodesian security forces, most notably through the Selous Scouts did commit “False Flag” atrocities as part and parcel of their modus operandi. As mentioned in this post, the Rhodesian “Bush War”, as is the case with a multitude of wars, had a psychological dimension in regard to which the Selous Scouts with their expertise in “pseudo operations” consistently undertook missions which relied on deception, and such deception was utilised to either kill a large number of the insurgent enemy (Black Nationalist, Marxist militias) or to kill specific civilian targets in order to blame the Black African insurgents.

    You have chosen to ignore the example of the Selous Scout False Flag operation conducted in February 1980. Named “Operation HECTIC”, it involved two Black African Selous Scouts named Lieutenant Edward Piringodo and Corporal Morgan Moyo bombing churches in the Salisbury area. Piringodo and Moyo used explosives captured from the guerrillas to blow up two churches, taking care to leave behind ZANU literature near the ruins caused by each blast. However, both Scouts died after a third bomb they were carrying prematurely exploded inside the car they were driving. They were near an Anglican church at the time of the final explosion which took their lives.

    “Operation Hectic” was designed to discredit Robert Mugabe’s ZANU at the forthcoming elections by making his organisation appear to be anti-Christian and anti-Church. The irony is that although influenced by Marxist-Leninist thinking, Mugabe did not totally cast off his Jesuit upbringing. For goodness sake, he even named one of his younger children, a son Bellarmine, after a not-very-well-known Catholic Saint.

    This mission makes the allegation that the Selous Scouts carried out atrocities against African villages and Catholic missions extremely credible. They would have used Black African members of the force in the way Piringodo and Moyo were used to disguise themselves as guerrillas to carry out such atrocities.

    Again, why would they do this? To discredit the Black African guerrillas in the international court of public opinion.

    Do I discount the fact that the disputed atrocities may have been committed by Black African guerrillas?

    No.

    But Old Rhodesians need to remove their rose-tinted lenses and confront the brutalities perpetrated by their side. Glenn Cross’s 1999 book, “Plague Wars” gives a good account of this aspect of the war. An academic article written in 2002 by Ian Martinez for Third World Quarterly which was titled “The History of the Use of Bacteriological and Chemical Agents during Zimbabwe’s Liberation War of 1965-80 by Rhodesian Forces” is also very enlightening.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Response to "bloosn" (Part 2):

    Tracing the funding of the diabolical chemical warfare shows that it originated from Britain from where money was funnelled through Saudi Arabia and South Africa before reaching Rhodesia. The “British-betrayed-us” mantra by Old Rhodesians forgets that the “Kith and Kin” attitude remained strong.

    You are wrong to write that engaging in “False Flag” operations was “alien” to them. The Rhodesian military began to develop counter-insurgency chemical warfare in the early 1970s. The authorities acquired double-agents within the structures of the guerrillas who soaked clothing and food in toxic organophosphates. This meant that many newly recruited revolutionaries died on the journey to guerrilla training camps in Zambia and Mozambique. This meant that those who had not yet engaged in attacking the Rhodesian state (they could have given up or been told they were not guerrilla material) were preemptively murdered in a cruel manner. Also, because the double-agent perpetrators could be easily fingered, they were themselves killed.

    A Defense Intelligence (DIA) cable from Harare to Washington D.C. in 1990 revealed that a member of the Selous Scouts admitted in 1978 that they (the Selous Scouts) had “tried both chemical and biological warfare techniques to kill terrorists”.

    The end justifies the means you might say, but the Rhodesian authorities did not seem to mind that their chemical warfare programme was by the end of the 1970s causing health problems among the civilian population.

    You need to remember that in 1979, Rhodesia recorded the largest recorded outbreak of anthrax. Ken Flower, Chief of Rhodesia’s Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) and a CIO officer named Henrik Ellert confirm that the Ian Smith-led regime used biological and chemical weapons against the guerrillas, against rural Black Africans to prevent their support of the guerrillas , and against livestock like cattle in order to reduce rural food stocks.

    The upshot is that such chemical warfare and many of the methods specifically adopted by the Selous Scouts were war crimes.

    War crimes? Yes, use of chemical warfare in which the Selous Scouts played a significant role contravened The Hague Convention (1907) and the killing of livestock in Black African areas infringed Common Article III of the Geneva Convention.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Response to "bloosn" (Part 3):

    Those captured Black African guerrillas who the Selous Scouts could not “turn” were either subjected to an extrajudicial execution or were used as human guinea pigs in biological experimentation, which of course inevitably led to their deaths.

    Again, as I mentioned in my piece, the Scouts’ commander Lt. Colonel Reid-Daly was a veteran of the Malaya conflict during which time he would have seen and imbibed the more nefarious aspects of counter-insurgency employed by the British Army. While I mentioned Frank Kitson’s name, the true exponent of what came to be known as anti-Maoist rural counter-insurgency warfare, was applied in Malaya by General Robert Thompson.

    The Selous Scots were created in 1973 to precisely conduct an “ungentlemanly war”. And truth be told the unit were known for “murder, rape, smuggling and poaching” and its members gained a reputation as “psychopathic killers” and “vainglorious extroverts”.

    The Selous Scouts were instructed to poison watering holes, stagnant water, slow moving streams and other bodies of water near guerrilla camps inside Mozambique, near the border. In one operation, the Selous Scouts poisoned a well in Mozambique which led to the deaths of at least 200 civilians because the well was the only source of drinking water in the area. The Scouts were also instructed to spread cholera. This also caused deaths among innocent civilians in Mozambique, but was discontinued because the agent dissipated quickly in water, and it could spread back to Rhodesia including areas where the Scouts were operating.

    The deaths of cattle and these poisoning incidents were used as Rhodesian government propaganda to blame the guerrillas.

    The recollections of the likes of Ken Flower and Henrik Ellert in regard to Selous Scouts atrocities are highly relevant because the Scouts were directly under the control of the CIO and not the Rhodesian Army. What is more, the Rhodesian government had a tight control over the media which facilitated the psy-ops motives of the Selous Scouts. The White population, were thus subject to brainwashing by government propaganda which included a great deal of disinformation.

    So I repeat, you are grossly mistaken. Or, perhaps, are in denial.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Some facts and much speculation accompany the many paragraphs of propaganda here. Why tell lies, this is all history now, tell the truth. Start with the fact that 80% of the Rhodesian military were not white. Why would the "non whites" so strongly stand, and fight along side the system that they supposedly hate? As they were the majority of the Rhodesian military by a ratio of 4:1, why did they not simply overthrow the whites. I'll tell you why... It's because your story contains far more lies than truth. You should be ashamed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Selous Scouts and Rhodesia's "Dirty War": A Tale of False Flag Terror and War Crimes https://adeyinkamakinde.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-selous-scouts-and-rhodesias-dirty.html

      Delete
  9. @ Unknown (Post of 17 December 2020 at 06:52) It would help if you would distinguish what you claim are "facts" from "speculation" and "propaganda".

    Joining the Rhodesian military did not mean that Blacks consented to the regime. They did it for the most part to earn a living and to feed their families. That is a simple fact for which many analogies can be made from history.

    For example, over 200,000 Irish joined the British armed forces during World War I and well over half of them were volunteers.

    To use the words of James Connelly in regard to Blacks (or "non-whites" as you term them) joining Rhodesia's forces, it was "economic conscription".

    No "lies" on my part and nothing to be "ashamed" about.

    I believe that you are guilty of "projection" and are a victim of a form of indoctrination which does not permit you to see the correct and objective picture.

    ReplyDelete