Congo: Savagery

It began as just another week of heat and torpor in the Congo. Sweating natives, as usual, loaded palm kernels into boats at upcountry river stations, while understaffed United Nations teams passed out powdered milk to babies and urged the villagers to expand their scraggly little farm plots. In Leopoldville, things seemed normal enough: harassed Premier Cyrille Adoula, struggling to hold his limping central government together, still pondered ways to whip Katanga’s Secessionist Moise Tshombe into line, and noted nervously that Eastern Province’s Antoine Gizenga talked of breaking away again to win autonomy for his own ragtag region. At U.N. headquarters, staffers looked forward to National Army Day, which, the army promised, would be celebrated by no parades—just by “calm and dignity.”

But everyone had forgotten the savagery that lay just beneath the Congo veneer of nationhood. Like an ugly scene glimpsed by the lightning of hot equatorial skies, the Congo government again stood revealed as incapable of governing, its army a disorganized rabble.

The Hot Rumor. Fortnight ago, several hundred Congolese army troops arrived at the Lualaba River port town of Kindu in Kivu Province, an area of the eastern Congo lightly controlled by local authorities and protected only by a 200-man U.N. garrison of Malayan soldiers. The newcomers were technically members of General Joseph Mobutu’s central Congo army; in fact they took orders from Eastern Province’s Gizenga, eager to expand his influence into Kivu. They were a surly lot who paid scant attention to the orders of their commander, Colonel Alphonse Pakassa. And like most Congolese soldiers, they were willing to listen to any rumor that came along.

Hottest rumor of the week followed the arrival one sultry forenoon of two planeloads of U.N. Italian crewmen who had ferried in a shipment of U.N. scout cars for Kindu’s Malayan garrison. “Belgian paratroops!” cried Gizenga’s men as they hopped into trucks for the dash to the airport. Bursting into the nearby Malayan officers’ mess, where the 13 Italian flyers were having lunch, the Congolese soldiers grabbed the “Belgian” crewmen and hustled them off to a jail near town. Two Italians shouted their protests in French as they waved U.N. identity cards. “Ah, Flemish!” cried the Congolese as they began to beat the prisoners. Then someone opened fire, and one by one, the 13 Italians were killed on the spot.

Into the River. Producing knives, the frenzied troops then hacked the bodies into pieces, tossing them as souvenirs to the civilian crowd that watched. That afternoon, several Congolese soldiers strode into the local office of the World Health Organization, gleefully dropped a human hand on a desk and walked out giggling; others heaved the rest of the ghastly remains into the muddy Lualaba.

“What can I do?” shrugged Colonel Pakassa to U.N. officials who flew in two days later in anxious search for the missing airmen. “You know how soldiers are.” The colonel’s own men, in fact, had held him off at gunpoint during part of the savage episode. For hours he pretended that the Italians were still in jail, admitted only that they had been “beaten.” Finally, he announced that they had “escaped.” Only then did the true, grisly story begin to emerge.

Stunned at the news, U.N. Congo Chief Sture Linner fired off his bitter report of the brutal tragedy to Manhattan head quarters, then rushed planeloads of U.N. reinforcements to the Kindu garrison; from Central Government Premier Adoula he demanded, and got, brisk cooperation in surrounding the guilty Gizengist troops to start an investigation that might send many of the rebel soldiers to the gallows for murder. (In the past, rebellious Congolese troops have usually been merely confined to camp for brief periods.)

Who’s Boss? The bigger question was Gizenga’s own role in the massacre. He had been seen a few days after the killings in Kindu itself, hundreds of miles from his Stanleyville headquarters. Had he provoked the bloody slaughter as a slap at the U.N.’s authority in a region he hoped to conquer? If so, similar trouble could be expected to the south in Albertville, stronghold of northern Katanga on Lake Tanganyika’s shore, where another batch of Gizenga troops turned up in an obvious Gizenga bid to chop off a sizable chunk of Moise Tshombe’s province.

But it seemed quite possible that Antoine Gizenga had as little control over his wild-eyed soldiers as did Colonel Pakassa. Already, the undisciplined Gizenga “invaders” at Albertville had allowed themselves to be surrounded and sealed off by the local U.N. Indian forces, and Gizenga himself was back in concealment. He had achieved only one thing so far: destruction of the pact with Congolese Premier Adoula, by which Eastern Province had been brought under the central Leopoldville regime. Now, Adoula had to start all over again with the seemingly hopeless struggle to build a unified Congo. Things were in such a mess that he had to make a hasty trip to Luluabourg at week’s end to quell still more rebellious troops in Kasai Province.

Back in Manhattan U.N. headquarters, the Kindu tragedy came just in time to complicate the agendas on two important debates—on the Congo and on colonialism generally. In the Security Council, the Congo bloodshed, and the U.N.’s special commission report on the death of Patrice Lumumba (see following story), added to the angry bickering over a new mandate to stop the Congo fighting. Moscow’s Zorin immediately tried to limit the session’s business to a demand for action against Katanga’s Secessionist Tshombe, ignoring the uncomfortable fact that Red-backed Gizenga now seemed firmly in the secessionist camp himself.

The U.S. and Britain forced a broader debate, insisting that the Council consider any secessionist problem, from whatever direction, put its weight behind a constructive program to strengthen Premier Adoula’s central government. The U.S. was urging that Adoula’s army be reorganized and given a “small but effective air force” to back up Congolese ground troops; this would not be good news for Katanga’s Tshombe, who, with his own little handful of planes, has been able to launch deadly forays against both Adoula’s forces and the U.N. itself from time to time.

Tshombe himself professed fear that the U.N. might be preparing to attack Katanga again, cabled the Security Council that he was prepared to negotiate a peaceful settlement with anyone who accepted “the existence of Katanga as a sovereign and independent nation.” He added: “To prevent further bloodshed, we request your intervention to halt the invasion of Katanga.”