CONGO: Katanga v. the World

In the Congo the week began in deceptive calm. Cautiously, Belgian merchants crept back into the cities, taking down the shutters from their shop windows in hasty compliance with the Congo Cabinet's decree that stores and factories must reopen by August 8 or be confiscated. Reports of continuing tribal warfare among the Baluba and Lulua in the Kasai interior hardly ruffled Léopoldville's street crowds. Here and there local commanders of the Congo's restive Force Publique set up as semi-independent potentates. One Sabena pilot on a routine flight to Stanleyville suddenly heard on his radio the voice of the "commander of the Fifth Bicycle Battalion" warning sternly, "Do not violate my air space again or I'll shoot you down!" But in the 47 regional centers where they had been scattered by whirlwind airlifts (see map), the U.N.'s 11,000 troops had no trouble at all keeping the peace.

Louder & Louder. While his blue-helmeted men stood bored guard duty on sweltering street corners and dusty village lanes. Dag Hammarskjold dickered endlessly with the Congo's erratic politicians. Encouraged by the mercurial remarks of Premier Patrice Lumumba as he wended his way home from the U.S., the Congo government became more and more insistent on the departure of Belgian troops from their bastion in Katanga.

The mineral-rich southeastern province of Katanga in preindependence days supplied 60% of the revenue of the Congo government and most of the wealth the Belgians drew from the colony. In Katanga, Provincial Boss Moise Tshombe stoutly insisted that the Belgians must stay to protect Katanga's self-proclaimed status as a sovereign "republic" independent of Lumumba's government. Even a public promise from Hammarskjold that the troops the U.N. wanted to send in to replace the Belgians would not meddle in Katanga's quarrels with Lumumba failed to budge the stubborn Tshombe.

On the Air. As chief of a government dominated by Belgian "advisers" and propped up by a 7,000-man Belgian army, Moise Tshombe looked mighty like a puppet of Brussels. Operating on this theory, Hammarskjold early last week sent one of his aides flying off to Belgium with a blunt appeal: Remove your forces from Katanga so the U.N. can take over. Within hours, the envoy flashed back word of Belgian acceptance and Hammarskjold happily went on the air with an announcement that U.N. troops would move into Katanga at week's end. Dag then sent the U.S.'s Ralph Bunche flying off to the Katanga capital of Elisabethville as his advance emissary.

But while Congo government ministers jubilantly feted Dag, enraged Moise Tshombe called for "total mobilization," declared: "Katanga is independent, and will remain independent. The U.N. has no more right than any other country to enter our territory against its will." In Elisabethville and other Katanga towns, volunteers and recruits lined up by the hundreds to join Katanga's "army," and Tshombe's aides sent light planes to drop leaflets over the countryside, urging Katangans to prepare for war. There were no visible signs of Belgian pressure on Tshombe to give in.