Heroic Rhodesian vindicated by history Former Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith has died, aged 88. Smith was subjected to international vilification for his courageous Unilateral Declaration of Independance in 1965, which took the former colony of Southern Rhodesia out of the British Commonwealth as part of a defiant attempt to maintain white rule. Smith’s Rhodesia faced an international boycott, as well as a well-financed war from rival terrorist armies armed and trained by Red China and the Soviet Union. Denounced as a "racist" nation because of segregation, Rhodesia was an economic powerhouse under white rule, and as an agricultural breadbasket fed much of black Africa. Blacks not only had the vote, but the Shona and Ndebele (Matabele) tribal federations were kept in peace with one another. Smith’s attempt to preserve a form of apartheid separation was not to last. Abandoned by his only ally, South Africa, and with his nation run down by decades of war, Smith allowed a transfer of power to black rule in 1979. Changed to Zimbabwe, that unhappy nation has been under one man rule under Robert Mugabe ever since. Mugabe’s Shona tribesmen carried out a horrific genocide against the Ndebele, long their rivals. Whites have been nearly totally ethnically cleansed, and Zimbabwe stands literally on the brink of starvation, depending on foreign handouts to survive. The warnings of Smith and those who supported white Rhodesia have proved to be tragically prophetic. Yet Smith’s place in history will be judged critically. In refusing to establish an all-white nation and depending instead on non-white labor, Smith and his confederates laid the groundwork for disaster. And despite his compromise, his peaceful transfer of power to a communist black regime proved to have consequences just as tragic as they would have been had Rhodesia held out. Nevertheless, Ian Smith was a courageous gentleman, and he will be missed.