British SAS in Zimbabwe: Plans to evacuate whites

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Written By Jan Lamprecht

Finally the British have stood up to take some sort of responsibility for their former colony. The British military may intervene to help whites escape from the hell of Zimbabwe. I must say, it has been heartening for me to see both the Bush administration, and now the British taking a tougher stand on Zimbabwe. I doubt if either of them will be truly tough, but hey, it is an improvement on their prior stance is it not? From my point of view, any positive development, no matter how little is cause for great joy and hope.

Here are the details from an article from The Daily Telegraph in Britain, on the 29th of August::

The SAS has reconnoitred the border between South Africa and Zimbabwe in preparation for a possible evacuation of British citizens, defence officials said yesterday.

The purpose of their mission was to identify a number of coordination points inside Zimbabwe where the Britons, mainly white farmers, could be collected before a mass convoy into South Africa.

The Ministry of Defence’s Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood, Middlesex, has also drawn up plans for an RAF evacuation of other British citizens by plane from Harare airport.

The contingency plans to move the estimated 20,000 British citizens inside Zimbabwe include the use of RAF transport aircraft and members of the Parachute Regiment, who will be on exercise in South Africa from the end of next month until December.

There are another 20,000 whites in the country, almost all of them Zimbabwean nationals.

Up to 300 men from 1 Bn, the Parachute Regiment, will spend three months carrying out trials jumping from the new C130J Hercules transport aircraft.

They will be accompanied by an RAF C17 Globemaster transport aircraft, a VC10 military airliner and two C130J aircraft. Their exercises will be carried out with the South African National Defence Force (SANDF).

The MoD said the exercise was “absolutely not” connected to the situation in Zimbabwe. “This is a long-planned air concentration exercise, the first of a series of trials that will be taking place twice a year,” a spokesman said.

The Foreign Office last night played down any connection between the dispatch of the troops and the crisis in Zimbabwe.

“We keep contingency plans up to date for most parts of the world, but we are not moving to implement any such plans for Zimbabwe,” said a spokesman.

“A large-scale military operation does not fit in with what we estimate is required. If it were needed, there are contingency plans and they could be implemented in a short time.”

But defence officials said the paratroopers were part of the contingency plans and would be ideally placed if troops were needed for a defensive escort for any evacuation.

“There is a lack of willingness by UK Plc to get involved because any intervention will be bloody and if we are forced to go in, it will not be easy,” said one official. “Zimbabwe is a well-armed country.

“But if the war veterans start to evict farmers and there is mass slaughter of UK nationals we will be forced to intervene.” Military planners at Northwood were putting the final touches to an evacuation operation which could require British troops to go in for a very brief period “possibly just 24 hours”, the officials said.

“The obvious evacuation route is by road, but they could easily block this and we must therefore plan for an air intervention as we did in Sierra Leone two years ago.”

The paratroopers would support the SAS in providing a defensive ring for an operation known as a rapid air landing, in which RAF transports would fly into Harare airport to take out the Britons.

They would be escorted by Tornado ground attack aircraft and in the second phase of the evacuation the Britons would be flown out in a so-called tactical air land operation.

The paratroopers, who have carried out exercises in South Africa before and have strong links to SANDF, will be based in Cape Town and Kimberley.

Although the MoD has made it clear that it does not want to deploy troops in Zimbabwe, the possibility of the need for a mass evacuation has increased with President Mugabe’s latest attempts to drive white farmers off their land.

He ordered 2,900 of the remaining 4,500 white farmers to quit their land without compensation by Aug 8. About 60 per cent have defied the deadline and almost 300 have been arrested and charged for defying the orders.

A Zimbabwean High Court judge yesterday ruled that eviction orders served on 54 white farmers were illegal, but Mr Mugabe has consistently ignored court rulings that went against his orders.

On Tuesday, he refused talks with the white farmers. “There is no room for talks,” he told a rally in south-eastern Zimbabwe. “There is no room for any negotiations because the real owners of this land are asserting their rights and reclaiming their land.”

Mr Mugabe says his land drive is aimed at correcting colonial injustice which left 70 per cent of the best farm land in the hands of white farmers. The farmers say they support land redistribution but not forced evictions.

This comes hot on the heels of an analysis by a black Zimbabwean geopolitical analyst that he is expecting civil unrest in Zimbabwe in October-November of this year. Mugabe for his part announced his “War Cabinet” and is clearly getting ready to throw the army and Police into action against the blacks if they dare stand up to him. Recently a bomb was planted at the offices of one of only two independant radio stations in Zimbabwe. The “Voice of the People” radio station was destroyed in a mysterious blast which occurred at night. I of course suspect that Mugabe is behind this because there was a similar incident many months ago when there was a blast at the only independant newspaper in Zimbabwe, and that was definitely tied back to the Army. So Mugabe is cleary shutting down internal opposition.

Will he massacre the whites? I think not. I think Mugabe is truly frightened of just murdering whites en masse because of the power of the Western world. He has said on many occasions that he wishes some country would take the whites and get them off his hands. I think the deaths and murder which occurred were more part of a terror campaign aimed at scaring the whites off. But some whites are not running, and this is a problem for him. I think he wishes they had fled. It seems to me, at this point, as if the real fear is for civil unrest by the starving blacks, and this could end up becoming a calamity. Hence this suggestion of evacuating the whites by Britain. Clearly the British are holding this as a possible option just in case the situation gets out of hand.

I think from Mugabe’s point of view, he wants the whites out because with them gone, he can then clamp down on the media and internal opposition, and really vent his anger on the blacks. I would guess that once the whites are gone, and the foreign media is gone, etc, that is when the real killing will start. In the remote African bush, where nobody in the rest of the world will hear their screams, they will be butchered and murdered if they DARE to stand up to him.

Personally, I wish someone would get the opposition to understand the need for armed resistance. The MDC refuses to walk this path, and hence it may be laying the groundwork for mass murder. I wish the MDC would realise they are dealing with a butcher. I’ll bet if the MDC asked the USA or Britain for arms they might just get it. Failing that, the blacks will either be terrorised into submission or murdered by starvation. Mugabe’s latest tactic is the use of mass rape. Sometimes HIV+ “War Vets” rape women who might then infect their husbands/lovers. Mass rape is being used as a means of getting the women in line. For the blacks, all that remains ahead is hell on earth. Dare I remind people that we whites had said, from the beginning that these so-called “Liberators” of Africa were here to enslave the blacks under their Marxist system? Does anyone remember that? Well, it is now a reality…

If the British were to intervene, I doubt they would go in with the aim of having an armed confrontation with Mugabe, and I doubt very much he would want that. Of course, it would be beautiful for his propaganda machine to claim “a British invasion”. He would love that and milk it for all it is worth, and maybe even use it to justify what he is about to do to the blacks if they rise against him. I would guess, that he would allow the British to get the whites off his hands and he’d probably let them do it.

How does one get 40,000 whites out? Well, clearly the convoy idea is the best. In this way they could take a few of their possessions with them. Of course, the only viable convoy route anywhere would be to South Africa. Air evacuation would take quite a long time and be very expensive. All in all, the plans announced above, seem very practical. I am a bit curious of the need for the SAS to recce the entire South African/Zimbabwe border since the logical place to cross is the border post. The border consists largely of the Limpopo river and it is unlikely one can get normal vehicles across, unless one constructs a road and bridge to that point. To me the most practical idea is for them to simply drive out of Zimbabwe either via the South African border post, or, by the longer route of going out via Botswana and then into South Africa. These are the only roads which can take normal civilian vehicles.

Maybe Mugabe even wants this? He is absolutely determined to get rid of this whites and this would solve his problem without having to murder them. Then he is free, at his leisure to murder and torture the blacks as much as he pleases because then there will be nobody to watch it.

He has done this before. In the mid-1980’s the Matabele tribe in the south of the country rebelled against him. He sent in the army and murdered at least 2,000 blacks. Some estimates put it as high as 20,000. But the news was so successfully repressed that it only leaked out about 2 years AFTER it had happened. We will not truly know how many people he killed until years after the event. Even now, there may be news which we are not hearing. I assume the true scale of the tragedy will only become evident long after it is over. It is too bad we cannot prevent a massive human tragedy is it not? Well, the best one can do is spread the news.

The convoy idea is quite fascinating, and the moment I heard of it, it reminded me of my youth, and I would like to share some photos with you folks. I’d like to show you some holiday photos from 1978. Back then, if we wanted to go on holiday, which for most whites meant going to the seaside in South Africa, we had to drive several hundred miles in a convoy, protected by the Police, Army and Rhodesian air force. There are two main routes out of Zimbabwe to South Africa. The most likely one which they will use in a future evacuation is the one I am going to show you photos of.

Please forgive the photo quality. It is very poor. I took these as a teenager with a cheap little camera. These photos were taken while on the move as well, so they are blurred. But they are very rare photos showing an unusual aspect of life which I doubt most of you know of.

Let me describe the convoy process. We formed in convoys to avoid terrorist ambushes. Many people were killed along this road by terrorists lying in wait for them. So they formed convoys of several hundred civilian vehicles. We assembled at the small town of Fort Victoria (which has since been renamed). At the appointed time we would set off with some military vehicles accompanying us. The rule if we came under attack was to put your foot on the accelerator and get the hell out of the killing ground. We never came under attack, but that was probably because of all the precautions.

This photo was taken in Fort Victoria, the small town where the convoy assembled. The photo below is of a small Police truck with a machine gun mounted on it. We referred to them as “the Greens”. There were a couple of such vehicles in the convoy.

Here we are driving past a “Green” with the gunner waving back at us.

They also had small single-propeller ground-attack aircraft which would follow the convoy and circle around it to look for any possible terrorist groups who might be waiting to ambush us. Here you can see the small aircraft in the distance above the trees.

As you can see, all the things we had were pretty low-tech, and they were pretty much “Home Made” by the whites of the time. Yet, they worked well, and we faced off against proper weaponry which came from the Soviet Union and China. The strange vehicle you see standing by the side of the road is a Rhodesian invention. It is one of the early anti-landmine vehices of the time. Its underside was V-shaped to redirect landmine blasts. It has a bullet-proof front window. The angled sides are to deflect bullets coming at it from the sides when it runs into an ambush. (For better photos of such vehicles and their history and uses go to the photo gallery on my website.)

Here is some scenery from the south of the country. It is pretty arid compared to the rest of Zimbabwe. Here you can see a big rocky outcrop beyond trees.

Here you can see the cars ahead of us. This convoy we were in had hundreds of vehicles. The “Greens” often raced up and down along the convoy while a helicopter gunship and the little plane patrolled overhead along the length of the convoy.

My little camera doesn’t do this scene justice. Here we have an Alouette gunship flying over the cars. The quality is too poor to show, but these were armed with either 20mm explosive rounds or with a machine gun which would stick out of the one side. These helicopters were also known a K-cars, (K=Kill), and were the scourge of terrorists. The gunners in these helicopters were deadly.

Here you can just see the helicopter above the tree now flying towards the front of the convoy. This particular convoy headed from about the centre of Zimbabwe straight for the border with South Africa which is a drive of about 300 miles non-stop with no villages or towns where you can stop.

Well, there you have a little bit of history which will give you an idea of the possible route along which the British might just evacuate the whites from Zimbabwe. I was very impressed with the British forces which intervened in Sierra Leone last year. Their professionalism and their ability to deal with the locals showed that even a tiny force of British soldiers could easily take care of things. Admittedly, Mugabe’s army is a much tougher affair, than they faced in Sierra Leone, but I doubt he wants his soldiers involved in a messy confrontation with the British. I think he would prefer them to get the whites out of the country so that he can then murder the blacks in peace.

Isn’t it sad that this is what the world has come to?


I leave you with this final thought: The Worst thing a conservative can do, is to keep quiet. That is a recipe for certain defeat. The only hope for conservatism is for us to speak out much more loudly and to counter the many lies put out by our enemies.

Archive of Jan Lamprecht’s articles on Etherzone.

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