Trends have been irrevocably set in motion which may well bring about the dismantling of civilization as it is presently known in southern Africa. All of this is quite bewildering to the whites of Rhodesia, South Africa and South West Africa. From their point of view they see big power sanctions, political pressure, threats and other methods being employed to bring about the forced cessation of "white minority rule." They are hated from all sides — the ascendant Communist East, the strident Third World, and the flabby, flaccid, weak-willed West. The irony in all of this should be obvious to anyone who is even cursorily acquainted with the recent histories of other governments, not only in Africa, but in many other parts of the world. To millions of Americans, the enforced "solution" of majority rule for the southern African nations, brought about by various political and commercial impositions of the Western powers, is quite a satisfactory one. That way, we can have the whole world "tidied up," and walk about with the sure knowledge that there no longer exists, anywhere on the earth, one of the most detestable forms of government to be found anywhere: a "white minority government"! These same millions are smugly unaware of the fact that there are dozens of black minority governments, yellow minority governments, and various and sundry minority governments of every ethnic and ideological stripe allover the world. A case in point: A recent issue of Reader's Digest contained one of the most grisly articles ever published in its history. The' article showed how perhaps as many as one million human beings — or more — have been systematically butchered, starved, shot or clubbed to death just since the summer of 1975 in the nation of Cambodia! The full story, in all its grotesque horror, reminds one vividly of the gruesome tales of such torture camps as Buchenwald, Auschwitz or Dachau during the dark days of Hitler's Third Reich. It is nauseating reading, to say the least, and leaves one with an unspeakable sense of shock and outrage at the insane, brutal rape of gentle rural folk who have been systematically uprooted and "reeducated" by their Communist masters. In that brutally "pacified" land whole populations of villages were shot or bayoneted to death, with the men, women and children all walking docilely to a spot where they were instructed to kneel between two soldiers to wait their turn to be bayoneted front and back, in full view of countless others awaiting their own grisly end. The elite Communist minority rulers of this country are today firmly ensconced in power. Their impoverished nation is recognized as a member of the United Nations, and there is not one whisper of outrage in any official publication. There are no demonstrations outside the White House or at national monuments, no cries of outrage in the press, no trade boycotts, no demonstrations on campuses to mark the passing of more than one million hapless human beings whose only crime was to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time when a Communist government took over. Further to this repulsive spectacle, if not in the same grotesque proportions, has been the systematic rape and virtual destruction of country after country in Africa which bows its head under brutal black minority government. The one most recent case is, of course, the insane brutality of the ego-maniacal ldi Amin of Uganda. Uganda is composed of about 40 different tribes. Amin is of the Kakwa tribe, one of the country's most backward ethnic groups. Deeply fearful of threats to his minority regime from the more educated Lango and Acholi tribes, Amin's 5,000-man "death squad" has been massacring thousands of members of the two rival groups in one of Africa's most systematic genocides. According to some reports, Amin's security forces have been running amok in the northern provinces, killing and looting at will. The 500-house Acholi village of Akoro — the home of former President Milton Obote, who was overthrown by Amin in 1971 — was reported burned to the ground, and every person in it, including women and children, killed. "Amin is destroying in a few days what it took Uganda 80 years to build," said a former government official, an Acholi, who was once one of Amin's confidants. Estimates of the number of people killed in Uganda since 1971 range as high as 300,000! Refugees have been streaming out of Uganda into neighboring Kenya during the latest purge. Many of them are of the educated professional class. Amin is now surrounding himself with uneducated, in some cases totally illiterate, lieutenants who present no threat to his ironfisted rule. Amin has made a shambles of what once was one of east Africa's most progressive countries. Its major university, once the best in east Africa, has lost 85 percent of its staff. The once flourishing tourist industry is dead. Yet in spite of all this, Amin is still firmly in power in Uganda, and precious few of black Africa's other leaders have stopped their shrill denunciations of the white minority governments in the southern part of Africa long enough to condemn Amin's ruthlessly oppressive tactics. The Organization for African Unity (OAU) has condemned itself by its own silence. The exploitation of nation after nation in Africa continues, from Arabic countries in the north such as Libya, under Muammar EI Qaddafi's military rule, where international terrorism is harbored and financed, to Mozambique in the south under Marxist dictatorship. There are MANY "minority governments" holding sway over terrorized individuals who have been denied their human rights! Therefore, one comes away with the suspicion that the term " minority government" is not the criterion for unacceptability; it becomes unacceptable only when it is a "white minority government." When, in Mozambique, Marxist dictator Samora Machel took over from the Portuguese, he almost immediately confiscated private property, threw thousands of persons into concentration camps, and kept the firing squads busy as all forms of real or suspected political opposition were systematically eliminated. This same Marxist dictator howls with outrage against the white minority government in neighboring Rhodesia, and shrieks of the deprivation of human rights of black Rhodesians, all the while fully aware of the crowded concentration camps in his own country, where under the brutality of totalitarianism human rights have all but been obliterated. This same dictator is one who cheerfully supplies Communist — made arms to black guerrillas who prey upon fellow black men, mostly hapless farmers and villagers and their families, in their frequent forays into Rhodesia. To the north lies the tiny nation of Burundi, which holds the record for Africa's most horrendous ethnic massacre. In 1972, the ruling minority Tutsi tribe ruthlessly crushed an uprising of the enslaved majority Hutus, systematically murdering about 200,000 of them! But the world simply turned a blind eye. "It seems so strange," commented a missionary in Burundi recently. "Here you have a minority killing something like 200,000 of the people it holds in serfdom and the world doesn't protest, doesn't really even care. Can you imagine the outcry if the minority governments of Johannesburg or Salisbury had tried anything even vaguely similar? Yet here there's a subtle feeling that if blacks do something to blacks, it's somehow all right, and I'm afraid the feeling hasn't really changed." Today the Tutsi are still the undisputed masters; the Hutus are still as oppressed as ever, living in constant fear, working in the fields for their Tutsi overlords, holding menial jobs, and carrying cards identifying their tribal origins. (Yet it is only the "pass system" used in South Africa that draws international fire.) So from the tiresome and bloody spectacle of the tribal wars of Burundi, to the hideous civil war of Nigeria where hundreds of thousands of Ibos lost their lives in a futile attempt at independence, to the recent rape of the nation of Angola, one can only shake one's head in wonderment at the seeming irony. This is not to say there are not abuses in Africa's remaining white minority governments, or to deny the United States still has a long way to go before it solves all its own human rights problems. But it nevertheless remains true that the average black in both Rhodesia and South Africa is infinitely, yes INFINITELY, better off than his counterpart (though of a different tribe, and not really considered a "counterpart" in his own mind) in any number of other African nations. The fact is, there is an inordinate amount of irony, liberally sprinkled with a tremendous dose of hypocrisy, as one witnesses the concerted effort of Western powers — incongruously acting in concert with Moscow — to obliterate one form of minority government (white), while at the same time turning a deaf ear toward the pitiful cries of the millions who are being brutalized under literally dozens of other forms of minority governments, so long as they are non-white.
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