The ‘Khmer Rouge’ of Africa?

Abstract

‘It was war’ said Ken Flower, the Head of the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation, ‘and in war all things are allowed’.¹ But even in the madness of war the world holds certain standards and norms of behaviour. Without these, war can no longer even hold the status of an event where human sanity is temporarily suspended while the ugly means to a higher end briefly takes precedence. When the minimum standards of behaviour are ignored, the end becomes obscured while the means, the destruction, becomes paramount, and seemingly an end in itself.

A war of liberation seeks to free the people and the land; a war of destabilisation, on the other hand, seeks to destroy the people and turn the land to wilderness.

Derek Knight