CONGO: The Noisy Cockpit

How many nations is the Congo? One, says President Joseph Kasavubu in Léopoldville. Two, says President Moise Tshombe of separatist Katanga province. Three, insists Albert Kalonji, who says that his Kasai Mining State is just as separate as Tshombe’s Katanga. Last week a new voice made it four. In Stanleyville, Communist Antoine Gizenga, Vice Premier in Patrice Lumumba’s Cabinet, declared that Eastern province was an independent state and he was its president.

Back in Manhattan, the U.N. was split almost as many ways as it struggled to deal with the Congo mess. While the U.S. and many others held out for Kasavubu, Mobutu & Co., assorted Africans and Asians still demanded that jailed ex-Premier Patrice Lumumba be freed. Some, with no clear candidate in mind, insisted vaguely on increased powers for U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. The Soviets, on the other hand, demanded that all his powers be taken away. In the General Assembly, Soviet Delegate Valerian Zorin took the opportunity to ask whether “it is not time to remove the Secretary-General from command of the U.N. force and give the command to those people who will enjoy the confidence of the Congolese people.”

Matter of Starvation. But Hammarskjold’s gravest problem came from the six nations—the United Arab Republic, Ceylon, Morocco, Indonesia, Guinea and Yugoslavia—that suddenly announced their intention to pull their military units out of the U.N. Congo force altogether because they did not like the way things were being run. This clearly threatened to rip apart Dag Hammarskjold’s whole project. For the six accounted for almost 5,700 of the 20,000 U.N. troops available to keep the Congo peace.

Replying to his critics in the Security Council, Hammarskjold warned that if the U.N. should leave the Congo, “I am convinced that the consequence would be immediate civil war, degenerating into tribal conflicts fought in the most uninhibited manner. Such a situation could last for years.” Singling out one stark example, Hammarskjold said, “Today we are facing a situation where between 250,000 and 300,000 people are actually starving in south Kasai, with an estimated 200 people dying daily from sheer starvation.”

Beyond Headlines. Better than any man, Dag Hammarskjold knew that while the headlines went to the strident bickering over what the U.N. should do about the Lumumbas and the Kasavubus, the U.N.’s real mission in the Congo was to keep the country going. There was no limelight for the U.N.’s Canadian Red Cross doctors who quietly, desperately, kept the bush leper hospital open, for the U.N.’s food relief expert who launched a huge distribution scheme, for the U.N.’s Haitian specialist who filtered the water and sprayed DDT on the malarial swamps around Luluabourg, or for the two dozen U.N. technicians from several nations who handled air-traffic control at all the Congo’s major airports. If the troops who protect them were withdrawn, many of these technicians would leave and the projects collapse.

Most probably, the nations making such resounding threats to go home were merely bluffing. Despite what the home governments were announcing so indignantly, none of the national contingents in the Congo so far had received instructions to start packing.