CONGO: Where’s the War?

Washington airport was dank as any Congo rain forest. The diplomatic greeters, led by Secretary of State Christian Herter, huddled under a long blue canopy on rollers, but rain trickled down the back of the Egyptian ambassador’s neck and plonked off the Homburg of the ambassador from Guinea. From a MATS Convair stepped Congo Premier Patrice Lumumba, 35, wearing his customary blue suit and brown Italian loafers. He gazed at a blue, gold-starred Congo flag that had, all too obviously, been hand-sewn that morning, and a Marine Corps band struck up Stars and Stripes Forever—the commission assigned to write a Congolese national anthem has not yet come up with a tune.

It was the hastiest state visit the U.S. had ever laid on. But, explained a State Department official, “it isn’t important that several members of the delegation had no visas, that several others had no international health certificates, that one lost his passport and that the military aide has only one uniform. Here’s a man who is dealing cold turkey with the whole world—from kings to carpetbaggers—and with very little preparation.”

Five-Minute Peace. Washington officials, who had expected a ranting fanatic, found instead a poised, almost impassive, man who could respond politely and correctly in slightly accented French to Herter’s welcoming speech without recourse to notes or text, who faced a roomful of U.S. correspondents and fielded their sharpest questions with calm confidence, urbanely parried questions he did not choose to answer. Sometimes, he spoke with disarming candor. “I was sitting around my office with the country exploding around me,” he explained. “It took me just five seconds to decide that the only place to go was the United Nations.”

Earlier at the U.N. and again in Washington, Lumumba hammered away at a single theme: the U.N. must get the Belgian troops out of the entire Congo, including secession-minded Katanga province. “After the Belgian troops leave, peace will be restored in five minutes,” he told a U.N. press conference. “If the Belgian troops left tomorrow, that would be fine. But if they left today, that would be even better.” Lumumba backed away smoothly from his big development contract with U.S. Promoter Louis Edgar Detwiler: “Only an agreement in principle.” (Privately he admitted the contract was “a terrible mistake.”)

“Well Done.” In Washington, Lumumba settled into Blair House and popped over for talks with Herter. A goateed picture of confidence, he came out to indulge in some calculated exaggeration: “Now I know that the U.S. does not approve, and will never approve, the efforts to divide our country.” State Department officials, admitting that the performance was “very well done,” felt obliged to issue the “clarification” that the U.S. was backing the U.N., not Lumumba.

But diplomats, who had once dismissed him as a demagogue or a nut, began to wonder if Lumumba had not known all along what he was doing. “He was sitting down there feeling pretty vulnerable,” mused one. “So he mentions the Russians, and nothing could bring the house down faster. Everyone panics, and the U.N. really begins to move.” The consensus: “Erratic, but a tough, clever guy.”

Shepherded wherever he went by Guinean and Ghanaian officials, Lumumba made the standard tour of Washington and Mount Vernon. When one member of the delegation asked who George Washington was, he got the snapped reply: “He fought the British colonialists.” At the Lincoln Memorial, Lumumba compared Katanga Premier Moise Tshombe to Jefferson Davis. “All those who want secession are bound to be beaten in the end.” High on his list was a visit to a Cadillac-Oldsmobile agency, where he tested doors, poked seat cushions, asked prices—but in the end, bought nothing. Rushing from appointment to appointment in a tumble of confused aides, Lumumba inadvertently missed a date with Indiana’s Democratic Senator Vance Hartke, who flew in from Evansville specially to see him (“You just don’t do that to a U.S. Senator when you are asking for money,” said a mildly shocked aide). He kept Soviet Charge d’Affaires Mikhail Smirnovsky waiting for 30 minutes, then found he could not see him at all—apparently recognizing that it would be impolitic to receive a Soviet visitor while a guest of the U.S.

Only twice did he stray from reasonableness. A day after the Belgians published case histories of 291 rapes and 230 assorted acts of violence, including a 14-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old girl who were repeatedly raped, Lumumba snapped: “Our conclusion is that there were no such acts against white women.” Waving telegrams from home before a Washington press conference, he hit an unrealistic note of crisis: “Many killed by the Belgians. Entire Congo may be massacred. Awaiting Hammarskjold.”

Under Control. The real news from home was less dramatic and more gratifying. With the cities under control, the U.N. task force spread out in their richly varied uniforms through the small towns and countryside—the Tunisians in Kasai, the Moroccans around the mouth of the Congo, the Ethiopians around Stanleyville. The arrival of 710 Irishmen, brought the troop total to over 10,000. And though one Ghanaian charged off the plane at Ndjili shouting “Where’s the war?”, there was no fighting to be done.

The worst crisis ahead was economic.

Closed shops and factories put 80,000 out of work in Léopoldville alone, and the government imposed a 6 p.m. curfew for fear of payroll riots. All along the Congo, rubber, banana and coffee plantations stood deserted. The food airlift continued, but meat was in short supply.

Under a ten-year plan begun in 1950, the Congo acquired vital roads, schools, hospitals—and a national debt of $900 million (more than half of it owed to Belgium). Just servicing the debt eats up 17% of the total budget. Before Lumumba broke diplomatic relations, Belgium had been prepared to put up $27 million toward this year’s budget deficit, now estimated at $50 million. Belgium had planned to cede to the Congo $800 million stockholdings in the sprawling Union Miniere trust. But with Belgium fighting mad and Union Miniere agreeably handing over $25 million in advance tax payments to “independent” Katanga, Lumumba’s Congo was flat broke.

Patchwork. U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold spent the week listening to angry demands from both sides. After counseling patience to Lumumba in New York, he flew to Brussels. Hammarskjold’s session with Premier Gaston Eyskens and his Cabinet was heated. The Belgians argued that they would be complying with the U.N. resolution if they withdrew their troops to their two main bases in the Congo, pleaded that the U.N. should stay out of Katanga. Dag was unimpressed. As is his way, he pointed out that the U.N. resolution asked the Belgians to leave “the territory of the Congo,” and that certainly included both the bases and Katanga.

Leaving the frustrated and fuming Belgians behind, Hammarskjold turned down the offer of a Belgian jet to Leopoldville, boarded instead a KLM DC-7 to neutral Brazzaville, across the river in French Congo. Crossing the river in a launch, he soon was confronting the Congolese Cabinet. Prodded by sharp telegrams from Lumumba, the Cabinet insistently demanded that Hammarskjold use force if necessary to clear the Belgian troops out of Katanga.

At week’s end, Katanga’s pro-Belgian Premier Tshombe shipped a three-man delegation off to the U.S. to plead his independence cause and sent along Belgian Paratroop Colonel Guy Weber as “guide.” Belgium’s Premier Eyskens proclaimed: “The U.N. must not intervene in the internal affairs of Katanga.” But Belgian officials conceded privately that it was only a matter of time and began looking for a face-saving way to get Katanga back into the Congo. The government pulled back a token 1,500 of the 10,000 troops in Katanga, and the Belgian National Bank quietly advanced the Congo Central Bank an undisclosed sum (reportedly $8,000,000) to meet the government’s August payroll. Congo President Joseph Kasavubu declared: “I now see our affairs in the colors of the rose-though of course roses have thorns.”

This week, the Congo may even have a functioning government. After a whirlwind trip from Washington to Canada, where he got Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s promise of a 100-man-army communications network in the Congo, Lumumba buzzed back to New York. On his schedule were nothing but a trip to Macy’s, the purchase of some English language records and a flight for home, presumably to try to solve some of the problems he has just been talking about up till now.