The Congo: Full Circle

In the control tower at Ndola, barely seven miles from the charred clearing slashed out by Dag Hammarskjold’s doomed plane, two men arranged the cease-fire he had set out to negotiate. After a two-day session, Katanga’s President Moise Tshombe and U.N. Negotiator Mahmoud Khiari signed a provisional truce, ending the eight-day Battle of Katanga. Unofficial death toll: 44 U.N. troops, 152 Katangese police and soldiers, 79 African civilians, 14 European civilians.

Although welcomed by both sides, the cease-fire was a defeat for the U.N., which had obviously misjudged the strength and determination of Tshombe’s forces, and had taken a bad beating. It was an important victory in Tshombe’s running battle to keep Katanga free of the Congolese central government in Leopoldville.

Tshombe’s victory may not last long. Khiari made it plain at a press conference in Ndola that Katanga’s “secession is a matter of fact, but it is not legal nor is it a right.” Returning to Leopoldville, he told newsmen that he hoped to help “Katanga and the central government to find a peaceful solution, just as we achieved with the central government and the Stanleyville regime” of leftist Vice Premier Antoine Gizenga.

Meanwhile, the Congo government prepared for action. Premier Cyrille Adoula, ordinarily a moderate man, went into a rage over Katanga’s refusal to give in. General Joseph Mobutu, commander in chief of the army, started massing troops in a staging area across the border from Katanga, probably to forestall Gizenga, who reportedly was doing the same with his own private troops.

In Elisabethville, Tshombe had problems even more immediate than the possible invasion. Although the opposing armies grudgingly kept the truce, the city was in danger of attack by 30,000 starving Baluba tribesmen camped on the outskirts. Already Baluba raids had taken 40 lives, claimed Tshombe, announcing grimly: ‘”I will not tolerate this situation.” The Congo political cycle was turning dangerously close to where it all began during the first bloody months of independence only 15 months ago. Preparing for a possible new round of civil war, U.N. forces got their first shipment of eight jets (from Sweden and Ethiopia) last week, and one Congolese Cabinet officer bought a bulletproof vest from a discreet St. James’s tailor in London.