by Guy Arnold
Britain, France and apartheid South Africa gave active support to the secession, as their ruling classes shared the Belgians’ fear of Lumumba’s commitment to genuine independence and radical social change. The cynicism of the Western powers became evident once the major threat to their interests in the Congo was removed. After the assassination of Lumumba and the elimination of the Lumumbists from the political scene in Kinshasa, Belgium and the Western alliance determined that they could do profitable business in the Congo with the anti-Communist and pro-Western moderates they had helped put in power. Given the worldwide disapproval of the Katanga secession, particularly in Africa and the Third World generally, there was no compelling reason to support it. They pulled the rug from under Tshombe’s feet, and the secession was ended by UN military action in January 1963.7
U Thant succeeded Dag Hammarskjold as UN Secretary-General and he did what Lumumba had demanded: bring an end to Katanga’s secession. However, ‘This became possible after President John F. Kennedy gave the UN a green light in December 1962 to end Tshombe’s rebellion by force. In this regard, it should be noted that the so-called “U Thant plan” for Katanga’s reintegration in the Congo was entirely drafted by Congo experts at Foggy Bottom in Washington and sent to the top floor of the Secretariat through the US mission to the UN.’8 On 15 January 1963 Katanga’s secession was formally ended and Tshombe went into exile in Spain.
Under pressure from the United States and the pro-US moderates of the Binza group (named after a suburb of Leopoldville where they met) – every effort was made over the years 1961–63 to eliminate the Lumumbists from the Congo political scene. The Binza group consisted of five men: Mobutu, Victor Nendaka, Justin Bomboko, Albert Ndele and Damien Kondoko who worked closely with US, Belgian and UN officials and between them controlled President Kasavubu. After his return to Leopoldville under UN auspices in January 1962, Gizenga, the deputy prime minister, was sent to the island prison of Bula-Bemba. By October 1963 most of the ministers from the Lumumbist camp had been sacked; in any case, on 29 September 1963 Kasavubu dismissed parliament so that he, Adoula and the Binza group were able to operate without any legislative or parliamentary checks. The Lumumbists then united under an umbrella organization – the Conseil National de Libération (CNL) – which established its headquarters across the Congo River in Brazzaville where, the previous August, a popular revolution had ousted the reactionary government of the Priest-President Youlou who was replaced by the more radical Alphonse Massamba-Debat. What the West wanted in the Congo, and what its collaborators were prepared to accept, was the continued exploitation of the country’s resources. As a Congolese intellectual would describe the process many years later: ‘The neo-colonial situation involves the uninterrupted exploitation of the country’s resources by the metropolitan bourgeoisie, but this time in collaboration with national ruling classes. The primary mission of the latter is to maintain the order, stability and labour discipline required for meeting the country’s obligations to the international market.’9
In a letter to the UN Secretary-General of December 1963, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana called for an all-African force to take over from the United Nations Force in the Congo when the UN mandate expired. He argued that unless this was done the withdrawal of UN forces would be followed by a military coup engineered by either General Mobutu or Moïse Tshombe, ‘the puppet of the Union Minière’. Nkrumah saw the Congo’s political importance as very great because of its position between independent Africa to the north ‘and the territories of colonialism and white supremacy in the south’. He disputed that the Congo had to be in hands friendly to the West. He said that ‘any form of foreign control over the Congo Republic constitutes an immediate and substantial threat to the independence of every African leader’. Nkrumah was correct in his assessment of what was happening – from an African point of view – but his arguments were not going to carry weight in a United Nations dominated by the Western powers.
NATIONALIST REVOLTS AGAINST THE CENTRE
The overall situation in the Congo continued to deteriorate through 1963 into 1964; there was no effective government and a general growth of lawlessness. Two groups launched more or less simultaneous armed struggles against the central government. The first of these were the Mulelists; the second the Conseil National de Libération (CNL), which launched its armed struggle in those areas where the Mouvement National Congolaise (MNC) and other parties of supporters of the Lumumbists were strong. Pierre Mulele, who had briefly been minister of education under Lumumba, was the first prominent Lumumbist to return to the Congo, in 1963, and the first to launch a revolutionary struggle against a neo-colonialist state in Africa. He had spent 15 months in Cairo as the representative of the Gizenga government and then a further 15 months in China where he received training in revolutionary guerrilla warfare. After returning to Kwilu he spent six months preparing the groundwork for a revolutionary struggle and training the first group of his partisans. He taught his guerrillas to respect the people with whom they came in contact and not to mistreat them or deprive them of their property. He saw the major task as being the radical transformation of society from the bottom up, based upon the solidarity of village life. He launched a full-scale guerrilla war in January 1964 and at first his forces succeeded in controlling a major portion of Kwilu; these early successes turned Mulele into a national legend. Most of his followers, who came to be called the Mulelists, were aged 13 to 18. However, he never succeeded in expanding his operations beyond the areas occupied by the two ethnic groups that formed the basis of his insurrection. These were the Mbundu (Mulele’s ethnic group) and the Pende (Gizenga’s group). In theory the Congolese Army, then numbering 30,000, should have had little difficulty in dealing with the Mulelists who were poorly armed and numbered 4,000 at most. In practice, threats to central government elsewhere in the huge country, as well as the increasing unreliability of most of the army, allowed the Mulelist revolt, which was a genuine nationalist one, to develop into a major threat to government. Mulele held his ground for five years against central government forces sent against him and was so popular on his home ground that despite a government offer of a US$10,000 reward for his capture, he was never betrayed. However, in 1968 he went to Brazzaville for medical treatment and from there Mobutu managed to lure him back to Leopoldville with promises of an amnesty and national reconciliation, where he was murdered on 3 October 1968.
The CNL, on the other hand, was rent by ideological and personality differences from the beginning. Even so, it was a genuine second liberation movement, based upon mass support, and its Armée Populaire de Libération (APL) had considerable success during 1964. In two and a half months under General Nicolas Olenga the APL siezed control of North Katanga, Maniema, Sankuru, the entire Eastern province and parts of Equateur Province. Kisangani fell to the CNL on 4 August and by November it controlled half the national territory. On 5 September its leader Christopher Gbenye established a people’s republic with himself as president, Gaston Soumialot as defence minister, Nicolas Olenga as army forces commander and Thomas Kanza as foreign minister. However, it was soon obvious that the CNL leadership were less revolutionary intellectuals than concerned to recover the power they had lost earlier to the moderates and they wanted to settle scores with their political enemies. Most of their troops, who became known as the Simbas (Swahili for lions), were youths who went into action under the influence of hemp (cannabis) and behaved towards the people they were supposedly liberating as though they were operating in conquered territory. The collapse of the CNL was brought about by the US-organized counter-insurgency operation of November 1964. Once the CNL revolt had been crushed Mobutu was to lure most of its leaders back from exile and allow them to engage in private business. He did not fear them as he did the charismatic and dedicated Mulele.
Meanwhile, the last UN toops had left the Congo on 30 June 1964, exactly four years after independence, and at once the country erupted into further violence, especially in
Kwilu and the most easterly and northerly regions. In July Kasavubu, under US pressure, invited Tshombe, whose pro-Western stance was only too well attested, to return from exile to become prime minister, and forced Adoula to resign. Tshombe at once raised a force of European mercenaries to fight the rebels in the east of the country. By the end of July, after intense fighting, the rebels held about 500,000 square kilometres (200,000 square miles) of territory. The Congolese Army, on the other hand, had virtually disintegrated, leaving at most 5,000 men that could be used to any effect.
THE RETURN OF TSHOMBE
The repeated defeats of Mobutu’s army by the Simbas, the departure of the UN troops at the end of June and threats from Tshombe’s former mercenaries, then in Angola, to invade Katanga, had rendered Adoula’s government increasingly unstable. In July 1964, therefore, Tshombe was brought back from exile in Spain to replace Adoula as prime minister; the change of leaders was engineered by Belgium and the United States. Tshombe, who in the meantime had been in contact with all sectors of public opinion including the Gbenye-led CNL faction through Thomas Kanza, set up a provisional government of ‘public salvation’. Since early 1964, before it was decided to bring back Tshombe, the CIA had been conducting a paramilitary campaign against the insurrections in Kwilu and the east. By that time the CNL was receiving help from Nasser’s Egypt and Eastern bloc countries while the United States and Belgian military experts and white mercenaries made up the counter-insurgency forces and these combined with the Katanga gendarmes, once Tshombe had brought them back from Angola, so that the mix by mid-year was very much a Cold War affair. The United States committed itself to full support of the Tshombe government. US President L. B. Johnson listed the disturbances in the Congo as one of his major foreign policy problems and said he would ‘attempt to see that the people of the Congo have as good government as is possible’. (What they got in fact was 30 years of Mobutu.)
In September 1964 Organisation of African Unity (OAU) foreign ministers from 34 member countries met in Addis Ababa to consider the Congo question. The Secretary-General, Diallo Telli, said that the ‘Congolese Drama’ should be ‘insulated effectively by the OAU from the Cold War’ although by then it was already too late. The foreign ministers passed a six-point resolution calling for an end to the recruitment of mercenaries and the expulsion of those already in the Congo; an immediate ceasefire; an appeal for the creation of a Congolese government of unity; the creation of an ad hoc committee to help leaders achieve reconciliation, bring about normal relations with neighbours and decide on aid requirements; an OAU mission to visit the capitals of countries interfering in the Congo to ask them to desist; and for OAU members to cease any action that might aggravate the situation. An OAU Reconciliation Commission under President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya was established and Kenyatta appealed to the Congolese for ‘immediate and maximum cooperation’. Tshombe, however, said he would not co-operate and would not meet with the rebels. Then, on 23 September, President Kasavubu informed the OAU that the Congo would no longer conform to the organization’s decisions and he accused it of ‘manifest interference in the purely internal affairs of the Congo.’
Stanleyville was the principal CNL-held city and the rebel headquarters, so the forces of counter-revolution (the Belgians and Americans, aided by a force of 700 mercenaries on the ground) decided to make it their primary objective. Operation Dragon Rouge (Red Dragon) was conceived as a combined land–air offensive; it culminated on 24 November with a US-Belgian parachute drop on Stanleyville that coincided with the arrival in the town of the mercenaries, a successful operation from which the CNL did not recover. This operation was carried out even as African countries, working through the OAU, attempted to broker a peace, but the United States and its Western allies did all they could to undermine these African diplomatic moves. President Johnson, under the humanitarian pretext of rescuing white hostages, authorized an airlift of Belgian paratroopers while the Congo Reconciliation Commission was meeting in Nairobi under the chairmanship of Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta, indeed, felt the Americans had deliberately deceived him in the person of their ambassador, William Attwood, who tries unsuccessfully in his subsequent book The Reds and the Blacks to justify the deception that he clearly employed. Thus, in a coordinated action, a column of mercenaries and elite Congolese troops from the military base at Kamina, under Colonel Frederic Vandewalle, advanced on Stanleyville to arrive at the town on 24 November as US planes flew in Belgian paratroopers from the British Ascension island. About 60 of the white hostages and 1,000 Congolese were massacred by the Simbas during the ensuing battle. The intervention was intended to safeguard Western interests in the Congo and prevent the establishment of an independent government that might not cooperate with the West. It succeeded in this objective. However, the CIA campaign against the Mulele maquis in Kwilu and the Kabila rebels in the east was to last for another four years. The CIA employed anti-Castro Cuban and European mercenaries who were used to fly T-6 training planes, T-28 fighter planes armed with rockets and machine guns, C-147 military transports, H-21 heavy duty helicopters and B-26 bombers. The US Air Force provided air support for government troops and the mercenaries and used napalm on ground targets.
Meeting in New York in December 1964, in the aftermath of the US-Belgian intervention of November 24, the OAU Council of Ministers asked the UN Security Council to condemn the Anglo-Belgian-American intervention in Stanleyville. They appealed for an end to hostilities in the Congo and an end to foreign intervention. Speaking on 15 December in the Security Council debate, Kenya’s Joe Murumbi said:
How can one speak of a blood bath which one has designed and caused, in one breath, and of humanitarianism in the other? Where is this humanitarianism when the white mercenaries are allowed full licence to murder innocent African men, women and children? Where was this humanitarianism when Patrice Lumumba, later brutally done to death, was held hostage? … What happened to this self-same humanitarianism when innocent Africans were butchered in Sharpeville in South Africa? … It is a peculiar brand of humanitarianism coming from countries whose record and international behaviour do not entitle them to boast about their achievements.
Atrocities were only atrocities, it seemed, when they were perpetrated against whites, not when they were carried out by whites against blacks. Earlier that month, on 6 December, Connor Cruise O’Brien who had served with the UN forces in the Congo in the early days of the crisis, wrote an article in the Observer in which he asked:
Are white people in Africa to be regarded as covered by a sort of Caucasian providence insurance policy, with a guarantee that if the natives get rough, the metropolitan forces will once again come to the rescue? And if so, will this doctrine, in the long run, increase or decrease the security of white people in Africa and elsewhere? Similar policies in China contributed eventually to the total exclusion of all white influence, missionary or other, from that country.10
The rebellion in the east continued into 1965, although early in the year the government had gained control of all the main towns. Katanga had its gendarmes back from the bush and Kasai was brought under full central control. By this time the going rate for mercenaries had risen to £200 a month. By March 1965 the Congo National Army, with its mercenary leaders, was winning the war. A great deal of slaughter took place as the army terrorized the population while relying upon the mercenaries to lead military actions. By July it had become clear that the rebellion was coming to an end. The mercenaries were responsible for a growing list of brutalities and carried out horrific tortures on prisoners before killing them. By November the war was finally over.
THE DAMAGE TO THE CONGO AND AFRICA
Any assessment of the damage to the Congo, both immediate and long term, can only be approximate. An estimated 20,000 Congolese had been killed by December 1964. Many more died in reprisals though no figures are available. The mercenaries carried out indiscriminate killings in villages through which they passed. Although the Western press emphasized the kill
ing of Europeans it appeared likely in the end that no more than 300 had been killed altogether since 1960, though many more had been wounded. Perhaps 30,000 Congolese, a figure that has often been quoted, were killed altogether though the actual number of deaths may have been far higher. The damage to mining activity (then the principal source of national income) was enormous as was the damage to property. The Congo’s huge mineral wealth and Western, especially Belgian and British, investments were the principal reasons for intervention together with Cold War strategic considerations. The generally savage conduct of the white mercenaries from Europe and Southern Africa became notorious and did the white cause in Africa great harm. The five years of chaos, revolt, disruption and foreign interference in the Congo from 1960 to 1965 made the country’s name synonymous with the idea of breakdown in independent Africa with the result that it coloured Western perceptions of Africa for a generation. No one emerged from the crisis with credit. The Congolese divided into warring factions; the Belgians, whose efforts to prepare the country for independence had been minimalist, had been only too ready to return and manipulate the situation so as to safeguard their investments; the crisis brought the two superpowers into black Africa where Cold War policy considerations rather than concern to assist the Congolese overcome their problems was the guiding principle. In Katanga British and Belgian capitalist interests – Union Minière du Haut Katanga and Tanganyika Concessions – used their influence in support of Tshombe’s secession. In a felicitous phrase Tshombe was described as the ‘darling of imperialism of all kinds’ until he was discarded by the imperialists he had served. The United Nations, dominated by Western interests and most notably the United States, became tainted and its refusal to rescue Lumumba, who was considered by the West to be a dangerous pro-Moscow Marxist and too independent, was long seen by the Afro-Asian bloc as a black mark against the UN and its Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold.