Eschel Rhoodie
Eshel Mostert Rhoodie ( born July 11, 1933, Caledon, Cape Province, † July 17, 1993 in Atlanta, Georgia) was a South African journalist, author and politician, who served from 1972 to 1977 as Secretary of State in the South African Ministry of Information and order during this time a the major players in the government of their country in the field of political propaganda. At the end of the 1970s, he played a central role in a designated as Mulder Gate Affair political scandal involving the uncovering covert propaganda activities at home and abroad. He was consequently initially convicted of fraud and later acquitted on appeal in 1982 and emigrated to the United States.
Life
Eshel Rhoodie was born in 1933 in Caledon, the son of a prison guard and his doctorate at the University of Pretoria with a comparative work on the prison system in the countries of the Commonwealth of Nations. Professionally, he was initially a short time for an Afrikaans daily newspaper, before he became a member of the South African Ministry of Information. After 15 years abroad working for the Ministry, including Australia, the United States and the Netherlands, he took over in 1972 the Office of the Secretary of State. In the 1970s, he traveled several times to Israel for talks that led to cooperation between the two countries in the defense sector and in particular to support Israel's construction of the South African nuclear program. As Secretary of State he was also involved significantly in projects of Information Minister Cornelius Peter Mulder to influence through various propaganda measures public opinion on apartheid at home and abroad.
These activities, which were approved by the then Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster and supported by funds from the budget of the Defense Ministry, included not only the corruption of international news and press agencies, among others, the attempt to buy the daily newspaper Washington Star in the U.S., as well as support establishment or pro-government English-language newspapers in South Africa. The discovery of these undisclosed measures the Ministry of Information by the daily newspaper Rand Daily Mail led in 1977 to a signified as Mulder Gate Affair political scandal in its history to 1979, among other things Cornelius Peter Mulder lost his political offices and was expelled from the National Party. Even Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster came back in 1979 by the Office of the President, which he had taken over a year earlier. In the wake of these events, the government summoned the Steyn Commission.
Eshel Rhoodie, which in connection with the activities of the Ministry of Information in addition to corruption and personal enrichment was accused fled to Ecuador. After he had applied unsuccessfully in 1979 for political asylum in the UK, he went to France. There he was arrested and about three months later extradited to South Africa, where he was sentenced in October 1979 to six years in prison for fraud. After the conviction on appeal the following year on the grounds that he had only acted upon instructions had been lifted, he emigrated in 1982 to the United States. A year later, he published a book about his view on the scandal, in which he portrayed various senior government politician in the country as complicit in the activities of the Ministry of Information and yourself as innocent. He was also active in the following years as a consultant for South Africans who emigrated to the United States.
Eshel Rhoodie was married and the father of a daughter and a son. He died in 1993 in Atlanta to a heart attack he had suffered during a tennis game.
Works (selection)
- South -West: The Last Frontier in Africa. New York and Johannesburg 1967
- The Third Africa. Cape Town 1968
- The Paper Curtain. Johannesburg 1969
- Discrimination in the Constitutions of the World: A Study of the Rights Group problem. Columbus, GA 1984
- PW Botha: The Last Betrayal. Melville 1989