A portable field battery in an anonymous Algiers villa, wired with metal clamps to the nipples or testicles; a roomful of French paratroopers and cigarette smoke; constant questions in a flat, bored voice. Tell us what you know and the pain will stop. Tell us what you know and the pain will stop. Then the electricity, the white light behind the eyes and the spasms. Algerian independence fighters who survived the torture called it la gégène. The French army called it counter-revolution.
France had been in Algeria since 1830, another tile in a mosaic of foreign invaders that included Phoenicians, Romans and Ottomans. Men from Paris built roads and villas, dug out farming grids and changed the country’s demographics with a salad of white immigrants from France, Italy and Spain, known as pieds noirs. The settlers worked side by side with native Algerians but never believed in equality. By 1954, Algerians of the Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front – FLN) had begun their fight for independence. The first battles took place in the monotonous sunlight of the steppes. Within two years, the FLN were in Algiers’s narrow streets. Men calling themselves urban guerrillas planted plastic explosive in cafés and knifed any policemen brave enough to chase them into the Casbah.
Paris unleashed the army. Among the men in green was a trim 48-year-old with greying hair, jaded eyes and ideas for a new kind of warfare. Colonel Roger Trinquier had joined the infantry at 20 to escape peasant life in the Hautes-Alpes. He fought river pirates in 1930s Indochina and confronted the Japanese in wartime Shanghai. In the post-war years, he led native groups behind Viet Minh lines. By the time he arrived in Algiers as head of a paratroop regiment, Trinquier had ditched the tactics taught in officer training school and become a convert to Colonel Lionel-Max Chassin’s radical new ideas of counter-revolutionary warfare. Chassin knew that it took more than a gunfight to defeat an insurgency. The French had to judo flip the guerrillas’ own tactics against them. Senior officers were slow to accept Chassin, so his partisans enlisted Belgian journalist Pierre Joly to spread the word. Joly published a selection of their writings in the underground book Contre-révolution.
Trinquier put the ideas to practical use in Algiers. He introduced small mobile combat units for street fighting, relocated sympathetic civilian populations, initiated social reform to cut away the FLN’s support and gathered intelligence by any means necessary. Crackling field generators, drowning torture, rubber hose beatings. Prisoners always talked.
In May 1958, Trinquier joined the putsch that brought General Charles de Gaulle back to power. The army had convinced itself that de Gaulle would keep Algeria French, but within two years the general authorised free elections in the colony, the start of an inevitable slide to independence. The French public cheered, sick of war and torture; the army felt betrayed. General Raoul Salan, a senior figure in the putsch, moved to Madrid and founded the Organisation de L’Armée Secrète (Secret Army Organisation – OAS) terror group to fight de Gaulle. Trinquier drove part of the way to the Spanish border with Salan but turned back, too loyal a soldier to take up arms against Paris.
Troubled by his allegiances, stuck in an administrative post in Nice, Trinquier received a letter from Africa on 5 January 1961. Georges Thyssens had a job for him as head of the Katangese armed forces.
Trinquier’s name had come up during a meeting between Katangese Minister of Defence Joseph Yav, a 31-year-old butterball of colourful American shirts under a black Homburg, and his new advisor Jacques Duchemin.
French journalist Duchemin had got the job after impressing Yav during an interview in Brussels. He quit the newspaper business and arrived in Elisabethville on 2 December 1960 aboard a Sabena DC-7 packed with Belgian civilians returning to Katanga. The numbers of whites in the Congo had been slowly climbing since the independence exodus: Katanga had 20,000, Léopoldville 9,000 and Kasaï 2,000.1
One of Duchemin’s first suggestions caught Yav’s attention: recruit a Frenchman to run the Katangese armed forces. Paris already sold the secession weapons through Abbé Fulbert Youlou’s Republic of the Congo, a former French colony, and de Gaulle had approved the delivery of three Fouga training jets (a pre-independence order that took its time) to Katanga by a Lebanese businessman. France would not object, according to Duchemin, if Katanga sheltered under its wing. Yav passed the suggestion to Moïse Tshombe.
The Katangese president was enthusiastic. He had no problems cutting ties with Belgium after the recent pressure to reunite the Congo. Duchemin’s plan could free Katanga from the whims of Brussels and open up a new future in French Africa, a network of former colonies that still took orders from Paris.
Duchemin suggested three senior French soldiers: de Massu, de Bigeard and Trinquier. The third name sounded familiar to Tshombe. When Pierre Joly of Contre-révolution fame had turned up in August with his plan for a French-led mercenary army, he had mentioned Trinquier as possible commander. Tshombe authorised Thyssens to write to the colonel in Nice.
The move angered Brussels and its advisors in Elisabethville. Major Guy Weber tried to sabotage Duchemin’s plan by spreading rumours that Thyssens intended to use French mercenaries to install a dictatorship under Munongo.
If the rumours contained any truth then Thyssens had picked the wrong partner. Munongo would never side with a white man against Tshombe. Recently, drinking in a bar, a European had said something that annoyed the Minister of the Interior. Munongo slapped the man’s face so hard his teeth rattled.
‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten you Belgians killed my great-grandfather,’ he said.2
Trinquier cleared the offer with French Foreign Minister Pierre Messmer, a pouchy-faced war veteran and de Gaulle loyalist. Messmer gave the green light.
‘The Belgians are already aware,’ said Messmer at his office in Paris’s leafy place du Maréchal-de-Lattre-de-Tassigny, ‘and look on this project with the greatest displeasure’.
‘Should I go or not?’
‘You should go. It will be a little more difficult, that’s all.’3
Messmer confided that de Gaulle’s ambition was to reunite Katanga with the rest of the Congo and run the country from Elisabethville. He recommended keeping that secret from Tshombe as long as possible. Trinquier asked how official his visit would be. Messmer thought it over.
‘I think it would be a good idea,’ said Messmer, ‘to detach you from the army for your mission and reinstate you afterwards’.4
At ten in the morning on 26 January 1961, a newly civilian Trinquier touched down at Elisabethville airport in a Sabena jet accompanied by his bodyguard Michel Rey. The Frenchman looked conspicuous as any ex-soldier, grim-faced in a boxy sports coat and sunglasses. Joseph Yav met Trinquier at the airport and briefed him on the situation as they drove into Elisabethville. The pressure from all sides to end the secession, the UN neutral zones, Balubakat and the Stanleyville ANC occupying parts of the north, questions being asked over Lumumba’s disappearance.
‘You see, we need a solid army to cope with this situation,’ Yav told him. ‘We are counting on you and the officers you recruit to save us.’5
Trinquier booked a room at the Hôtel Léopold II, an off-white block at the intersection of avenue de l’Etoile and avenue Fulbert Youlou. The hotel was infested by newspaper men, mercenaries and ultras. In the bar, smiling Katangese servers kept the whisky flowing as foreign correspondents hammered at portable Olivettis, a copy of Joseph Conrad’s Congo novella Heart of Darkness nearby for inspiration. Belgian settlers conspired in the lobby under spinning ceiling fans. Monsieur Blatter, the sour-faced Swiss manager, patrolled the dark panelled corridors scowling at his guests.
Professor René Clemens visited Trinquier at the hotel that afternoon and warned him that the Minaf Belgians objected to his presence. If he took the job, they would leave. The colonel protested that he was there to help. Clemens told him to keep his help. The Belgians were big enough to go it alone.
Guy Weber was less polite. He cornered Trinquier the next morning before a meeting with Tshombe at the presidential palace. Weber did not want outsiders interfering in Katanga; he had personally shot down offers of help from other foreigners, including Jean Thiriart’s former Nazi commanding officer Otto Skorzeny.
‘I want to say to you, before the meeting,’ said Weber, ‘that we are still the masters in Katanga and nothing happens without our agreement.’6
The meeting did not last long. Weber and Crèvecœur loudly objected to giving a Frenchman command of the gendarmes. They protested their loyalty. Tshombe listened serenely, then pointed out that Brussels paid a third of their wages. They served two masters. That evening, Tshombe telephoned Trinquier to offer him the job. The Katangese president wanted to replace all Belgians in his service with French volunteers.
Trinquier investigated the situation in Elisabethville: the UN posts near the airport, Groupe Mobile units training under Belgian officers, journalists gossiping in bars, the red dust landscape outside the town criss-crossed by aeroplanes and jeeps. He retreated to his room at the Léopold II to write a report.
In Trinquier’s opinion, the Baluba in the north could not defeat Tshombe’s gendarmes in open battle. They would inevitably turn to urban warfare, like the FLN in Algiers. Before long, the blue flash of plastic explosive would be destroying Elisabethville cafés and bars. To fight Baluba terrorists, Trinquier planned to recruit French mercenary officers for the gendarmes, train Katangese officers in Chassin’s techniques and introduce la gégène to sub-Saharan Africa. In five years, Tshombe’s army would be run by Katangese counter-revolutionaries.
The biggest problem Trinquier could see was opposition from senior Belgian officers. But that could be stamped out with the help of Elisabethville’s ultras. His bodyguard Michel Rey had asked around. Local whites saw the colonel as a new dawn for Katanga.
‘Young officers were waiting with impatience for me to take command,’ said Trinquier. ‘They hoped I could change the atmosphere and at last they could do some serious work. The civilians as well. What struck us was the kind of hate they felt towards Belgium. They rejected it; all of them were prepared to take Katangese nationality and follow President Tshombe.’7
He met some ultras in the hotel. They talked about racial tensions in the gendarmes. This did not surprise Trinquier. He had seen Crèvecœur and fellow advisors ignore Katangese Cabinet ministers in the same room. Trinquier may have been a ruthless enthusiast for torture but he thought racism fatal to counter-revolution.
Later, Trinquier met vice president Jean Kibwe for dinner at the hotel. Kibwe needed advice.
‘We have killed Lumumba and his two companions,’ Kibwe said. ‘The press, especially the left-wing press, are asking us daily what happened to them. We are going to be obliged to announce their disappearance. What can we do to make this news of as little consequence as possible?’8
‘Lumumba is dead,’ said Trinquier. ‘You cannot bring him back to life. Sooner or later the world will find out about his disappearance. It is better to clear the ground and announce it straight away, then wait for the storm to pass.’
If Kibwe did not want the Katangese government to take the blame, Trinquier suggested, then just tell the press that the prisoners had been shot while trying to escape. Kibwe thanked him. He was unapologetic about Lumumba’s murder.
‘Even if his death has, for us, serious consequences,’ Kibwe said, ‘we will not regret it.’9
Colonel Frédéric Vandewalle did his best to stop Trinquier. He cabled Brussels with nightmare scenarios, warning that the Frenchman’s appointment would cause the Belgian mission to fall apart. The response was chilly. After the initial shock of betrayal, Foreign Minister Pierre Wigny had accepted France’s ambitions in Katanga, privately relieved to give up responsibility and escape the international condemnation that had been raining down. He had no objections as long as UMHK could continue to mine copper. Vandewalle counter-argued about creeping French influence and loss of morale. Wigny ignored him.
Guy Weber joined the battle, writing notes to Tshombe:
The decision of the Katangese government to give command of its armed forces to a FRENCH officer is SERIOUS and has given the officer corps a psychological shock. The Belgian cadre has always served with loyalty and there is no question of any bad feeling. But it is my duty not to conceal the consequences of this action.10
Three pages of closely typed frustration and conspiracy theories about Thyssens followed. Tshombe waved away the charges and told Weber to smooth the way for a French takeover.
On 31 January, Trinquier had a final meeting with Weber. Earlier that day, Tshombe had ordered Marissal and the delegation in Brussels to stop accepting Belgian volunteers. Weber finally got the message; through clenched teeth he assured Trinquier of a clean handover. The next day, the colonel flew back to Paris with a signed contract in his pocket that made him the most powerful white man in Katanga.
Trinquier reported to Messmer, but did not tell him about Lumumba’s death. Messmer gave the green light for a recruiting office in the rue Cambon, near the Ritz. The colonel began discreetly looking for army veterans and adventurers with the right politics.
‘Our young men instinctively realised that the battles that were being fought in Katanga were the same that we are fighting in Algeria, Laos or Angola,’ Trinquier said. ‘It is our freedom and our civilisation that we are defending.’11
The first volunteers, including fellow Algeria veteran Roger Faulques, signed up. Trinquier had limits. He turned away a man called Robert Denard who had done time in a Moroccan jail.
The Belgian advisors in Elisabethville had not given up. In early February, Vandewalle persuaded Tshombe to allow military action in the north, ostensibly an attempt to free the Lubudi–Luena railway from Baluba ambushes. Vandewalle’s real aim with Operation Banquise was to show Tshombe he did not need the French to retake northern Katanga. Crèvecœur got out his maps. No one saw any reason to tell Brussels about the plan. Trucks and jeeps rolled into Baluba territory.
On 15 February, a day that saw a total solar eclipse over Europe, Munongo announced Lumumba’s death at a press conference in Elisabethville. He claimed that the former prime minister had escaped from custody in Katanga and been murdered by villagers. No one believed him. A journalist asked if Munongo had killed Lumumba.
‘Prove it!’ said Munongo.12
Tshombe remained calm.
‘The fuss over this evil man will soon die down,’ he said. ‘The people have no memories here. C’est fini.’13
Stanleyville troops in Bukavu broke into a convent, stubbed their cigarettes out on a nun’s breast and decapitated a Belgian priest. Seven Kasa-Vubu supporters were stabbed to death in Léopoldville; Gizenga executed fifteen political opponents in Stanleyville, including Gilbert Pongo, who had arrested Lumumba in Kasaï and been captured a few weeks later trying to retake Bukavu. Gizenga’s men kept Pongo in a barrel of salt with his legs slashed open before the execution.
In South Kasaï, the authorities killed six Lumumba supporters sent to them by Mobutu. Kalonji’s followers sliced off the prisoners’ skin in strips, roasted it and fed it to them.
‘The tribunal of chiefs and our people have done nothing else than follow the example of the Allies,’ said André Kabeya, South Kasaï Minister for Justice, ‘who in Japan and Germany have sentenced and executed political and military leaders guilty of war crimes.’14
Left-wing students protested Lumumba’s death across Western Europe, claiming him as a symbol of anti-imperialist struggle. African-Americans jeered United Nations delegates from the public gallery of the New York headquarters. The Soviets claimed Hammarskjöld had masterminded the murder and demanded the withdrawal of UN troops from the Congo. Soviet Bloc secret police organised demonstrations. Riots took place outside Belgian embassies in Moscow, Belgrade and Cairo.
The United Nations wanted Lumumba’s death investigated. Tshombe stalled by talking about double standards.
‘To the best of our knowledge, the USSR and communist Hungary have never granted the commission of investigation established by the United Nations the right to conduct an investigation in Hungary,’ Tshombe wrote to the UN, ‘and Mr. Hammarskjöld was not even allowed to visit Budapest. Katanga does not see why there should be one law for the rich and another for the poor.’15
Only Vandewalle got any joy from the political hurricane. Lumumba’s death made Katanga toxic in Paris. Pierre Racine, director of Prime Minister Michel Debré’s Cabinet, summoned Trinquier to Debré’s official residence at Hôtel Matignon and cancelled the mission. Trinquier, warlord dreams dancing behind his eyes, refused to accept the decision. The discussion escalated into an argument. Paris police appeared at Le Bourget airport to prevent Trinquier leaving the country. Detectives parked outside his house, revving their engines in the bitter cold.
Vandewalle hoped a successful assault on the Baluba and their Stanleyville allies in northern Katanga would be enough to put the final stake through the Frenchman’s heart. But his operation would spark an international incident when the Compagnie Internationale, Katanga’s first unit of English-speaking mercenaries, found themselves in a stand-off with UN soldiers at a grassy airfield, both sides wondering who would shoot first.
The story of Trinquier’s involvement can be found in his autobiography, Le temps perdu and Notre guerre au Katanga by Trinquier, Duchemin and le Bailly. Additional details are from Roman Pasteger’s Le visage des affreux.
1 Hempstone, Rebels, Mercenaries and Dividends, p. 133.
2 Kurzman, Dan, ‘Katanga was not Crushed’, The Reporter, 9 November 1961.
3 Trinquier, Le temps perdu, p. 368.
4 Trinquier, Le temps perdu, p. 368.
5 Trinquier, Le temps perdu, p. 373.
6 Trinquier, Le temps perdu, p. 374.
7 Trinquier, Le temps perdu, p. 380.
8 Trinquier, Le temps perdu, p. 381.
9 Trinquier, Le temps perdu, p. 382.
10 Vandewalle, Frédéric, Une tenebreuse affaire ou Roger Trinquier au Katanga (Éditions de Tamtam Ommegang, 1979), p. 88.
11 Leguil-Bayart, Jean-François, Global Subjects: A Political Critique of Globalization (Polity, 2008), p. 145.
12 Mummendey, Beyond the Reach of Reason, p. 45.
13 Moraes, The Importance of Being Black, p. 202.
14 Mummendey, Beyond the Reach of Reason, p. 48.
15 UN Document (S/4688/Add.2).