The Congo: War in Katanga

“This operation bears no comparison to anything else in United Nations history,” said the U.N.’s senior officer in Katanga. Conor Cruise O’Brien was vastly understating the case. In recalcitrant Katanga last week, scattered bands of blue-hel-meted troops—Indian, Swedish, Irish—were engaged in a battle to the death with a weird and formidable foe: the troops of Katanga President Moise Tshombe, some of them Baluba warriors smeared with warpaint, led by Europeans and backed by jet fighters.

It was a war that the U.N.’s O’Brien, presumably with the full approval of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, had started in an attempt to bring Tshombe back under the authority of the Congo central government and thus head off a possible civil war. As the fighting raged on, it carried the United Nations into the new, uncomfortable—and, to some critics, indefensible—position of active aggressor on a large scale.

Ultimatum. Since February, United Nations forces in the Congo had been armed with a Security Council resolution calling upon Tshombe to dismiss the 500 European officers leading his null army—and actively working toward maintaining Katanga’s secession from the central Congo government, even at the cost of civil war. Last month, the Congo’s moderate Premier Cyrille Adoula asked the U.N. to enforce the resolution. O’Brien gave Tshombe until Sept. 9 to get rid of the Europeans.

When the deadline passed, U.N. Congo Chief Sture Linner reported: “At least 104 foreign personnel failed to give any account of themselves.” O’Brien de manded compliance. In answer, Katanga’s white-led political police arrested O’Brien’s deputy, Michel Tombelaine. Reported Linner, with undisguised frustration: “This was the culmination of a long series of wrongful acts by these officers, including the organization of attacks on the United Nations, repeated threats, and incitements to violence.” O’Brien issued an ultimatum: remove all remaining white officers, or else. When Tshombe flatly refused, U.N. troops went into action, while Hammarskjold, who had just arrived for a personal inspection, waited in Léopoldville.

Attack. Long before dawn one morning last week, a company of Indian troops backed by Irish armored cars surrounded the Elisabethville post office’ held as a communications center by a Tshombe garrison. In French and Swahili, demands were megaphoned that the garrison yield the building. The answer was the rattle of machine guns. The U.N. returned fire, and for two hours streams of red tracer bullets crossed each other in the predawn darkness. An Indian soldier was hit in the face; he screamed. A Katanga gendarme, hit in the belly, fell from a second-story window, picked himself up, staggered away with his entrails hanging out. The driver of an armored car was decapitated, and his car lunged weirdly into a wall.

Other U.N. troops were deployed throughout the city. Indians took the state radio building after a charge with fixed bayonets. Swedish troops attacked the home of Tshombe’s Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo (who had fled). Shortly after dawn, the U.N. forces gained their objectives, and O’Brien called a press conference to announce that “the Katanga secession is over. Katanga is now a Congolese province.” The cease-fire announcement was vastly premature.

Siege. O’Brien, 43, an intense Irishman with literary leanings (he is noted for a study of Irish Insurrectionist Charles Stewart Parnell) had badly misjudged Moise Tshombe, the strength of his gendarmerie, and above all their determination to fight for Katanga’s independence. After the announcement, the central government in Léopoldville named Egide Bocheley as Katanga’s “High Commissioner” to replace Tshombe. Bocheley, a follower of far-left Vice Premier Antoine Gizenga, flew off for Elisabethville. When his plane landed, it was not safe for him to leave the airport, and he spent the night sitting up in a chair. Elisabethville was under siege.

In cold fact, the cease-fire—which O’Brien said had been agreed to by Tshombe himself—never existed. Instead, the President was rallying his troops for what soon became a full-scale attack. The main U.N. Katanga garrison, 500 Irish and Swedish soldiers stationed at Kamina air base 260 miles northwest of Elisabethville, was under siege by a strong force of heavily armed Baluba tribesmen, troops led by white officers and supported by a French-made jet fighter. Reported the control tower at week’s end: “It will be difficult to hold out much longer.”

Even more precarious was the position of 150 Irish troops who had been sent to the mining town of Jadotville to protect its European residents. Under constant attack by hordes of savage warriors, the garrison was cut off from a relief column, but managed to flash a brave radio message to Léopoldville: “We will hold out until our last bullet is spent. Could do with some whisky.”

Dirge. Heavy street fighting turned Elisabethville into a shell-pocked inferno, and there was serious doubt that the U.N. could avoid being overwhelmed. Tshombe, after ‘a day of hiding, turned up in his heavily guarded residence to direct the battle. Said he: “I am prepared to die fighting in my own home.” The tree-lined avenues were littered with the shells of Jeeps and the bodies of men; water and power were cut off, food was running low (and food markets closed), and there was growing danger of disease. Few people ventured out of doors, and many slept in corridors and bathrooms for fear of being injured by stray bullets or flying glass. Said an English businessman who escaped to the Central African Federation: “Elisabethville is a city of terror and hate—hate by the entire population, black and white, for the United Nations troops.”

U.N. members were sharply divided over what to do in Katanga. Britain called for a ceasefire. France condemned the action. Ireland, worried about its soldiers and this fall’s national elections, dispatched its Foreign Minister to the Congo. In the neighboring Central African Federation, Sir Roy Welensky, openly friendly to Katanga’s pro-European attitude, arranged to send food and medical supplies to the Tshombe troops, remarking that “I really don’t care if the United Nations likes that or not.” The U.S. cautiously supported the U.N. operation, finally urged that fighting be stopped. Radio Moscow charged that the U.N. did not really want to oust Tshombe and unite the Congo. And there were those who wondered if Dag Hammarskjold’s U.N. forces would have been as ready to fight if Gizenga and not Tshombe had seceded.

At week’s end, Hammarskjold, jolted by the military setbacks and looking drawn and pale after three days of harried talks in Léopoldville, got another jolt from across the Congo River in Brazzaville. His scheduled take-off for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York was forbidden by authorities in the former French Congo, who said that they could not guarantee his safety “because of the discontent and agitation provoked by events in Katanga.” When Hammarskjold heard the news, his only reaction was to stare vacantly in the direction of an Indian pipe drum band, which was playing Over the Sea to Skye—a Scottish funeral dirge.