CONGO: The Embassy Firefight

In Léopoldville one long, hot day last week, the simmering conflict between the U.N. Command and Congolese Military Strongman Colonel Joseph Mobutu finally reached a showdown.

In the morning, as two big crocodiles yawned lazily on the nearby riverbank, Congolese Interior Commissioner José Nussbaumer strode into the Ghanaian embassy and ordered Chargé d’Affaires Nathaniel Welbeck to leave the country that afternoon on a Sabena plane. “I’m not at home to you!” screamed Welbeck, waving a red and white fetish stick in indignation. “Get out and stay out!” Already on his way to the door, Nussbaumer turned and shouted: “I’ll be back at 3 o’clock to make sure you take that plane.”

Wisps from the Pipe. The hassle was an old story to the U.N. staff in Leéopoldville. Brawny, racist-minded Diplomat Welbeck, once Kwame Nkrumah’s top political skull-basher back in Ghana, had long been one of Léopoldville’s biggest troublemakers. At Nkrumah’s bidding, he shot about the Congolese capital lining up all possible support for Colonel Mobutu’s archfoe, deposed Premier Patrice Lumumba, and was helped in his endeavors by the curious policy of the U.N. Command’s Rajeshwar Dayal who offered U.N. protection to virtually everyone save working officials of the Congo government. Last month Welbeck was declared persona non grata by Congolese President Joseph Kasavubu, but refused to leave. Confident that the Congo army would never attack his U.N. guards, Welbeck acted as though the Kasavubu government did not exist.

Last week once again the U.N. Command inscrutably chose to come to Welbeck’s aid. Soon after Nussbaumer’s ultimatum, the U.N. sentreinforcements that raised the U.N. guard at the Ghanaian embassy to 170 Tunisian soldiers. The Congo was represented by a handful of military police headed by busting Security Inspector Henri N’Gampo, whichfrequently retreated behind a hedge to stuff his pipe with bangi, a Congolese form of marijuana.

By late afternoon, apparently drug-crazed, Inspector N’Gampo was out of control. He scrambled about shouting “We will kill him.” Then his unpredictable anger turned on three Western reporters, including TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs. He ordered them arrested as Communists and interrupted their protests “Shut up or you die!” Only the arrival of a personal emiissary from Colonel Mobutu persuaded him to free the newsmen.

A Burst in the Chest. At 7 o’clock, 200 nervous Colongolese troops arrived and deployed facing the embassy. TheTunisians, equally jittery, eyed them in the growing dusk. At 7:40, Lieut. Colonel Joseph N’Kokolo, second-ranking officer in the Congo army started across the street with the evident intention of conferring with the Tunisian commanding officer. This was the moment Police inspector N’Gampo chose to shout “Tirez: [Fire]!” A French-speaking Tunisian pulled the trigger of his submachine gun; the burst smashed into the chest of Colonel N’Kokolo, killing him instantly. Both sides wildly opened fire, and, in the first exchange, while he was still screaming “Tirez!”, Policeman N’Gampo fell, seriously wounded.

A Nip at the Bottle. For twelve hours the chatter of automatic weapons was punctuated by the deeper thud of shells from Congolese armored cars. Pitch-darkness and bad marksmanship limited the casualties to one Tunisian and four Congolese dead, eleven Tunisians and 30 Congolese wounded. With morning, firing finally stopped, and British General Henry Alexander, commander in chief of the Ghanaian army, appeared.

Alexander had flown in the day before with special orders from Nkrumah to see to it that Welbeck stayed put in Léopoldville. But one look at the critical situation convinced Alexander that Welbeck must go—and fast. At the Ghana embassy, Alexander found that the terrified Welbeck had spent the night cowering between two beds, keeping up his courage with periodic nips at a bottle of brandy. Escorted by Alexander, Welbeck emerged from the bullet-scarred residence with a weak smile and a face-saving lie: “I am moving only because my government has asked me to go.” Aware that any delay might get Welbeck lynched, the British general grabbed him firmly by the arm and snapped: “You come right along now. The plane’s waiting.”

The First Moves. This was not the only victory of the week for bespectacled little Colonel Mobutu. A few days later a dramatic reconciliation was arranged between Léopoldville and the long-rebellious province of Katanga. Three representatives of the Mobutu-Kasavubu regime flew to the Katanga capital of Elisabethville where they sat down with Katanga’s President Moise Tshombe and issued a communiqué that for the first time promised a joint solution of the Congo’s “internal problems,” to be worked out next month at a round-table conference between the central government, Tshombe and other dissident provincial leaders.

The gap between grandiloquent pronouncements and reality gets pretty wide in the Congo these days. But at least it was a start.