Congo: Unsafe Little Kingdom

• Share

Between the spells of violence, there always comes a time when everything stops for the Congo's slow-motion politics. It is a painful process, and excruciatingly complicated, almost as if each side hoped to crush the other through sheer exasperation.

Last week another bout of politicking was under way. Into Leopoldville at last flew the first batch of President Moise Tshombe's Katanga Deputies to the central Congolese Parliament. Landing in a United Nations plane and guaranteed U.N. protection during their stay, they arrived ostensibly in fulfillment of Tshombe's pledge made fortnight ago in his meeting at Kitona with the central government's Premier Cyrille Adoula. The pledge: to integrate secessionist Katanga province with the rest of the Congo. But it was clear from the moment the delegates left Elisabethville's airport that they were not ready to keep Tshombe's promise. As the Deputies departed, a spokesman said: "We are going to Leopoldville to have that ridiculous Fundamental Law changed."

Inside Pressure. The Loi Fondamentale is the provisional constitution left behind by the Belgians when they pulled out of the Congo in June 1960. Because the draft looked toward a federal Congo with a strong central government, Tshombe was against it from the start; at his meeting with Adoula, he reluctantly agreed to accept its provisions, but now (on the ground that his own provincial Parliament in Katanga had still to ratify his agreement) he insisted that the delegates would try again to get the provisional constitution changed. Said he: "We still insist on a confederation."

Tshombe was speaking not only for himself. A powerful faction inside his Cabinet, led by tough Godefroid Munongo, Katanga's Minister of the Interior, refused any compromise whatever with the central Congolese regime. On the other side were Katanga's Baluba tribesmen—many of them displaced by the war and living precariously in U.N. refugee camps—whose leaders hate Tshombe and demand not secession but union with the Congo; the Baluba represent half of all Katanga's people.

The U.N. insisted that the Katangese at least make a stab at settling their differences with Adoula. The threatened alternative: a new military crackdown by the U.N.'s Swedish, Irish, Indian and Ethiopian troops, now holding Elisabethville and other towns in a firm grip. An even more humiliating prospect for Tshombe lay in the U.N.'s announcement that a thousand troops from Adoula's central Congolese army soon could don blue helmets and join the U.N. force as "guards" in Katanga. Using these undisciplined, ill-trained troops was a considerable risk, but the U.N. decided on the move to enhance Adoula's prestige and underline his authority against Tshombe.