by Ralph Riegel
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Lumumba had been weakened from within by rivalries carefully nurtured by the US with emerging Congolese officials including Joseph Kasavubu, Mobutu and others. These rivalries would be crucial in leaving Lumumba vulnerable and isolated when his enemies chose to strike. Belgian interests also fostered a growing separatist movement in Katanga to the south, where a pro-Brussels administration was deemed preferable to the ‘radicals’ who were taking the helm in Leopoldville.
Central to the Belgian and European ambitions in this regard was Moise Tshombe, the leader of the Conakat movement and a former sergeant in the Belgian-run Congolese army. To the Europeans, Tshombe represented stability and a pro-business administration that was compliant to European concerns. Tshombe made it clear he was willing to be a loyal Belgian ally, which secured him all the backing he needed to make Katanga independent. Tshombe also enjoyed the full confidence of Union Minière and other major mining multi-national companies.
In July 1960, Belgian forces took up positions in Katanga where they had boosted their troop numbers from 3,800 before independence to 9,400. Tshombe, who was the provincial governor, declared the region’s independence from the rest of the Congo. With the loss of Katanga, the Congo lost more than half the sources of its foreign currency earnings, a potentially catastrophic blow to the fledging Congo state. Patrice Lumumba instantly appealed to the international community – and specifically the United Nations – for help to preserve the integrity of the state. His plea met with immediate UN support and it was agreed that UN forces would be installed in Katanga to help keep the peace.
The move served to accelerate the pace of Congo’s internal confrontation. While the international community refused to recognise Katanga as an independent state, the chaos within the Congo itself steadily mounted. Tshombe exploited this fact by claiming Katanga had chosen to secede from chaos.
Within six months of delivering his controversial speech in front of King Baudouin, Lumumba was dead. In the final months of his life, Lumumba was effectively under house arrest as Mobutu used the army to tighten his grip on power. Lumumba had become such a controversial figure that rumours swirled around the Congo that the Belgians, the CIA and even MI6 were all conspiring to secure his assassination.
In late December 1960, Lumumba, realising the danger he was in, decided to try to escape. He evaded the guards surrounding the prime minister’s villa and attempted to make it to Stanleyville, his main support base, where he hoped to either set up a rival regime or allow his allies to arrange for safe asylum in a friendly African country or possibly Europe. Lumumba left his villa in a Chevrolet car on the pretext of dropping servants home. He then headed towards Stanleyville – but, disastrously, he decided to make several stops on the way to deliver political speeches to local village elders on how he had been treated.
Mobutu had planned for just such a move and had a fast-response corps of troops ready. They hunted Lumumba to Kasai near the River Sankuru where he was trapped and captured. Despite a two-hour head start, the prime minister’s leisurely progression took him just over halfway to the safety of Stanleyville before he was captured. Lumumba’s end mirrors the tragedy of the Congo itself. He was savagely beaten by the Congolese troops who had received orders from Mobutu to show his political rival no mercy. One of the last photographs of Lumumba shows him being hauled out of the back of an army truck, hands bound painfully behind his back. He is being dragged by the hair and is surrounded by laughing and jeering soldiers. Lumumba may have had a premonition of what was to happen when several weeks beforehand he quipped to a friend that the Congo had need of martyrs. ‘If I die, tant pis [too bad],’ he is alleged to have said.
UN troops – aware of what was happening – did not intervene. Some of the troops who spotted Lumumba were Swedish and they were appalled at what was going on. It later emerged they had received direct orders from UN headquarters in New York not to interfere in what was viewed as an internal Congolese matter – ironic given the speed with which the UN had intervened in the first place to prevent Katanga seceding. Brigadier Indarjit Rikhye, a UN officer, was deeply disturbed by what was happening. ‘He [Lumumba] was chained in the back of a truck. He was bleeding, his hair was dishevelled, he had lost his glasses. But we could not intervene,’ Rikhye later explained.
Lumumba was flown to Leopoldville where he was beaten again, humiliated in front of reporters and photographers, and then transferred to Colonel Mobutu’s personal base. Congo’s new strongman was operating from Binza, a fortified para-commando facility outside the city. Mobutu ordered Lumumba brought before him, and the protégé studied his former mentor. Mobutu is reported to have laughed, spat in Lumumba’s face and warned him: ‘You swore to have my skin – now it is I who have yours.’
Further humiliation followed as Mobutu’s young officers punched, kicked and whipped the prime minister. The army revelled in Lumumba’s fall and the rise of their own leader. Unconfirmed reports indicate that some of the abuse was even filmed for sub-sequent viewing by army leaders. But the tragedy had not yet reached its climax. Mobutu was determined that, whatever about humiliating his rival, he did not want Lumumba’s blood on his hands. The Belgians wanted Lumumba dead, so an arrangement was secretly agreed whereby Lumumba would be delivered to Katanga and to those who hated him most.
What happened next has largely emerged through the award-winning work of Flemish investigative journalist, Ludo de Witte, who tracked down many of those involved. His book – Die Moord Op Lumumba (The Assassination of Lumumba) – became a bestseller and prompted a formal inquiry into the events of 1961 by the Belgian parliament. De Witte argued that not only was Belgium complicit in Lumumba’s murder, but President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration and the CIA were also supportive of the assassination.
On 15 January 1961, Belgium secretly instructed President Tshombe and Katanga to accept custody of Lumumba. Tshombe – who fully realised it was coded language for a death sentence – is said to have hesitated for only a moment before agreeing. One Belgian official later commented that Lumumba’s death was ‘a public health measure’. On 17 January, Lumumba was flown from Leopoldville to Elisabethville in the heart of Katanga. On the flight, he was savagely beaten again by Baluba soldiers who were specifically assigned to the mission because of their tribal hatred of Lumumba.
The bloodied prime minister was taken from the military jail at Thysville and handed over to Katangan soldiers – commanded by a Belgian officer – who ushered the politician to the Villa Brouwe, a secure compound on the outskirts of the city. Katangan and Belgian soldiers took it in turns to beat Lumumba while Tshombe visited to view his deposed rival at first hand.
Later, after some discussion between Tshombe and the Katangan cabinet, Lumumba and two of his staunchest supporters who had also been arrested, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, were taken to a remote location in the bush some fifty kilometres outside Elisabethville by an armed squad commanded by Belgian officers. A Belgian soldier, Captain Julien Gat, commanded the firing squad. In the presence of Tshombe and the Belgian police commissioner in Katanga, Franz Verscheure, the three prisoners were placed against a tree. Lumumba had been so badly beaten that, according to accounts, he was hardly able to stand. Lumumba spotted the graves, which had already been dug, and he turned to one of the Belgians and said, in French, ‘You’re going to shoot us?’ Lumumba was executed by firing squad and then shot at close range through the head. He was the last of the three friends to be executed. It was 9.40 p.m. on 17 January 1961 and Congo was about to enter another dark age.
The bodies were dug up two days later amid mounting Belgian concerns about the political fall-out from the execution. The corpses were hacked to pieces before being dissolved in sulphuric acid obtained from local mining firms. Belgian policeman, Gerard Soerte, was ordered to take charge of the exhumation and to help cover up all traces of the killing. Later he admitted, ‘He [a Katangan Minister] said “You destroy them – you make them disappear. How you
do it doesn’t interest me.” We were there for two whole days. We did things an animal would not do. That is why we were drunk – stone drunk.’
The final earthly traces of Patrice Lumumba and his friends – anything the mining acid could not destroy – were then placed on a huge funeral pyre with the ashes later scattered along a local road and river. The only things left after the process were bullets recovered from Lumumba’s corpse, which were kept as grisly souvenirs.
Mobutu, as he had shrewdly predicted, was the only beneficiary from the killing. Far from securing recognition of Katanga’s independence – and protecting Belgium’s puppet state – Lumumba’s death reinforced Congolese determination not to lose their wealthiest province. It also enraged Lumumba’s supporters who now staged a military coup of their own. The prime minister’s killing would forever stain Tshombe’s breakaway regime.
However, Lumumba’s death did not immediately derail Tshombe’s separatist movement. Rather, it increased the stakes in the short term, and Katanga suddenly saw an influx of Belgian, French, American, German and even South African mercenaries eager to defend the statelet. These guns for hire – many of them veterans of the bitter colonial conflicts in north Africa and south-east Asia – were regarded as the ‘steel’ in the rapidly expanding Katangese army or gendarmerie.
The availability of hard cash ensured that the gendarmerie had access to the very best in weaponry. Katanga even secured Fouga Magister jets for its air force, instantly giving it a major advantage over any UN troops to be deployed. Katanga also acquired some ex-US army armoured cars, including a number of Staghound T17E1 vehicles, which boasted a 37mm gun.
The first UN troops from Ireland entered the Congo in July 1960 – one month after Patrice Lumumba’s doomed speech – in a desperate effort to hold the country together and prevent a civil war over Katanga. Niemba, an isolated outpost in Katanga, then claimed the lives of nine Irish soldiers in November 1960 and forever dispelled the thought that Ireland’s first major United Nations mission overseas would be little more than a parade ground exercise.
Those responsible for the Niemba killings – members of the Baluba tribe – never understood that the Irish soldiers were in fact there to help them. The Balubas were one of the African tribes left most vulnerable by both independence and the threat of Katangan secession – to them there appeared to be no difference between Belgian mercenaries and Irish or Swedish UN troops.
By the time Pat Mullins, John O’Mahony and the members of the 35th Battalion descended the steps of the Globemaster II at Leopoldville in June 1961, the Congo stood on the precipice of all-out civil war. The UN was deployed to keep the peace between armed groups determined to destroy each other or anyone who got in their way, but the Irish soldiers realised that the situation was much more dangerous than they had realised.
‘We arrived in the Congo to discover that we were the meat in the sandwich. The UN was there to keep the warring sides apart – the only problem was that some of the warring sides outnumbered and outgunned us,’ John O’Mahony said.
Sgt Dan Carroll and Tpr Ned Regan on armed guard as a queue of Baluba refugees seek admission to a UN camp at Elisabethville.
Members of the 35th Irish (UN) Battalion form up on parade outside Prince Leopold Farm. Note the blue helmets and the Carl Gustav sub-machine guns arming the troops. (Photo: Art Magennis)
The bush on the far outskirts of Elisabethville. The Lubumbashi River is in the left background while the sprawl of the city is just visible in the right background. (Photo: Art Magennis)
A young Tpr John O’Mahony poses for the camera while on duty at Elisabethville Airport in August 1961. Note the Magister jet to the left rear. In the centre is a ubiquitous Douglas DC-3 of Second World War vintage, while to the right is a Douglas DC-4. (Photo: John O’Mahony)
5 – The Slow Burning Fuse to Tragedy
When Pat Mullins, John O’Mahony and the other members of the 35th Irish (UN) Battalion stepped out onto the tarmac of Leopoldville Airport they might as well have set foot on Mars. Most of the soldiers who gratefully scrambled out of the Globemaster II that evening had never been abroad before, let alone experienced a culture as exotic as that of the Congo. Most of the men had never even seen a black person at first-hand before – now there were Congolese porters, ground crew, airport attendants and drivers curiously gathered everywhere to watch the new arrivals.
‘We stepped out into the heat of Leopoldville in our normal wool uniforms – and I’d say within a few minutes you could have fried eggs on our foreheads we were so hot,’ John recalled. ‘We didn’t get our tropical kit until the following day when we began to organise ourselves at Camp Limiate on the outskirts of Leopoldville. This was the old Belgian colonial capital and it was quiet and pretty safe. Katanga was far to the south and Leopoldville seemed totally unaffected by what was going on.’
The city was known as Kinshasa to the Congolese and Leopold-ville to the Belgians. Leopoldville/Kinshasa was the true centre of power in the vast country – and also offered concessions to the Europeans who came to the Congo looking for fame, fortune, adventure or simply escape.
Kinshasa was a vastly older settlement than its upstart rival to the south, Elisabethville. Whereas Kinshasa had been a settlement of some form or other since about 500 bc, Elisabethville had been founded in 1910 by the Belgians to assist with the development of the newly discovered mineral riches in Katanga. Located on a strategic stretch of the Congo River, Kinshasa offered both access to the coast via steamboat and to the interior, upriver along the Congo.
The settlement, discovered first by Stanley and then King Leopold’s agents in the 1880s, was just a rudimentary trading post located on the river and surrounded by a vast collection of African villages one of which was named ‘Kinchassa’. The major tribes of the region were the Humbu and Mfinu, and they received a share of the profitable trade that passed through, whether it was slaves, ivory, timber or foodstuffs. Slaves – usually the unfortunate losers in the latest bout of Congolese tribal warfare – were shipped to the coast where there was a ready market with European and Arab slave traders.
Africa’s west coast was one of the ‘points’ of the infamous slave triangle trade. This involved African slaves being shipped by Europeans to North America and the Caribbean for work on the cotton and sugar plantations. The ships then brought tobacco, sugar, cotton and rum from North America back to Europe. They then loaded up with European trade goods for Africa, including cloth, ironware and weapons. Having unloaded in the Congo or the other slave depots along the west African coast, the triangular process started all over again. Of all the Congo’s exports, it was slaves that generated the most wealth and the greatest misery.
Stanley was the first to grasp that Kinshasa was a vital hub that offered control of western, northern and central Congo. Crucially, it was the first navigable port above the Livingstone Falls, some 300 kilometres to the west. While Boma – located in the Congo estuary near the coast – was initially chosen as the capital of King Leopold’s new territory, it was soon clear that Kinshasa offered far greater strategic advantages.
The French, who established Brazzaville – the capital of the other Congolese nation, the Republic of the Congo – on the north bank of the vast Congo River, also appreciated those strategic advantages. Eventually, the French made Brazzaville the capital of their vast new entity, French Equatorial Africa (AEF). This huge colony comprised the modern-day Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Central African Republic and Chad. The two booming capitals now stared across at each other over the brooding Congo River.
For a decade, the Belgians had to use vast teams of porters to carry export goods from Kinshasa to Matadi, the next navigable port below the falls. But the king was adamant that the Congo had to develop and, in 1898, a railway was finally completed linking Kinshasa/Leopoldville with Matadi. It was a prodigious achievement given the terrain and the climate, and the death toll of workers is still only estimable. The railway slashed shipment times �
�� particularly for wild rubber exports – and the city suddenly began to expand at a ferocious pace.
As the Irish troops gazed around at their surroundings that June day in 1961, it was clear that Leopoldville was a city of enormous contrasts. There were wide, graceful tarmac boulevards lined with beautiful colonial houses and manicured lawns dotted with exotic flowers. There were also grand colonial buildings housing the organs of the Belgian administration – and there were bistros, restaurants and hotels. Leopoldville had spacious parks and its own Parc Zoologique. But nearly encircling the city, there were also vast shanty towns where the native African workers lived, most in varying degrees of squalor. While Leopoldville was only a fraction of the size it would soon become under President Mobutu, it was clear to all the Irish troops that, already, the vast contrasts in lifestyles did not bode well.
For the young Irish soldiers, it was a sensory overload –
everything was so strange, exciting and exotic that the troops weren’t quite able to take it all in on that first ride from the airport to their staging barracks. Yet, what every single Irish soldier noted was that the Congo was armed as if it was expecting imminent trouble. There were Force Publique or Congolese army troops stationed throughout the city, while UN military police patrols swept around the streets in jeeps ensuring that UN peacekeepers stayed out of trouble.
Camp Limiate was everything that the USAF Wheelus Field base was not. There were few concessions to comfort. The barracks were basically old sheds and all the cooking had to be done in field kitchens set up by the UN logistics corps. The weather was also oppressively hot and sticky. Irish soldiers, totally unaccustomed to humidity, wilted in the ferocious humidity generated by the Congo basin. The soldiers made the welcome swap to tropical kit and soon everyone took to wearing shorts because of the heat and humidity. But mosquitoes made life hell for everyone.
