When the first crisis in the
Congo broke out in 1960 the Katanga region contained 60% of the country's
economic wealth and it was no surprise that Patrice Lumumba regarded this break
away movement as an intolerable way to kickstart his premiership. The
secessionists were led by Moise Tshombe, nicknamed 'the cash register' owing to
his voracious appetite in accepting bribes and kickbacks. On account of the
Belgian goverment's intention to maintain their extortionate concessions on
mineral rights Tshombe was considered the ideal front man for their purposes.
The Katangan secession was announced only a week after Lumumba's accession
speech in which he denounced the deprivations of Leopold's rule in the Congo and
indeed the whole history of the Congolese people's exclusion and effective
apartheid under the Belgian colonial regime.
So, clearly the establishment were now presented with a native premier who would not fit into the mould expected of him; what was needed instead was a pliant member of the indigenous elite who would allow business to continue as usual. The varied attempts now put in place to have him "removed" by both Belgium and the United States have been painstakingly reconstructed in Ludo De Witte's "The aassassination of Patrice Lumumba", a book which prompted a Belgian parliamentary inquiry into the events of these dark days - the painfully self-evasive synopsis of which can be read here;
http://www.africawithin.com/lumumba/conclusions.htm
What marks this episode off as being truly depraved is the subsequent manner in which the UN peacekeeping forces were instructed not to interfere with the secessionists which was clearly against the agreements set down in the original discussions between the Congolese nationalists and the Belgian government prior to independence; to wit, that the territorial integrity of the Congo should be maintained. Further, once it became clear that Lumumba was not going to play ball with the Belgians i.e. cede the sovereignty of the country's resources to the former colonial power, signals began emerging from the UN and Washington that he was 'an irrational actor', and that he was being 'overly paranoid' - a characterisatiion which has incidentally been maintained to this day by influential Western commentators and African 'experts' such as Martin Meredith (see "The State of Africa"). Thus the name blackening enterprise once begun was latched onto by the international press and within the space of a couple of weeks the newly feted premier had descended from independence hero to 'possessed' demigogue. However, this was just the beginning.
Lumumba travelled to Washington to have his case heard but Eisenhower refused to meet him personally. We now know that Eisenhower had personally given his approval for an assassination. CIA station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin, was later given a tube of poisonous toothpaste with which to slip into Lumumba's quarters. By this time, the seccesionists, who were only ever securing mineral mining rights for Belgian companies (which were one of the main suppliers of uranium to the United States at the height of Cold War rearmament) were now being talked of by the international press as representatives of a legitimate government with their own cabinet and trade delegates. Meanwhile, firefights between Belgian mercenaries hired by Tshombe (whose bank account was being stuffed by the Belgian mining company Union Miniere) and UN forces continued unabated though the UN forces still had no mandate to proceed into Katanga and upend the 'provisional government'. So, the UN under French, British and US influence were deliberately hamstrung and rendered ineffective thus aiding the cause of the illegal secessionists. De Witte details several examples of the bias of UN field commanders and Dag Hammerskold towards Tshombe's secessionists such as allowing them receive military supplies and air space denied the conventional Congolese forces of Lumumba'sgovernment.
Under these circumstances Lumumba looked to the Pan-African Union under the leadership then of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Seke Touree of Guinea to provide forces that would reverse this Belgian neo-colonial appropriation. To no avail, the Ghanese contingent was still led by a British army officer who likewise declared he had no remit to 'interfere'. So, left with no other option, Lumumba, who was emphatically not a communist, sought military assistance from the Soviet Union who were only too happy to oblige with a small contingent of troops. Khrushchev had spent 3 hours haranguing the UN general assembly about the international body's organisational structure in Sept, 1960; the month after the crisis had broken out. The whole world was watching and waiting to see how the crisis would unfold and yet what happened? Lumumba was captured by Mobuto's forces (the man who would eventually allow his country's assets to be stripped by multinational mining companies for over thirty years whilst the population persevered with levels of venality and corruption which were appalling even by African standards - you may say in fact that this whole episode set the benchmark for clientalist politics in Africa) handed over to Tshoimbe's nest of thieves in Katanga - of all places - and again in front of the world's media, and then, as he was subsequently assassinated a bogus story was proliferated that he had been murdered by hostile natives as he was making his getaway!
CHINA STAGES LUMUMBA RALLY - British Pathe
China held a demonstration rally (see above) of some 100,000 people protesting the manner of Lumumba's death (from Belgian custody into the arms of his 'assassins') but the stuffy newsreader covering the event on Britain's Pathe news can only comment how "brainwashed" the Chinese masses are for believing the supposed tosh which their government is peddling them ie. they are outraged, yet that outrage has to be manufactured by propaganda - it certainly cannot be genuinely felt solidarity with yet another victim of European colonialism in Africa. And of course, Pathe news is wrong in it's central assumption - the United States and Belgium had colluded in the African leader's assassination.
( ANTI-BELGIUM DEMONSTRATIONS OVER CONGO CRISIS ) - British Pathe
CAIRO RIOTS OVER CONGO - British Pathe
You can see here how the colonial world order - Britain, France, Belgium, the United States simply do not get it - Lumumba is just an upstart who had high fallutin' notions of his place in the scheme of things; he took the UN charter and the UN Declaration at face value and thought that just maybe their principles might apply to the newly independent Congo. What an absurd notion as it turned out; the US and Belgian backed Mobuto had no such illusions and bled his country dry for the next thirty years whilst undermining and promoting the politics of cynical clientalism in all his African neighbours.
When the Rwandan conflict spilled over the border fifteen years ago the Congo was a rotten apple ready to collapse. What might have been had Lumumba been given greater support by the UN to halt the secessionists, if the Belgians were put in their place by the US as they had done four years earlier to Britain and France during the Suez crisis in 1956? Clearly, the Belgians were given the green light to proceed with the secession by some high ranking officials in Washington who then proceeded to dilute the effectiveness of the UN response.
The legacy of Patrice Lumumba however is reflected in the pan-African aims, institutions and policies of the African Union and in the guiding ethos behind the adoption of the Ezulwini Consensus, which proposes a permanent African seat in a reformed United Nations Security Council. His ability to evoke so powerfully the extent of his people's subjugation derived from a rare understanding of the inherent duplicity of the colonial discourse. As Jean Van Lierde put it;
"He was the only Congolese leader who rose above the ethnic difficulties and tribal preoccupations that destroyed all the other parties. Lumumba was the first real pan-African."
Seeing clearly these machinations he gave little thrift to King Baudouin's 1960 Independence Day assertion that the Congo had benefited "from the genius of Leopold". He could have remained seated and held his tongue but instead stood up and systematically denounced the horrors of Belgian rule. Perhaps the Belgians had the measure of the man and knew because he was one of those rare souls who pined more than anything for justice for his people he would be thus unable to contain himself when Baudouin produced this litany of inflammatory nonsense extolling the virtues of the monstrous Leopold. If this were the case, then they achieved their ends superbly.
Leopold, for his part, halved the 20 million or so population of the Congo Free State in fifteen years. He was motivated not by ideology or necessity but pure greed - the rubber boom had his mind warped by the pursuit of profit. Worst still, he had the hypocrisy of cloaking it all under the veneer of philanthropy and done everything to halt the publication of British Consul, Roger Casement's report on the atrocities. Leopold was a truly loathsome creature who made even the 1885 Berlin Conference's pathetic entreaties on human rights look respectable. Lumumba, however, unrehearsed and constitutionally incapable of sustaining the colonial lie, responded on the spot;
"Fighters for independence, today victorious... I salute you in the name of the Congolese government. All of you, my friends who've unstintingly fought at our side. We have known mockery, insults... blows from morning to night... because we were negroes. We knew that the law was never the same... for whites and blacks. Who will forget the firing squads... the brutal arrests of those who refused to bow... to the regime of injustice, oppression and exploitation. Belgium has understood the price... that we attach to our liberty and dignity. She understands that we Congolese... will not be hostile. We just want to abolish the colonial system...that was the shame of the twentieth century."
The Belgian ranks were horrified and Baudouin's moustache twitched with rage. The following day every international newspaper and local radio station carried the headlines and talked of this "outrageous snub". Africans themselves were stunned, unused to such defiance. Kasavubu, blinkered by his desire to see a resurgent Kikongo kingdom and offered empty assurances on such by the Belgian paymasters annulled Lumumba's premiership after he had raised the pay of native Congolese in the armed ranks. Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief, was then given orders, which we now know came directly from Eisenhower to "get rid of this man", who was not "our kind of guy" who would humbly play ball, unlike their protege Mobuto who was being groomed as a counterfoil to a deeply exaggerated and poorly understood Soviet "expansion".
Mobuto, as mentioned, would eventually run the country into the ground, preparing more than anything the seeds for a Congolese Civil War in 1998-2003 that would claim 5 million lives, the largest death toll in any conflict since World War II. Devlin was now given that tube of poisonous toothpaste which he was supposed to slip into Lumumba's quarters but eventually decided for himself that to assassinate him would be disastrous for the US's long term interests in the region.
Lumumba was eventually arrested when he tried to halt the Katangan secessionists with the help of a small thousand-strong Soviet troop detachment. Lumumba had declared repeatedly that he was not a communist and nothing in his programme for government suggested he had any intentions of developing a centrally planned economy. The UN had promised to dispatch forces but when they arrived they did nothing to interfere with the Katangan rebels. Katanga, a fifth of it's land area, was the richest province in the Congo and this uprising which was supported surreptitiously by the Belgians with the help of Chombe, the 'cash register' or 'the Jew' as Gerard Soete described him - the Belgian police officer who was eventually charged with dismembering Lumumba and burning his remains in acid.
Earlier, when Lumumba had slipped under the net of the Belgian authorities and was making good his escape through the rough interior of the Congolese jungle he was compelled by tribal leaders through each village he passed to give them a briefing on the "real" independence struggle, as opposed to the propaganda now emanating from Kinshasha. Thousands gathered at each of these multiple stops and despite reports of Mobuto's men closing in, Lumumba, with scant regard for his own personal safety would stay for hours at a time to impress upon all the need to abandon their divisive tribalism and adopt the pan-African philosophy of political engagement, which he had learnt from his mentor Joshua Nkrumah in Ghana.
In the end, it was this passion to engage his people, at all costs, which led to his capture. Mobuto's forces caught up with him, took him to Katanga, and there, under the eye of the Belgian authorities, was brutally murdered. His family weren't even given a body to mourn; they were told he had tried to escape and was slain by local villagers. A pathetic fabrication that fooled no-one, least of all Laurent Kabila, one of his most able deputies, who fled to South Kivu, just north of Katanga, where he would wait almost thirty years before having the satisfaction of deposing Mobuto, the autocratic stooge with a penchant for palace-building.
Patrice's daughter, Julianna Lumumba, who remembers sitting quietly in his study while he penned letters to party supporters back in the late 50's and who is now the Secretary-General of the African Union's Chamber of Commerce has called his murder a "crime against humanity". She is not bitter, however, and instead shares her father's compassion and broader understanding. I will leave you finally the with the words of his friend Jean Van Lierde, a salutary reminder to that invidious dimension of colonial paternalism that found itself incapable and unwilling of absorbing the most passionate voices of dissent;
"The image he projected, by his use of vocabulary and his manner, frightened some people. He gave the impression that he was not a man who could be dominated. And a man who could not be dominated was dangerous."
So, clearly the establishment were now presented with a native premier who would not fit into the mould expected of him; what was needed instead was a pliant member of the indigenous elite who would allow business to continue as usual. The varied attempts now put in place to have him "removed" by both Belgium and the United States have been painstakingly reconstructed in Ludo De Witte's "The aassassination of Patrice Lumumba", a book which prompted a Belgian parliamentary inquiry into the events of these dark days - the painfully self-evasive synopsis of which can be read here;
http://www.africawithin.com/lumumba/conclusions.htm
What marks this episode off as being truly depraved is the subsequent manner in which the UN peacekeeping forces were instructed not to interfere with the secessionists which was clearly against the agreements set down in the original discussions between the Congolese nationalists and the Belgian government prior to independence; to wit, that the territorial integrity of the Congo should be maintained. Further, once it became clear that Lumumba was not going to play ball with the Belgians i.e. cede the sovereignty of the country's resources to the former colonial power, signals began emerging from the UN and Washington that he was 'an irrational actor', and that he was being 'overly paranoid' - a characterisatiion which has incidentally been maintained to this day by influential Western commentators and African 'experts' such as Martin Meredith (see "The State of Africa"). Thus the name blackening enterprise once begun was latched onto by the international press and within the space of a couple of weeks the newly feted premier had descended from independence hero to 'possessed' demigogue. However, this was just the beginning.
Lumumba travelled to Washington to have his case heard but Eisenhower refused to meet him personally. We now know that Eisenhower had personally given his approval for an assassination. CIA station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin, was later given a tube of poisonous toothpaste with which to slip into Lumumba's quarters. By this time, the seccesionists, who were only ever securing mineral mining rights for Belgian companies (which were one of the main suppliers of uranium to the United States at the height of Cold War rearmament) were now being talked of by the international press as representatives of a legitimate government with their own cabinet and trade delegates. Meanwhile, firefights between Belgian mercenaries hired by Tshombe (whose bank account was being stuffed by the Belgian mining company Union Miniere) and UN forces continued unabated though the UN forces still had no mandate to proceed into Katanga and upend the 'provisional government'. So, the UN under French, British and US influence were deliberately hamstrung and rendered ineffective thus aiding the cause of the illegal secessionists. De Witte details several examples of the bias of UN field commanders and Dag Hammerskold towards Tshombe's secessionists such as allowing them receive military supplies and air space denied the conventional Congolese forces of Lumumba'sgovernment.
Under these circumstances Lumumba looked to the Pan-African Union under the leadership then of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Seke Touree of Guinea to provide forces that would reverse this Belgian neo-colonial appropriation. To no avail, the Ghanese contingent was still led by a British army officer who likewise declared he had no remit to 'interfere'. So, left with no other option, Lumumba, who was emphatically not a communist, sought military assistance from the Soviet Union who were only too happy to oblige with a small contingent of troops. Khrushchev had spent 3 hours haranguing the UN general assembly about the international body's organisational structure in Sept, 1960; the month after the crisis had broken out. The whole world was watching and waiting to see how the crisis would unfold and yet what happened? Lumumba was captured by Mobuto's forces (the man who would eventually allow his country's assets to be stripped by multinational mining companies for over thirty years whilst the population persevered with levels of venality and corruption which were appalling even by African standards - you may say in fact that this whole episode set the benchmark for clientalist politics in Africa) handed over to Tshoimbe's nest of thieves in Katanga - of all places - and again in front of the world's media, and then, as he was subsequently assassinated a bogus story was proliferated that he had been murdered by hostile natives as he was making his getaway!
CHINA STAGES LUMUMBA RALLY - British Pathe
China held a demonstration rally (see above) of some 100,000 people protesting the manner of Lumumba's death (from Belgian custody into the arms of his 'assassins') but the stuffy newsreader covering the event on Britain's Pathe news can only comment how "brainwashed" the Chinese masses are for believing the supposed tosh which their government is peddling them ie. they are outraged, yet that outrage has to be manufactured by propaganda - it certainly cannot be genuinely felt solidarity with yet another victim of European colonialism in Africa. And of course, Pathe news is wrong in it's central assumption - the United States and Belgium had colluded in the African leader's assassination.
( ANTI-BELGIUM DEMONSTRATIONS OVER CONGO CRISIS ) - British Pathe
CAIRO RIOTS OVER CONGO - British Pathe
You can see here how the colonial world order - Britain, France, Belgium, the United States simply do not get it - Lumumba is just an upstart who had high fallutin' notions of his place in the scheme of things; he took the UN charter and the UN Declaration at face value and thought that just maybe their principles might apply to the newly independent Congo. What an absurd notion as it turned out; the US and Belgian backed Mobuto had no such illusions and bled his country dry for the next thirty years whilst undermining and promoting the politics of cynical clientalism in all his African neighbours.
When the Rwandan conflict spilled over the border fifteen years ago the Congo was a rotten apple ready to collapse. What might have been had Lumumba been given greater support by the UN to halt the secessionists, if the Belgians were put in their place by the US as they had done four years earlier to Britain and France during the Suez crisis in 1956? Clearly, the Belgians were given the green light to proceed with the secession by some high ranking officials in Washington who then proceeded to dilute the effectiveness of the UN response.
The legacy of Patrice Lumumba however is reflected in the pan-African aims, institutions and policies of the African Union and in the guiding ethos behind the adoption of the Ezulwini Consensus, which proposes a permanent African seat in a reformed United Nations Security Council. His ability to evoke so powerfully the extent of his people's subjugation derived from a rare understanding of the inherent duplicity of the colonial discourse. As Jean Van Lierde put it;
"He was the only Congolese leader who rose above the ethnic difficulties and tribal preoccupations that destroyed all the other parties. Lumumba was the first real pan-African."
Seeing clearly these machinations he gave little thrift to King Baudouin's 1960 Independence Day assertion that the Congo had benefited "from the genius of Leopold". He could have remained seated and held his tongue but instead stood up and systematically denounced the horrors of Belgian rule. Perhaps the Belgians had the measure of the man and knew because he was one of those rare souls who pined more than anything for justice for his people he would be thus unable to contain himself when Baudouin produced this litany of inflammatory nonsense extolling the virtues of the monstrous Leopold. If this were the case, then they achieved their ends superbly.
Leopold, for his part, halved the 20 million or so population of the Congo Free State in fifteen years. He was motivated not by ideology or necessity but pure greed - the rubber boom had his mind warped by the pursuit of profit. Worst still, he had the hypocrisy of cloaking it all under the veneer of philanthropy and done everything to halt the publication of British Consul, Roger Casement's report on the atrocities. Leopold was a truly loathsome creature who made even the 1885 Berlin Conference's pathetic entreaties on human rights look respectable. Lumumba, however, unrehearsed and constitutionally incapable of sustaining the colonial lie, responded on the spot;
"Fighters for independence, today victorious... I salute you in the name of the Congolese government. All of you, my friends who've unstintingly fought at our side. We have known mockery, insults... blows from morning to night... because we were negroes. We knew that the law was never the same... for whites and blacks. Who will forget the firing squads... the brutal arrests of those who refused to bow... to the regime of injustice, oppression and exploitation. Belgium has understood the price... that we attach to our liberty and dignity. She understands that we Congolese... will not be hostile. We just want to abolish the colonial system...that was the shame of the twentieth century."
The Belgian ranks were horrified and Baudouin's moustache twitched with rage. The following day every international newspaper and local radio station carried the headlines and talked of this "outrageous snub". Africans themselves were stunned, unused to such defiance. Kasavubu, blinkered by his desire to see a resurgent Kikongo kingdom and offered empty assurances on such by the Belgian paymasters annulled Lumumba's premiership after he had raised the pay of native Congolese in the armed ranks. Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief, was then given orders, which we now know came directly from Eisenhower to "get rid of this man", who was not "our kind of guy" who would humbly play ball, unlike their protege Mobuto who was being groomed as a counterfoil to a deeply exaggerated and poorly understood Soviet "expansion".
Mobuto, as mentioned, would eventually run the country into the ground, preparing more than anything the seeds for a Congolese Civil War in 1998-2003 that would claim 5 million lives, the largest death toll in any conflict since World War II. Devlin was now given that tube of poisonous toothpaste which he was supposed to slip into Lumumba's quarters but eventually decided for himself that to assassinate him would be disastrous for the US's long term interests in the region.
Lumumba was eventually arrested when he tried to halt the Katangan secessionists with the help of a small thousand-strong Soviet troop detachment. Lumumba had declared repeatedly that he was not a communist and nothing in his programme for government suggested he had any intentions of developing a centrally planned economy. The UN had promised to dispatch forces but when they arrived they did nothing to interfere with the Katangan rebels. Katanga, a fifth of it's land area, was the richest province in the Congo and this uprising which was supported surreptitiously by the Belgians with the help of Chombe, the 'cash register' or 'the Jew' as Gerard Soete described him - the Belgian police officer who was eventually charged with dismembering Lumumba and burning his remains in acid.
Earlier, when Lumumba had slipped under the net of the Belgian authorities and was making good his escape through the rough interior of the Congolese jungle he was compelled by tribal leaders through each village he passed to give them a briefing on the "real" independence struggle, as opposed to the propaganda now emanating from Kinshasha. Thousands gathered at each of these multiple stops and despite reports of Mobuto's men closing in, Lumumba, with scant regard for his own personal safety would stay for hours at a time to impress upon all the need to abandon their divisive tribalism and adopt the pan-African philosophy of political engagement, which he had learnt from his mentor Joshua Nkrumah in Ghana.
In the end, it was this passion to engage his people, at all costs, which led to his capture. Mobuto's forces caught up with him, took him to Katanga, and there, under the eye of the Belgian authorities, was brutally murdered. His family weren't even given a body to mourn; they were told he had tried to escape and was slain by local villagers. A pathetic fabrication that fooled no-one, least of all Laurent Kabila, one of his most able deputies, who fled to South Kivu, just north of Katanga, where he would wait almost thirty years before having the satisfaction of deposing Mobuto, the autocratic stooge with a penchant for palace-building.
Patrice's daughter, Julianna Lumumba, who remembers sitting quietly in his study while he penned letters to party supporters back in the late 50's and who is now the Secretary-General of the African Union's Chamber of Commerce has called his murder a "crime against humanity". She is not bitter, however, and instead shares her father's compassion and broader understanding. I will leave you finally the with the words of his friend Jean Van Lierde, a salutary reminder to that invidious dimension of colonial paternalism that found itself incapable and unwilling of absorbing the most passionate voices of dissent;
"The image he projected, by his use of vocabulary and his manner, frightened some people. He gave the impression that he was not a man who could be dominated. And a man who could not be dominated was dangerous."
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