Word: rhodesia
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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...
...head the investigation 16 months ago by Foreign Secretary David Owen) discloses that the oil sanctions began earnestly enough in the first weeks of furor just after Salisbury, resisting Britain's plans for black majority rule, declared its independence on Nov. 11, 1965. Within days, Parliament enacted the Southern Rhodesia Act, reaffirming Crown rule and authorizing the government to impose a variety of sanctions on the rebel colony. On Dec. 17, 1965, an executive order outlawed the shipment of petroleum and petroleum products to Rhodesia...
With a flamboyant wave of the Union Jack, the Royal Navy was ordered to blockade the Portuguese Mozambican port of Beira, where a new oil pipeline led into Rhodesia. The blockade lasted ten years, but was only window dressing. Shipments to Rhodesia continued to arrive at the old petroleum port of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), several hundred miles to the south. From there the oil was shepherded by Shell Mozambique, a U.K.-incorporated firm, into the hands of South African brokers, who sent it north by rail through Mozambique to Rhodesia...
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...
News gradually reached Britain that oil was still flowing into Rhodesia, and hopes for the success of sanctions gave way to dismay. As Lord Thomson (then Commonwealth Secretary and chairman of an informal Cabinet committee charged with handling the Rhodesia problem) told the Bingham inquiry, "We came increasingly to the conclusion that we couldn't bring the Rhodesian government to an end by 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...