First & last elected leader of the Congo

The Italian cultural institute screened the film “Lumumba” in Addis Ababa last week. This week, as if on queue, there was a coup attempt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where much of the east remains unstable with many armed gangs roaming around 34 years after independence and 33 years after Belgium and the US murdered the first elected Prime Minister of that troubled land.
Two years ago a parliamentary commission concluded that Belgium did bear moral responsibility for killing of Patrice Lumumba, whereupon the Belgium government “extended to the family of Patrice Lumumba and to the Congolese people its profound and sincere apologies for the pain inflicted upon them.”
Mr. Lumumba’s crime, which made his elimination an important objective for both Belgium and the United States at the time, was his perceived nationalistic and especially his pro-soviet leanings. He would inadvertently, fall in the “cold war” sinkhole where political murder was but one of the many deadly games in town.
The falling-out started on the very day of independence celebrations, June 30, 1960. The late King Baudouin of Belgium delivered an arrogant and extremely paternalistic speech in which he did not even acknowledge the assembled Congolese people or their elected leaders. Those who observed Lumumba furiously scribbling on the draft of his own speech during the King’s statement knew what was coming.
When called upon to speak, the Prime-Minister-Elect launched into a rousing nationalistic speech contrasting the Belgian King’s representation of a rosy colonial history with the humiliation that the Congolese had suffered under Belgian rule. The Congolese applauded widely with approval.
But the Belgian officialdom used to Africans groveling at its feet was stunned by what it considered to be a deliberate, rude and vindictive statement before the whole world. It was a bitter humiliation to the departing colonial power and Lumumba would soon pay with his life.
Henceforth, he would be regarded as unstable, irrational and sometimes bordering on the insane. A man with the audacity not to allow the Belgian mining company, Union Miniere, to maintain control over his country’s copper, cobalt and diamond mines…a man for “definitive elimination”, a terrorist.
Barely two weeks after Lumumba’s inauguration as Prime Minister of the Congo, Brussels dispatched agents to destabilize his government. “Technical”, legal and military assistance was extended to his political enemies calculated to deprive Lumumba of political as well as economic power. His arrest was orchestrated through pressure on Joseph Mobutu, the new chief of the Army.
A quick succession of events soon propelled the young Republic into Chaos. It started with a mutiny of Congolese soldiers against their all-Belgian officers, which spread to army barracks across the country. The Military considered only weeks before as the most reliable organization degenerated into a wild and dangerous rabble.
Under this chaotic cover, Moise Tchombe, the leader of the richest province Katanga, attempted to secede with the not so subtle military intervention of Belgium. Lumumba requests assistance from the UN, the US and the Soviet Union in order to evict the Belgians. When the Soviets delivered military equipment, in Washington, the reaction was one of “cold war” hysteria… the Russians are coming!!!
National Security Council meeting (August of 1960) concluded that Mr. Lumumba was “working to serve the purpose of the Soviet”, and that he is in “Soviet pay”. The US was not about to be forced out of strategic Congo by a Soviet-supplied lunatic.
With implicit authorization to assassinate Mr. Lumumba and plausible deniability firmly in place, the lame-duck Eisenhower administration dispatched CIA agents to the Congolese capital to apply poison to his toothbrush much like the poisoned cigars that were dispatched to kill Castro. Plan B was the use of a high powered rifle with telescopic scope and silencer.
Joseph Mobutu, Lumumba’s former private clerk, now army chief of staff with rank of colonel staged a coup after attempts to remove the Prime Minister and suspended all political institutions. By the time the prescribed poison was shipped from CIA labs to its agents in the Congo, Mubutu had already arrested Lumumba and delivered him to his archenemy Moise Tchombe in Katanga.
He is never to be seen again. On January 17, 1961, Patrice Lumumba was executed. Commanding the firing squad was a Belgian captain. Among the witnesses were the Belgian police commissioner and three Belgian military officers and, of course, representative of Moise Tchombe.
Mobutu would rule for 32 years as the steadfast ally of the West. In return for the systematic looting of Zaire’s enormous mineral wealth, the West periodically replenished the national treasury with the knowledge that Mobutu pilfered billions of dollars. His greatest accomplishment, it could be argued, is changing the Congo Republic’s name to Zaire.
The Lumumba Commission’s conclusion that the Belgium government bears only “moral responsibility” in the murder of Congo’s first and, so far only democratically elected Prime Minister was hogwash. Could it be motivated by the desire to protect the Belgian treasury from huge transfers of wealth south to its former colony that a full responsibility could entail?
Maybe it is time for an assessment of the damage inflicted on the Congolese people by the premeditated murder of their elected leaders, the destruction of their democracy at birth and the systematic pilfering of their strategic natural resources, the effects of which are still evident in the Congo.

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