Ian Smith, 88; former leader of Rhodesia

Ian Smith, 88, who led a white-minority government and fought a civil war to suppress black nationalism in the former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, died yesterday.

Mr. Smith died of a stroke at a nursing home near Cape Town, South Africa, according to Sam Whaley, who was a senator in Mr. Smith's Rhodesian Front government and now lives in Harare, Zimbabwe.

"It's the passing of an era," Whaley said.

Mr. Smith became prime minister of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1964 as the leader of the white-supremacist Rhodesian Front. "There will be no African rule in my lifetime," he told Time magazine in 1964.

At the time of the interview, whites were 5 percent of the population of Southern Rhodesia, a nation formed from a group of tribal lands seized in the 19th century by British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes. In 1965, Mr. Smith renamed it Rhodesia and declared independence from Britain.

The independence declaration, against which Britain's government failed to act, drew world condemnation and U.N. economic sanctions that led to the collapse of Rhodesia and the birth of Zimbabwe in 1980.

Mr. Smith was born in Shurugwi on April 8, 1919. At the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force in England. He required plastic surgery to repair facial disfigurement when a plane he was piloting crashed in 1943.

In 1948, he wed Janet Watt. They had a son, Alec.

Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence, soon after neighboring Zambia and Malawi were granted sovereignty by Britain in 1964, led to the country's international isolation and economic decline.

Civil war broke out in 1972, pitting Mr. Smith's army against the black liberation movements of Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union, or ZAPU, and the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, the military wing of ZANU, the current ruling party led by President Robert Mugabe.

Beleaguered by war and sanctions, Mr. Smith reluctantly accepted U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's proposals for a settlement.

Rhodesia held its first multiracial elections in 1979.

The poll, in which ZANU and ZAPU refused to participate, failed to end the war, and fresh elections were held in 1980 after a deal was reached in talks hosted by the British government. Mugabe has ruled Zimbabwe since then.