<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" ><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;"><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"><div class="plainMail"><br>---------- Forwarded message ----------<br><br><br>NYTimes<br><br>January 16, 2011<br><br>An Assassination’s Long Shadow<br><br>By ADAM HOCHSCHILD<br><br>San Francisco<br><br>TODAY, millions of people on another continent are observing the 50th<br>anniversary of an event few Americans remember, the assassination of<br>Patrice Lumumba. A slight, goateed man with black, half-framed<br>glasses, the 35-year-old Lumumba was the first democratically chosen<br>leader of the vast country, nearly as large as the United States east<br>of the Mississippi, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.<br><br>This treasure house of natural resources had been a colony of Belgium,<br>which for decades had made no plans for independence. But
after<br>clashes with Congolese nationalists, the Belgians hastily arranged the<br>first national election in 1960, and in June of that year King<br>Baudouin arrived to formally give the territory its freedom.<br><br>“It is now up to you, gentlemen,” he arrogantly told Congolese<br>dignitaries, “to show that you are worthy of our confidence.”<br><br>The Belgians, and their European and American fellow investors,<br>expected to continue collecting profits from Congo’s factories,<br>plantations and lucrative mines, which produced diamonds, gold,<br>uranium, copper and more. But they had not planned on Lumumba.<br><br>A dramatic, angry speech he gave in reply to Baudouin brought<br>Congolese legislators to their feet cheering, left the king startled<br>and frowning and caught the world’s attention. Lumumba spoke<br>forcefully of the violence and humiliations of colonialism, from the<br>ruthless theft of African land to the way that
French-speaking<br>colonists talked to Africans as adults do to children, using the<br>familiar “tu” instead of the formal “vous.” Political independence was<br>not enough, he said; Africans had to also benefit from the great<br>wealth in their soil.<br><br>With no experience of self-rule and an empty treasury, his huge<br>country was soon in turmoil. After failing to get aid from the United<br>States, Lumumba declared he would turn to the Soviet Union. Thousands<br>of Belgian officials who lingered on did their best to sabotage<br>things: their code word for Lumumba in military radio transmissions<br>was “Satan.” Shortly after he took office as prime minister, the<br>C.I.A., with White House approval, ordered his assassination and<br>dispatched an undercover agent with poison.<br><br>The would-be poisoners could not get close enough to Lumumba to do the<br>job, so instead the United States and Belgium covertly funneled cash<br>and aid to
rival politicians who seized power and arrested the prime<br>minister. Fearful of revolt by Lumumba’s supporters if he died in<br>their hands, the new Congolese leaders ordered him flown to the<br>copper-rich Katanga region in the country’s south, whose secession<br>Belgium had just helped orchestrate. There, on Jan. 17, 1961, after<br>being beaten and tortured, he was shot. It was a chilling moment that<br>set off street demonstrations in many countries.<br><br>As a college student traveling through Africa on summer break, I was<br>in Léopoldville (today’s Kinshasa), Congo’s capital, for a few days<br>some six months after Lumumba’s murder. There was an air of tension<br>and gloom in the city, jeeps full of soldiers were on patrol, and the<br>streets quickly emptied at night. Above all, I remember the<br>triumphant, macho satisfaction with which two young American Embassy<br>officials — much later identified as C.I.A. men — talked with
me over<br>drinks about the death of someone they regarded not as an elected<br>leader but as an upstart enemy of the United States.<br><br>Some weeks before his death, Lumumba had briefly escaped from house<br>arrest and, with a small group of supporters, tried to flee to the<br>eastern Congo, where a counter-government of his sympathizers had<br>formed. The travelers had to traverse the Sankuru River, after which<br>friendly territory began. Lumumba and several companions crossed the<br>river in a dugout canoe to commandeer a ferry to go back and fetch the<br>rest of the group, including his wife and son.<br><br>But by the time they returned to the other bank, government troops<br>pursuing them had arrived. According to one survivor, Lumumba’s famous<br>eloquence almost persuaded the soldiers to let them go. Events like<br>this are often burnished in retrospect, but however the encounter<br>happened, Lumumba seems to have risked his life to try to
rescue the<br>others, and the episode has found its way into film and fiction.<br><br>His legend has only become deeper because there is painful newsreel<br>footage of him in captivity, soon after this moment, bound tightly<br>with rope and trying to retain his dignity while being roughed up by<br>his guards.<br><br>Patrice Lumumba had only a few short months in office and we have no<br>way of knowing what would have happened had he lived. Would he have<br>stuck to his ideals or, like too many African independence leaders,<br>abandoned them for the temptations of wealth and power? In any event,<br>leading his nation to the full economic autonomy he dreamed of would<br>have been an almost impossible task. The Western governments and<br>corporations arrayed against him were too powerful, and the resources<br>in his control too weak: at independence his new country had fewer<br>than three dozen university graduates among a black population of more<br>than
15 million, and only three of some 5,000 senior positions in the<br>civil service were filled by Congolese.<br><br>A half-century later, we should surely look back on the death of<br>Lumumba with shame, for we helped install the men who deposed and<br>killed him. In the scholarly journal Intelligence and National<br>Security, Stephen R. Weissman, a former staff director of the House<br>Subcommittee on Africa, recently pointed out that Lumumba’s violent<br>end foreshadowed today’s American practice of “extraordinary<br>rendition.” The Congolese politicians who planned Lumumba’s murder<br>checked all their major moves with their Belgian and American backers,<br>and the local C.I.A. station chief made no objection when they told<br>him they were going to turn Lumumba over — render him, in today’s<br>parlance — to the breakaway government of Katanga, which, everyone<br>knew, could be counted on to kill him.<br><br>Still more fateful was what
was to come. Four years later, one of<br>Lumumba’s captors, an army officer named Joseph Mobutu, again with<br>enthusiastic American support, staged a coup and began a disastrous,<br>32-year dictatorship. Just as geopolitics and a thirst for oil have<br>today brought us unsavory allies like Saudi Arabia, so the cold war<br>and a similar lust for natural resources did then. Mobutu was showered<br>with more than $1 billion in American aid and enthusiastically<br>welcomed to the White House by a succession of presidents; George H.<br>W. Bush called him “one of our most valued friends.”<br><br>This valued friend bled his country dry, amassed a fortune estimated<br>at $4 billion, jetted the world by rented Concorde and bought himself<br>an array of grand villas in Europe and multiple palaces and a yacht at<br>home. He let public services shrivel to nothing and roads and railways<br>be swallowed by the rain forest. By 1997, when he was overthrown
and<br>died, his country was in a state of wreckage from which it has not yet<br>recovered.<br><br>Since that time the fatal combination of enormous natural riches and<br>the dysfunctional government Mobutu left has ignited a long,<br>multisided war that has killed huge numbers of Congolese or forced<br>them from their homes. Many factors cause a war, of course, especially<br>one as bewilderingly complex as this one. But when visiting eastern<br>Congo some months ago, I could not help but think that one thread<br>leading to the human suffering I saw begins with the assassination of<br>Lumumba.<br><br>We will never know the full death toll of the current conflict, but<br>many believe it to be in the millions. Some of that blood is on our<br>hands. Both ordering the murders of apparent enemies and then<br>embracing their enemies as “valued friends” come with profound,<br>long-term consequences — a lesson worth pondering on this
anniversary.<br><br>Adam Hochschild is the author of “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of<br>Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa” and the forthcoming “To<br>End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.”<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br> <br><br> <br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br> <br><br><br><br><br> <br><br> <br><br>
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