by Ravi Somaiya
In early July, the Congo formally joined the United Nations. And at around the same time, black Congolese soldiers, who had been promised nearly immediate changes in their quality of life after the election, finally ran out of patience.
Camp Thysville, about a hundred miles outside Leopoldville, housed the ANC’s Fourth Brigade with the Second and Third Infantry Battalions. There, about two thousand men, unsure, and unmoored, mulled the idea that they might be free, and that those they had previously feared might now fear them. Their hatred extended beyond their officers, to anyone European.
Hammarskjöld received cables, on paper so thin it was translucent, containing alarming fragments of what happened next. A Belgian parliamentary report, compiled later, described the events that followed in greater detail, with names redacted. It is a list of dozens of incidents, each laying out unimaginable horrors.
One woman had been at home, on July 5, 1960, the report said, with her mother and four children. At around 4 p.m. a group of four soldiers broke in, pushed her into a bedroom and raped her in turn, then left. Three hours later, as she processed what had just happened, a group of thirteen soldiers and policemen entered the house. Twelve of those also raped her.
On July 6, a Belgian man was snatched up and taken to an army jail. He was forced to flatten coils of barbed wire with his feet. Another man, Swiss, not Belgian, was arrested two days later, the report said. He was hit in the back of the head with rifle butts while a Congolese policeman said, “That’s independence.” The documented examples alone continued for thirteen pages.
Belgians began to flee by any means open to them. Groups of cars, with smashed windows and suitcases strapped haphazardly to their roofs, sped across the borders. Parents handed their children loaded guns. Men dressed as women to sneak aboard transportation home. They destroyed the blueprints and operating instructions for the country’s major pieces of infrastructure as they left, out of spite.
The Europeans who chose to remain, about thirty thousand of them, fled south to the province of Katanga. It bordered the white-controlled Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, and its capital Elisabethville was the center of the white-controlled mining industry. It would be their stronghold.
On July 11, 1960, Katanga’s council of ministers, led by a local businessman named Moïse Tshombe and backed by the federation, Belgium, and the Katangese mining industry, declared that the province had seceded and would form its own government.
It took with it most of the Congo’s mineral wealth and somewhere between half and two-thirds of its revenues as a nation. Quite simply, the Congo could not survive or even function without Katanga.
At about 2 p.m. the next day, Hammarskjöld received a formal request from the Congolese government for military assistance. Lumumba was determined to overturn the secession by any means necessary. He simply had to reclaim Katanga and make the Congo one nation. And at first, while Katanga had only a small, ragtag army of mercenaries to defend it, the odds were in the new prime minister’s favor.
Hammarskjöld began to work on the problem as he always worked, deep into the nights, all alone, by the light of a desk lamp. He sifted the mass of data he had gathered about the country. Its history, the long-term probabilities, the practical possibilities, and the support required. He wrote notes: what the UN could do, what it should do, its objectives and operating principles. If he knew his aim, the speed and confidence to navigate the inferno would follow.
On July 14, 1960, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 143 calling on foreign troops to depart the Congo, and giving Hammarskjöld the power to provide military assistance to the crumbling Congolese government as it sought to reunite the country.
Transport planes began landing in Leopoldville, disgorging thousands of United Nations peacekeepers drawn from Morocco, Sweden, and India, among other smaller nations.
But Katanga had virtually unlimited resources and connections. It was filled with Europeans who had fled what they felt was a vicious and unjustified attack. It did not plan to let the black revolution proceed unchecked. A British journalist, Sandy Gall, captured a conversation between two white residents at this moment.
“They’re not fit to run a shamba [farm] let alone a country, man.”
“Yes, but that’s a matter of training. In a few years’ time…”
“But Jesus, man, you don’t know the African. You just don’t understand his mentality. These fellows were swinging from the trees when I first came here and now you want to dress them up in dinner jackets and make them run the country?”
Footnotes
1 The next day, twenty-two more signed on to the declaration.
2 Vervet monkeys, also known as green monkeys, share 90 percent of their genetic makeup with human beings. They feel joy, sadness, and anger. They can adapt to nearly any environment. And they are among the only nonhuman primates that suffer from stress and high blood pressure in the same ways we do.
Chapter 2
“Swindled, cheated and abused”
Jean-François Thiriart was an optometrist. A successful one. He lived in a solid, respectable Belgian home, in a solid, respectable Belgian suburb, with a solid, respectable Belgian family. He owned a chain of optical stores across Europe and, at thirty-eight, he had risen to chair the European Federation of Optometrists.
The smell at his home was the first clue that something else lay beneath the surface. Sour urine, mixed with the ferrous tang of cat food, hit visitors as soon as they walked in, to be explained moments later when one of twenty or so cats he kept strolled languidly past.
Thiriart had always felt he should not have been born in Belgium. He had bigger ideas, befitting a bigger nation—even a continent, or a planet. He grew fond of reciting a Latin maxim he had picked up from Heinrich Jordis von Lohausen, an Austrian general who had become one of the grand philosophers of white nationalism in the years after World War II: “Destiny carries the willing man,” it went. “The man who is unwilling it drags.”
He was trim and precise, with a pair of rectangular, silver-rimmed spectacles and a shock of dark hair. As a teenager, he had first enlisted in a left-wing student organization, the Young Socialist Guards. But then his mother had divorced his father and married a German Jew, who insisted on teaching his stepson Yiddish.
He joined the extreme-right-wing National Legion at seventeen, in 1939, and another pro-Nazi group known as the Association of the Friends of the German Reich at around the same time. He thrilled to skydive with the commandos of Austrian SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny.
Thiriart had been jailed for three years after the war, and had kept a low profile since. He now disdained the label fascist, which he felt was outdated, petty, and offensive. His vision was far grander. His theories were rigorous and should not be subjected to such simplifications. He peppered his conversation with allusions to philosophers, warriors, and poets. (Most of whom, on closer inspection, turned out to be fascist.)
Left and right were obsolete concepts, Thiriart felt. He cited Hitler, who (he had been reliably informed by people who would know) had once said that Communists made great Nazis, whereas moderates never did.
To Thiriart only race, history, and power mattered. A pan-European white nationalism. He dreamed of a sweeping white-power bloc, from Brest, in northern France, to Vladivostok, on Russia’s Pacific coast, closer to Tokyo than Moscow.
In 1960, he became fixated on the Congo. The withdrawal of Belgium had angered him. The idea that Washington or Moscow might step in angered him more. He felt that to raise his own army, and to take back the Congo for Europe, would provide both an example and a base of operations for the future.
He began to rouse supporters with stump speeches, in bars and parks and grubby meeting halls, that were purest fire and fury. “We are calling the men who are ready to die for Europe… The Europe of the beautiful conceptions, the Europe of salons, will emerge from the Europe of guns, from the Europe of will power.”
In Belgique-Afri
que, a pamphlet published by Belgian colonialists, he was more specific.
Recruitment of soldiers, he said, should focus on “Europeans, Belgians, Hungarians, Italians, who are sick of seeing Europe scorned and humiliated from the outside, swindled, cheated and abused from the inside.”1
He had begun recruiting already, in the backstreet bars of Brussels. He and his colleagues sought the defeated, the guilty, the sick, and the sad. Those who could be brought easily to tears of outrage, who longed to attach all of life’s horror and mystery to successive simple causes. They were slow to move, to decide, to commit. Their minds were not nimble or open. But once you had them, Thiriart felt, you had them. Especially for 25,000 Belgian francs a month, plus expenses. A wage that most of them could only dream of.
They came in all stripes. Fascists, who had fought for Germany. Ultra-hard-line Catholics who saw Jews as the perpetual enemies of Christ. Arch-royalists, who craved the return of Leopold and released pamphlets campaigning against democracy. Corporatists, who believed that the only way for a nation to run was in the interests of the powerful. And white supremacist colonial soldiers, veterans of wars in Kenya and South Africa.
More than anything, Thiriart spoke to those who yearned to be heard. To be respected. To have their pain accepted and approved and indulged, however repulsive its manifestations. The thing they least wanted to hear was that they were merely afraid.
They sought not comfort, or relief, but retribution.
In 1960, Katanga’s capital city, Elisabethville, was a colonial idyll dotted with vivid purple jacaranda trees and trickling fountains. It was home to hundreds of thousands of people, a blend of Europeans and white Africans, who lived in homes with manicured lawns surrounded by low walls, and black Africans segregated into their own neighborhoods, many in houses they had built themselves.
Its center was a sunbaked sprawl of low, white and tan buildings around broad intersections and grand boulevards. They hosted a slow parade of Europeans in Volkswagens and finned Chevrolets, surrounded by black Africans on two wheels. On the outskirts the roads turned to a dark, rich dirt, and the bicycles began to outnumber the cars.
The newly anointed presidential palace of the newly founded nation of Katanga was a beautiful white house set back from such a road. That summer a car pulled up to its wrought-iron gates. A palace guard sitting in a wooden hut, wearing white pantaloons with a red sash, a green jacket with gold braiding, and a pointed gold helmet, stood up to meet it. He informed Moïse Tshombe, the president, that his visitor had arrived.
Tshombe was forty. He was a large man with a round, animated face that looked built for comedy but caught perpetually in tragedy. He was the son of a rich man—a local king, in fact. He liked fast cars, and women who liked men who liked fast cars. He had started business after business but had never managed, until leading a rogue nation, to make anything stick. It was a nice feeling. He had postcards made of himself posing, exuding a barrel-chested pride, in his ceremonial sash. He reveled, too, in the newly minted coins and stamps that legitimized his rule.
Actually running a government had, on the other hand, been one hideous calamity after another. Most recently, a giant cloud of bees had shut down the ministry of the interior, drifting from room to room with a thrumming malevolence as his ministers hid in their offices until the bees had decided to depart.
Tshombe had been selected by Belgian officials. The political campaigns he had run, and the decisions he had made as president, including secession, were strategized by those officials and the executives of Union Minière—the Belgian mining company that had arrived in the Congo with Leopold’s blessing in 1906, and had effectively ruled over Katanga since.
It still extracted hundreds of thousands of tons of minerals, primarily copper, and returned the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars to Belgium, and its shareholders in Britain and elsewhere, each year. The New York Times described it as “the colossus of the Congo economy.”
Its dozen or so mines and headquarters, and the roads and railroads that connected them, were like Katanga’s arteries. Many of them snaked across the southern border into the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, to connect up with other white-African-controlled mines and refineries. And its communications networks were the only reliable methods of getting information to and from the province.
Union Minière felt it had found in the Congo, according to its promotional materials, malnourished and diseased savages in huts and transformed them into clean pseudo-Europeans, grateful and docile in prim white shorts and shirts. Its films showed them gamboling innocently in Union Minière compounds, little towns attached to the company’s facilities. It provided housing, education, and medical care, and even sold cost-price building materials and offered cheap loans. More than twenty-two thousand black Africans worked directly for the company, and it estimated that it supported about a hundred thousand in total.
The company’s executives flitted through Katanga like low-key royals. They shopped for a nice bottle of burgundy or a Christian Dior dress in town. They played tennis at Circle Albert, an exclusive sporting club, or enjoyed coq au vin or filet mignon with an appropriate wine, of course, at the Hotel Leopold II.
When one of those executives had asked Tshombe to meet his brother-in-law, visiting from Belgium, he could not refuse. So he instructed the palace guard to show the man, an envoy from Thiriart named Pierre Joly, a sometime-journalist with a slicked ponytail, inside.
Over a bottle, perhaps, of red wine and with the scent of yellow rock roses from the garden wafting through the warm air, Joly made a proposal. It was the culmination of the recruiting and funding work he and Thiriart and other far-right campaigners had done in Brussels.
They wanted to supply a mercenary army to Katanga, led by extremist European soldiers. It would be at Tshombe’s disposal—subject to consultation with Union Minière and Tshombe’s network of Belgian advisers, of course.
Rumors had swirled in Katanga that the central government in Leopoldville would soon send soldiers to retake the province. Tshombe was scared. He wanted to maintain his power, and to placate his patrons. He approved the plan.
By September 1960, the first fifty mercenaries had stepped off Sabena airlines flights from Brussels to Elisabethville. The head of intelligence for the Katangese police, Armand Verdickt, ran background checks on them. Deserters. Thieves. Rapists. Addicts. One wrestled professionally as The Black Angel. These are not soldiers, Verdickt said, scanning the list. “Ils sont les affreux.”
Each successive group, arriving staggered over days and weeks, was ushered through customs without stopping. They boarded old flat-bed trucks, covered with sun-bleached canvas stretched over a steel frame. As they drove, rural Katanga unfolded through the canvas flaps and the cloud of billowing red dust they left in their wake.
Dirt roads, edged with a verge of short grass, gave way to a tangle of roots, branches, and vines and then a verdant green. It was punctuated occasionally with baobab trees, their trunks as squat and square as a house, their branches surreal and tiny on top. They passed husks of buildings, their exposed beams pointing skyward at strange angles, bemused and emaciated cows, bony dogs and lean chickens.
On such a journey one soldier had, according to one of the contradictory memoirs that the mercenaries would eventually write, seen a man leaning thoughtfully on a spear, considering their passing. Without knowing or caring who he was, he had pulled his pistol and snapped a shot through the open rear of the truck. He missed, and the man leapt back into the bush. The echoing report had woken the other soldiers from their daze. But none of them considered the attempt impolite.
It was a signal of the atrocities to come. And as they began to defend Katanga from enemies, real and imagined, by any means they felt necessary, the nickname Verdickt had coined spread through Katanga, and through the Congo. They would forever be les affreux. The deplorable ones.
Footnotes
1 Later, the Argentinian dictator General Juan Pe
rón became an adherent of Thiriart’s ideas.
Chapter 3
“The galaxy of good and evil talents”
On September 20, 1960, on a warm late-summer day in Manhattan, the fifteenth annual General Assembly of the United Nations began. Thousands of delegates were scattered around the complex of United Nations buildings that sits on the East Side of Manhattan, in New York but distinctly not of it, designed after a series of disagreements between the architects Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer among others.
Kips Bay was once dominated by slaughterhouses and tenements. Now, tucked behind well-kept hedges and lawns, it hosts a rectangular glass-and-stone skyscraper so substantial that sections of cloud and sunshine play across its surface. It is home to the UN’s staff, including the secretary-general. Leading away from it is a low, sweeping curved building, which hosts the General Assembly. Or rather, attempts to contain it.
Its cavernous halls—somewhere between a church and an airport—had to accommodate the egos and entourages of ten heads of state, eleven prime ministers, twenty-eight foreign ministers, and a nearly uncountable quantity of ambassadors, ministers, economic, military, and legal advisers, and first, second, and third secretaries.
The New York Times wrote:
Never, except at peace conferences ending great wars, has there been anything like the galaxy of good and evil talents, assembled under the glittering light of publicity, that has been shooting out sparks on the banks of the East River.
These personalities are endowed with temperaments. They lose their tempers, they embrace each other under the incongruous glare of the photographers’ flashes, they pointedly ignore each other as they pass in narrow aisles, they whisper together when the speaking is going on, they cluster in the strictly guarded delegates’ lounges.