Congo: The Boys from Binza

At a military camp outside Leopoldville, a battalion of paratroopers watched glumly as two of their lieutenants and 18 men were lined up and stripped naked. It was a cashiering, Congo-style. According to their superiors, the punished men had accepted bribes in a plot to overthrow the government. This plot failed, but there are plenty of others going. Again the Congo is rumbling, and Premier Cyrille Adoula is feeling the ground shake under him.

The tremors became serious last August, when mobs of unemployed overthrew President Fulbert Youlou in the ex-French Congo across the Congo River in Brazzaville. The upheaval fired the imaginations of labor leaders in Leopoldville, whose slums teem with thousands of jobless. They were joined by followers of the late Patrice Lumumba and his leftist successor, Antoine Gizenga. Although he is imprisoned on an island in the river, his African Solidarity Party remains well organized.

Government authorities recently reported a training camp for 600 guerrillas, probably Communist-run, in the forests of Kwilu province 300 miles east of Leopoldville. The Russian embassy, closed after Lumumba’s overthrow in 1960 but reopened a year ago, also got busy again. In September the situation began to worry the band of anti-Communist strongmen, known as the “Binza Group,”* who have kept Adoula in power. Fed up with the do-nothing Parliament (which once had to be locked in by U.N. troops in order to elect a government), the Binza boys pressured President Joseph Kasavubu into suspending Parliament, ostensibly because it had failed to draft a new constitution. More and more a front man for the Binza group, the democratic-minded Adoula reluctantly agreed to rule by decree.

Immediately the Congo’s unionists threatened a general strike. Lumumbists formed a “Committee of Liberation,” endorsed labor’s demands. Prompted by his backers, Kasavubu last week decreed a six-month state of emergency in Leopoldville, and a three-man junta in effect took over. All are Binza men:

Defense Minister Jerome Anany, Justice Minister Justin Bomboko, and Interior Minister Joseph Maboti.

When the labor leaders decided to challenge the junta and attempted to organize a government workers’ strike, it failed miserably. Five unionists were jailed, while Defense Minister Anany accused “a foreign embassy” of “paying agitators,” named no names; but the pro-government newspaper, Le Progrés, accused the Russian, Czech and Egyptian legations. At week’s end Adoula was still Premier, but he had been severely weakened by his aggressive Binza buddies, who may or may not decide to keep him on.

* After the Leopoldville suburb where in 1960 they plotted the overthrow of Lumumba.