Murdered Congo leader's son seeks Belgian justice

Of all the deaths in Congo's terrible history, Lumumba's is the best remembered

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* Editorial
* The Guardian, Thursday 1 July 2010
* Article history

"Much that is incredible, extravagant, ambiguous and unjust has been written about Patrice Lumumba", his friend Thomas Kanza once noted. He was right. Congo's first prime minister, a hero of independence 50 years ago this week, was overthrown and murdered less that a year after taking office. Of all the deaths in that country's terrible history, Lumumba's is the best remembered: a man whose killing doomed hopes of African independence. It is too easy to think that, had he lived, the Congo would have thrived. Lumumba was not a saint and the challenge of running a vast country whose population had been denied basic education by Belgian rulers interested only in exploiting its wealth would have sunk any government.

But the Congo, which became Zaire, would have been spared the autocracyof President Mobutu and perhaps the hideous war that followed his death. This week the Belgian king arrived in Kinshasa to mark Congo's half century as an independent state, a peculiar re-enactment of his predecessor's role granting independence in 1960. Then, Lumumba, denied a formal place at the ceremony, denounced colonial rule. Belgium conspired to overthrow him; so did the United States. No one knows who ordered his death, only that Belgian troops were involved in it. Now Lumumba's sons say they want justice. More than that, though, DRC needs peace and prosperity, rather than the continued abuses of its latest discredited government. That would be the best tribute to its lost leader.

Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa

“In assessing the central character ...
Gibbon’s description of the Byzantine general
Belisarius may suggest a comparison:
‘His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times;
his virtues were his own.’”
— Richard Mahoney on President Kennedy

By Jim DiEugenio
CTKA From the January-February 1999 issue (Vol. 6 No. 2)

As Probe has noted elsewhere (especially in last year’s discussion of Sy Hersh’s anti-Kennedy screed, The Dark Side of Camelot), a clear strategy of those who wish to smother any search for the truth about President Kennedy’s assassination is to distort and deny his achievements in office. Hersh and his ilk have toiled to distort who Kennedy really was, where he was going, what the world would have been like if he had lived, and who and what he represented. As with the assassination, the goal of these people is to distort, exaggerate, and sometimes just outright fabricate in order to obfuscate specific Kennedy tactics, strategies, and outcomes.

This blackening of the record—disguised as historical revisionism—has been practiced on the left, but it is especially prevalent on the right. Political spy and propagandist Lucianna Goldberg—such a prominent figure in the current Clinton sex scandal—was tutored early on by the godfather of the anti-Kennedy books, that triple-distilled rightwinger and CIA crony Victor Lasky. In fact, at the time of Kennedy’s death, Lasky’s negative biography of Kennedy was on the best-seller lists. Lately, Christopher Matthews seemed to be the designated hitter on some of these issues (see the article on page 26). Curiously, his detractors ignore Kennedy’s efforts in a part of the world far from America, where Kennedy’s character, who and what he stood for, and how the world may have been different had he lived are clearly revealed. But to understand what Kennedy was promoting in Africa, we must first explore his activities a decade earlier.

SNIP...

To say the least, this is not what the Dulles brothers John Foster and Allen had in mind. Once the French empire fell, they tried to urge upon Eisenhower an overt American intervention in the area. When Eisenhower said no, Allen Dulles sent in a massive CIA covert operation headed by Air Force officer Edward Lansdale. In other words, the French form of foreign domination was replaced by the American version.

SNIP...

1964: LBJ reverses Kennedy’s policies

In 1964, the leftist rebellion picked up strength and began taking whole provinces. President Johnson and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy decided that a weakened Adoula had to be strengthened with a show of American help. The CIA sent Cuban exile pilots to fly sorties against the rebels. When the UN finally withdrew, the US now became an ally of Belgium and intervened with arms, airplanes and advisors. Incredibly, as Jonathan Kwitny notes, Mobutu now invited Tshombe back into the Congo government (p. 79). Further, Tshombe now blamed the revolts on China! To quote Kwitny:

In a move suspiciously reminiscent of a standard US intelligence agency ploy, Tshombe produced what he said were some captured military documents, and a Chinese defector who announced that China was attempting to take over the Congo as part of a plot to conquer all of Africa. (p. 79)

With this, the Mobutu-Tshombe alliance now lost all semblance of a Gullion-Kennedy styled moderate coalition. Now, rightwing South Africans and Rhodesians were allowed to join the Congolese army in the war on the “Chinese-inspired left”. Further, as Kwitny also notes, this dramatic reversal was done under the auspices of the United States. The UN had now been dropped as a stabilizing, multilateral force. This meant, of course, that the tilt to the right would now go unabated. By 1965, the new American and Belgian supplemented force had put down the major part of the rebellion. General Mobutu then got rid of President Kasavubu. (Adoula had already been replaced by Tshombe.) In 1966, Mobutu installed himself as military dictator. The rest is a familiar story. Mobutu, like Suharto in Indonesia, allowed his country to be opened up to loads of outside investment. The riches of the Congo, like those of Indonesia, were mined by huge western corporations, whose owners and officers grew wealthy while Mobutu’s subjects were mired in abject poverty. As with the economy, Mobutu stifled political dissent as well. And, like Suharto, Mobutu grew into one of the richest men in the world. His holdings in Belgian real estate alone topped one hundred million dollars (Kwitny p. 87). Just one Swiss bank account was worth $143 million. And like Suharto, Mobutu fell after three decades of a corrupt dictatorship, leaving most of his citizenry in an anarchic, post-colonial state similar to where they had been at the beginning of his reign.

The policies before and after Kennedy’s in this tale help explain much about the chaos and confusion going on in Congo today. It’s a story you won’t read in many papers or see on television. In itself, the events which occurred there from 1959 to 1966 form a milestone. As Kwitny writes:

The democratic experiment had no example in Africa, and badly needed one. So perhaps the sorriest, and the most unnecessary, blight on the record of this new era, is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in post-colonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country, and were all instigated by the United States of America. (p. 75)

CONTINUED...

http://www.ctka.net/pr199-africa.html