Word: british
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...weeks the British press had been warming up, bannering the advance suspicions and denials that attend a grave and imminent scandal. The questions were incessant. Had the government proclaimed a stern law and then winked at its offenders? Who knew about the misdeeds? How much did they know? The affair that Britons were dubbing "Oilgate" threatened to reach into the highest places. At issue was whether ministers of the Crown in the years following Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 were aware that British Petroleum (BP) and London-based Shell International were helping to supply oil to that...
Last week the British government released a 500-page investigative report that seemed to confirm the worst suspicions. Not only has Rhodesia received a steady supply of petroleum products since its secession, but for at least eleven years British subsidiary companies were among the chief suppliers. Worse, Her Majesty's government, at the very time that it was piously trumpeting its sanctions against Rhodesia, had quietly acquiesced in a plan to circumvent them...
Mozambique and, much more important, South Africa were the glaring gaps in Britain's purported wall of sanctions against Rhodesia, and the government was not about to plug them. Reason: British investment in South Africa is huge ?currently about $10 billion?and trade between the two nations amounts to nearly $3 billion a year...
...sanctions unless we were prepared to apply them to South Africa. We were under no circumstances willing to do that. The best we could make of a bad job was to be in a position to say at least that there was no oil from British companies reaching Rhodesia...
...four-month-old "purification" campaign promises to be more fearsome than the earlier massacres. According to an investigative report issued by the British Foreign Office last week, the earlier purges cost 100,000 lives "as the absolute minimum." In 1975-76, the victims were intellectuals, officials of the previous regime and members of the armed forces, once commanded by Marshal Lon Nol, who escaped to Hawaii in 1975. (Last week the deposed leader challenged Kampuchea's right to U.N. credentials.) In 1977 the government concentrated on killing regional Khmer Rouge commanders who had collaborated with the Vietnamese...