1979: Operation Midford

October 1, 2024

By AHNZ

In 1979 New Zealand contributed 74 soldiers to a monitoring force in Rhodesia and 2 observing Members of Parliament. It was called Operation Milford. The country had been one of our colonial cousins and its Prime Minister (1953-8) Garfield Todd was a New Zealander himself.

Under international sanctions, Rhodesia opted for self-deletion and became Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship: Zimbabwe. The country now became an authoritarian regime with Mugabe leader for life (d.2017.) Rhodesia was wealthy and successful; Zimbabwe is one of the world’s shithole countries. Evidently the people were not ready for democracy and freedom after all which is exactly what the Rhodesians had been trying to tell the world. But they were attacked from within by Communists and attacked from without by (“Woke”) trade sanctions…

“The United Nations Security Council last week took a historic step, of sorts. For the first time in its 21 years of existence, it resorted to mandatory economic sanctions to try to bring down a government. Object of the sanctions was Ian Smith’s white-supremacist regime in Rhodesia,” – Time (1966)

“Jury finds Christchurch man guilty of 17 sex charges…John Hope Muchirahondo is from Mutare, a provincial city of about 500,000 people in Zimbabwe’s east, near the border with Mozambique. He is one of more than 30 siblings from his father’s 13 wives. Muchirahondo himself has had children with several women since arriving in Aotearoa…He came to New Zealand as a 22-year-old with his mother in 2008. [The charges spanned from 2009 to 2021.]” – The full story of a sexual predator named ‘Hope’, Press (1/10/2024)

“On 20 December 1979, the New Zealand contingent flew out from RNZAF Base Whenuapai, and between 22 and 24 December 1979 the various elements of the Commonwealth Monitoring Force began to arrive at Salisbury Airport…18 April 1980, at a ceremony that was attended by HRH Prince Charles, the Union Jack was lowered for the last time from Government House in Salisbury, and the new African nation of Zimbabwe declared itself independent as a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations. ” – Wiki

Holyoake privately sympathised with the European settlers in Rhodesia. In July 1964 he told the Rhodesian Minister Clifford Dupont that ‘he wished to help the Europeans in Southern Rhodesia in
whatever way he could’, and in October 1965 he wrote to Ian Smith expressing his admiration for the European settlers ‘who ha[d] by their own special skills and industry established a prosperous and highly developed society.’…Press comment in New Zealand certainly revealed a strong current of support for the Europeans in Rhodesia. The Daily News defended them as ‘loyal Britons who believe that Britain has stabbed them in the back. Eighty years of effort will be dust and ashes if the African takes over…Mayor of Dargaville – who in early 1966 became Chairman of the New Zealand-Rhodesian Society – wrote to Holyoake that it would be a ‘terrible thing for New Zealand to be a party to such inhuman treatment of white settlers by handing the country over to Communist inspired trouble makers.” – THE RHODESIAN CRISIS IN BRITISH AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, CARL PETER WATTS, University of Birmingham (2006)

“Rhodesians, after having set up their own civilization equal to contemporary European societies, invested a great amount of time and money into raising the African natives to a greater standard of living, which allowed their population to double in only a single generation. There was no system of apartheid in Rhodesia; the Anglo-Rhodesians lived cheek by jowl with the Africans, employing them as domestic servants and laborers.” – Why the West Betrayed Rhodesia, Sargon of Akkad, Youtube (September 2024)

“…on this point, the Communists and liberals were in agreement: distinctions between peoples were morally forbidden to be recognized, regardless of the reality on the ground. Things were not the same, and yet the singular standard was advanced because of the ideological commitments of the West and the East.” – ibid

Perhaps the Rhodesians we helped replace had a point about diversity and integration of the natives. Christchurch tried to integrate 1 of Mugabe’s people in 2008 and it has taken 16 years to bring him to justice for the crimes done since. What chance did Rhodesia have?

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Image ref. clip from Our People, Our Century (2000)

Image ref. clip from Sargon’s video

Ref. also Are we the Baddies?, AHNZ

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