by Ralph Riegel
DES KEEGAN
A native of Dublin, Des joined the Defence Forces in February 1959 on his sixteenth birthday. After transferring to the 1st Motor Squadron in Fermoy, County Cork, he served in the army for twenty-one years before retiring with the rank of Squadron Sergeant. His career included three tours in the Congo, two tours in Cyprus and one tour in Lebanon. Having retired from the army, he was briefly employed in the private security sector before working for twelve years with electronics firm SCI in Fermoy and then retiring again – this time for good. He is one of the founder members of IUNVA’s Post 25 in Fermoy and devotes a lot of his time to assisting retired soldiers. His son is currently serving in the Defence Forces and has undertaken tours of Lebanon, Chad and Liberia.
THE MULLINS FAMILY
Denis (Dinny) Mullins took over the running of the family farm at Boher on the Cork-Limerick border. The farmhouse is much the same as the last day Pat saw it in 1961 – save for such modern ‘innovations’ as electricity and running water. As with all other Irish farms, the horse and plough is now a fast-fading memory and the entire holding is highly mechanised. Dinny married Marie and the couple have one son, Ned.
Tom Mullins, like Pat, worked for several farmers in the Kilbehenny area before getting a job with Mitchelstown Co-op. He married Mary and they have two children, Pat and Siobhan.
Mary and Tom Kent still live at Caherdrinna, midway between Kilworth and Mitchelstown, in the house where John O’Mahony and Pat Mullins enjoyed welcome breaks from training at nearby Lynch Camp in early 1961. Mary’s son, Eamon, who Pat never met, has taken a keen interest in his uncle and the Congo. Mary and Tom have two other children, Joan and Pat.
Margaret Mullins married Jim Dwane (RIP). The couple were blessed with seven children, Patricia, Donie, Mary, Margaret, James, Catherine and Eamon.
Nelly Mullins married Mike Kelly (RIP). They were blessed with two children, Eamon and Anthony.
Theresa Mullins married Pat Healy and they have one son, Patrick.
PATRICE LUMUMBA
The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s first post-independence prime minister was dead within six months of making his inflammatory speech in front of King Baudouin in June 1960. Lumumba’s fate echoed that of the Congolese people both past and future. Hunted like an animal, captured, tortured, humiliated, ignored by UN troops who could have helped him and finally handed over to his hated enemies in Katanga, Lumumba’s killing still haunts modern Belgium.
Research by investigative reporter Ludo de Witte in the 1990s revealed that Belgium was deeply complicit in Lumumba’s death and had the tacit support of the United States who viewed Lumumba as leaning dangerously towards Communism. His revelations prompted a parliamentary inquiry in Brussels – although four decades after the event, there was little left but rhetoric.
Even back in January 1961, Lumumba’s killers realised that absolutely no trace of the prime minister’s corpse could be allowed to remain after the execution. After the application of mining acid and funeral pyres, not a single physical trace was left of the Congo’s charismatic leader. Yet rumours still swirled around the Congo that his killers – before destroying his body and those of two friends also executed – insisted on digging the bullets out of his brain to keep as grisly souvenirs. Lumumba’s political career may have lasted just over two years, but he remains to this day one of Africa’s most fascinating – and studied – post-colonial leaders.
Elisabethville, the city where he was flown to meet his brutal death, was eventually renamed ‘Lubumbashi’. The city remains a wealthy mining outpost in a country still torn apart by poverty, bloodshed, corruption and tribal strife.
CONOR CRUISE O’BRIEN
Just months after the vicious fighting involving Ireland’s 35th Battalion at Elisabethville and Jadotville, Conor Cruise O’Brien resigned from his position with the United Nations in Katanga. To this day, debate rages over his role in the UN’s switch from peacekeeping to peace-enforcing operations.
In 1962, O’Brien wrote To Katanga and Back, a book which offers a fascinating insight into both UN and African politics at the time – though it also justifies O’Brien’s own position and actions. Throughout his life, O’Brien remained sensitive to comments about his role in the Congo – even using the letters page of The Irish Times to challenge some writings about Katanga and UN actions.
After a brief stint in academia in Ghana and then New York, O’Brien decided to return to Ireland and was elected a TD in 1969 for the Labour Party. He was later appointed as a cabinet minister in Liam Cosgrave’s 1973–77 administration. O’Brien – who quickly earned the nickname ‘The Cruiser’ – proved a talented, effective, if controversial politician, who was always willing to speak his mind on issues, sometimes to the dismay of both his Labour and Fine Gael colleagues. He was particularly noted for his visceral opposition to the IRA and the growth of militant republicanism. It was ironic that, despite a family background in journalism, O’Brien was a trenchant supporter of the use of censorship to tackle republicanism in the 1970s.
Having left full-time politics, after losing his Dáil seat in 1977 following Jack Lynch’s landslide Fianna Fáil victory, he burnished his reputation with an outstanding career in journalism both in Ireland and Britain where, for two years, he served as editor of The Observer.
His razor-sharp assessment of current affairs included coining the legendary Irish phrase GUBU (Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented) when a murder suspect was discovered in the Dublin flat of Charles Haughey’s then attorney general.
O’Brien – a columnist with the Irish Independent – also found time to write several critically acclaimed books including a biography of Edmund Burke and his own best-selling memoirs.
However, in later life O’Brien shocked friends and contemporaries alike by publicly embracing Unionism and joining the UK Unionist Party. He would later resign. Three years before his death in 2008 at the ripe old age of ninety-one, he rejoined the Labour Party. O’Brien was also an ardent supporter of Israel’s right to exist and defend herself from attack.
JOSEPH MOBUTU
The former Christian Brothers student was the true winner of the brutal events of 1960–1964. Mobutu knew that the Force Publique or Congolese army was the key to the country’s future – and he used it to sideline all the country’s leading pre-independence politicians. His Katangan rival, Tshombe, did him a huge inadvertent favour by killing Patrice Lumumba. As Mobutu well grasped, the blood of the prime minister’s assassination would forever stain Tshombe’s rule.
On the withdrawal of the UN from the Congo in 1964, Mobutu allowed a brief interval before moving against Tshombe who fled into exile where he died.
Mobutu milked the Congo’s riches for all they were worth and turned the country into his personal fiefdom. He knew that the key to the survival of his regime was proving a staunch ally of the West during the Cold War.
Mobutu sought to give the Congo a new start by renaming the country ‘Zaire’ and even funding the lavish, if gaudy, staging of the World Heavyweight Championship bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974. The fight went down in sporting legend as ‘the Rumble in the Jungle’. All Mobutu actually managed to achieve was a lingering sense of exploitation thanks to his son who sped around the centre of Kinshasa in front of the world media in a series of expensive Italian and German sports cars.
The end of the Cold War spelled the end for Mobutu, though he managed to cling on to power until May 1997. However, his desperate attempts to bolster his regime are now blamed for helping trigger the genocide in neighbouring Rwanda.
Mobutu died just four months after fleeing to Morocco. He is buried in Rabat and the Congo has shown no desire for his remains to be repatriated.
MOISE TSHOMBE
The execution of Patrice Lumumba tainted Tshombe’s regime in Katanga, which from that point, was doomed. With Belgium and other pro-Katanga countries unwilling to fund mercenaries in a war against UN troops, the secession
was effectively over.
Reinforced UN troops captured Katanga in 1963 and Tshombe fled into exile in northern Rhodesia. By 1964, when an all-inclusive political deal had been hammered out to settle the Congo’s problems, Tshombe returned from exile in Spain. He quickly discovered that Mobutu and the Congo’s titular head, Joseph Kasavubu, had no intention of allowing his long-term involvement in Congolese politics.
Tshombe was dismissed from the government within months and fled the country a second time after realising that Mobutu was about to charge him with high treason. In 1967, a Congo court imposed the death penalty on Tshombe. Two years later, Tshombe hit the headlines again when the plane he was travelling on was hijacked and diverted to Algeria. Tshombe was arrested and later placed under house arrest in Algiers. The Algerian government briefly considered deporting him to the Congo. But fear of western displeasure at such an effective death sentence stayed their hand and Tshombe remained under house arrest.
Tshombe died in 1969, reportedly from a cardiac condition that triggered a massive stroke. Belgium – where the authorities never forgot that he was a loyal ally – later agreed to have his body flown to Brussels for burial. Mobutu’s regime maintained that Tshombe was en route to Africa, intending to take part in a military insurrection, when his plane was hijacked. Two earlier insurrections were brutally put down.
BOB DENARD
After his exploits with the Katangan gendarmerie, the French mercenary continued to ply his trade throughout other war-torn parts of Africa.
Denard – whose real name was Gilbert Bourgeaud – served with the French navy, not the Foreign Legion as widely claimed. He became one of the world’s best-known mercenaries.
By the time of his death on 13 October 2007 at the ripe old age of seventy-eight, Denard had fought in Indo-China, Algeria, the Congo, Angola, Zimbabwe, Gabon and the Comoros Islands. Denard – who liked to be referred to as ‘Le Colonel’ – sired eight children through the course of seven marriages, several of which were polygamous. His story is widely credited as the inspiration for the Hollywood blockbuster, The Wild Geese and for Frederick Forsyth’s best-selling novel, The Dogs of War.
Several years before his death, Denard converted to Islam. The scale of his precise involvement in both Katanga and the Congo remains shrouded in mystery to this day.
DAG HAMMARSKJOLD
The Swedish diplomat remains the only United Nations Secretary-General to be killed in office.
Hammarskjöld was only fifty-six when he died in the plane crash at Ndola on 18 September 1961. The reason for the crash of the Douglas DC-6 aircraft in which he was travelling remains a mystery – many are convinced that the plane was shot down. Conspiracy theorists have been aided in their suspicions by the bizarre manner in which the authorities in northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) initially responded to the crash. Several studies have indicated that if a more prompt response been initiated some of the passengers might have survived.
Only one man survived the initial crash, Sgt Harold Julian, and he told those trying to help him that there had been several explosions before the plane plummeted to earth. It was also discovered that there were bullet wounds on two of the UN leader’s Swedish bodyguards. However, experts at the time discounted Julian’s account as confused – while the Swedes’ injuries were explained by ammunition ‘cooking off’ in the fire that followed the crash.
At the time of the tragic crash, Hammarskjöld was en route to Katanga to try and negotiate a ceasefire to end the bitter fighting which had erupted between UN forces and Katangan gendarmes. President John F. Kennedy – who also died violently within two years – described Dag Hammarskjöld as the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. He is now widely considered the finest UN Secretary-General in history.
PAT CAHALANE
A native of Dundrum in Dublin, Cmdt Cahalane eventually recovered from the injuries he sustained to his hearing in the Congo. He was attached to Defence Forces headquarters where he gradually became involved in the training regime at the Irish Military College. He was later assigned by the army to assist Zambia (formerly northern Rhodesia) with the training of its army officers, spending some time in Africa in the process. After he retired from the army, he secured a job as a security consultant for a leading Irish bank. He died more than twenty years ago.
KING BAUDOUIN I
The great irony of King Baudouin’s June 1960 speech, which triggered Patrice Lumumba’s scathing denouncement of Belgian colonialism, is that Baudouin was one of the most compassionate monarchs ever to have sat on a European throne.
Kind, generous, loyal and deeply religious, Baudouin was Belgian king for a period of forty-two years (1951–1993). Baudouin had not even wanted to accept the Belgian throne following the abdication of his father, King Leopold III, who abdicated under the twin clouds of his actions during the Nazi occupation of Belgium and a controversial romance with a commoner. However, Baudouin was warned that Belgium could not tolerate a second abdication in succession and that, if he refused to be king, the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha would likely fall and Belgium would become a Republic. He agreed to take the throne and proved one of the most diligent of Europe’s royals.
He was so loved by his subjects that Belgium went into deep mourning when he died unexpectedly while on holiday in Madrid at the age of sixty-three. Baudouin’s career was marked by a genuine concern for his subjects and the challenges posed by social disadvantage, which makes his actions in the Congo that summer in 1960 all the more difficult to understand given their obvious consequences.
The Belgian king was twenty-nine years old when he delivered that key address at the Congolese independence ceremony – and many now believe that his ill-judged speech was the combination of relative youth, the scheming of his political advisors and hard memories of his previous visit to Leopoldville when angry crowds threw stones at some of his supporters.
Baudouin had a happy thirty-three year marriage to the Spanish noblewoman, Doña Fabiola Mora Aragón. The couple never had children so, on Baudouin’s death, the Belgian crown passed to the king’s youngest brother, Albert II.
APPENDIX B –
TIMELINE
• 1482 – First permanent European trading contacts established in the Congo with the formation of a Portuguese colony.
• 1680 – Slave trade begins in earnest, initially to feed booming British, Spanish and French plantations in the New World.
• May 1876 – Belgium’s King Leopold II convenes the International African Association (AIA) with the aim of promoting exploration and colonisation. Leopold secures widespread support thanks to his promise to abolish the slave trade.
• September 1878 – Explorer Henry Morgan Stanley agrees to work with King Leopold to promote European interests in vast African regions.
• November 1884 – German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck organises the Berlin Conference to avert clashes between world powers over remaining unclaimed regions of Africa.
• February 1885 – King Leopold’s organisation receives 2.34 million square kilometres of Congo territory, more than France and Portugal combined. But the region is allocated to the king’s philanthropic organisation (AIA) not the Belgian state.
• 1889–1902 – The development of the automobile and perfection of tyre technology leads to an explosion in global demand for rubber. King Leopold’s loss-making African possession rushes to sate the world’s demand for rubber.
• 1900 – Anglo-French journalist, Edmond Morel, reveals King Leopold’s trade monopoly in the Congo and the fact that trade figures are being doctored.
• May 1903 – American missionary, William Morrison, makes damning allegations about atrocities in the Congo. The British public is outraged.
• June 1903 – Britain’s consul in the Congo, Roger Casement, is asked to make a full report on alleged abuses of natives by Belgian overseers.
• December 1903 – Casement submits his report to Lord Lansdowne at the Foreign Office. The eighty-four-page doc
ument detailed appalling atrocities perpetrated against tribes who failed to adhere to Belgian rubber quotas. Most gruesome is the revelation that Belgian-employed African soldiers would sever and smoke the hands of Congolese workers – submitting basketfuls of smoked hands to the overseers to prove that they had not wasted rifle ammunition shooting them.
• 1904–1908 – The scandal over King Leopold’s Congo operations finally forces the Belgian government to assume full control of the African territory. Conditions improve but the Congo natives are still subjected to effective apartheid.
• 1914–18 and 1940–45 – Belgium’s occupation by German forces in both world wars effectively undermines their position in the Congo.
• 1913–1917 – Major mineral deposits discovered in Katanga with copper and diamond mining launched.
• 1941–1948 – Repeated disturbances in the Congo ranging from strikes to a mutiny by Force Publique, the Congolese national army.
• October 1952 – Governor-General Léon Antoine Marie Pétillon predicts that, without major civil rights reform, Belgium would lose the Congo.
• 1959 – Belgium’s King Baudouin I pays his second visit to the Congo, which turns into a disaster when locals pelt him with stones after his perceived support for delayed independence. There are riots in Leopoldville.
• June 1960 – Belgium formally ends colonial links with the Congo, terrified of a savage civil war such as France faced in Algeria.
• July 1960 – Moise Tshombe comes to power in Katanga, the southern and wealthiest of Congo’s provinces, and demands immediate secession. He is backed by European financial and mining interests but opposed by the Congolese government and northern tribal groups in Katanga including the Balubas.
• 2 July 1960 – Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba appeals to the UN for support in the face of Katangan secession, which he describes as a military revolt.
