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Crimes of the West in Democratic Congo: Reflections on Belgian Acceptance of ‘Moral Responsibility’ for the Death of Lumumba

Thomas Turner

In February 2002, the Belgian government accepted ‘moral responsibility’ for the death of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba forty-one years earlier. Louis Michel, Belgium’s foreign minister, declared that ‘In the light of criteria applicable today, certain members of the government of the time and certain Belgian actors of that period carry an irrefutable share of responsibility for the events that led to the death of Patrice Lumumba.’ He went on to say that the government thought it appropriate ‘to present to the family of Patrice Lumumba and to the Congolese people its deep and sincere regrets and apologies.’ Brussels would contribute 3.75 million euros (over $3 million) to the Lumumba Foundation, created to promote democracy in the former Belgian colony (IRIN, 2002).

Too little, too late, some would say. Yet the Belgian statement is important in several respects. First, it is the result of a lengthy investigation by a parliamentary commission. In that sense, it represents a coming-to-terms with a major crime of the past.

Second, the statement of ‘moral responsibility’ is important also for what it does not say. The question of who, exactly, was involved on the Belgian side is avoided. ‘Certain members of the government’ share in the responsibility; but in a parliamentary government, ministers are collectively responsible. The expression ‘certain Belgian actors of the period’ is notably vague. Does it refer, perhaps, to the king and his court? The commission received from its panel of experts evidence of royal concern and involvement in the Lumumba question; but it toned down the matter in its final report (Péju, 2002). Did the ‘certain actors’ include corporate interests?

Third, the Belgian acceptance of responsibility was phrased so as to obscure the question of shared responsibility. To what extent was Belgium jointly responsible for the murder, together with its NATO ally, the United States, and with Congolese in positions of authority in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) and in Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi)?

Analysis of the violence in Congo since 1960 poses several problems. There are many accusations that this or that Congolese has been a puppet of one outside force or another. In some cases, the accusations seem well founded. Some Congolese ministers, and other prominent members of the local elite, were being advised by Belgians. Further, a number of Congolese took money from foreign governments. However, it does not follow that such people were merely carrying out policies designed elsewhere.

The Belgians had assigned themselves the responsibility for leading the Congolese from savagery to civilization, or from childhood to adulthood. One wonders how long this process was supposed to take. According to a fact endlessly repeated in the press, Congo had only ten or twelve university graduates in 1960.

The inadequacy of this notion of the Congolese as childish individuals, merely carrying out policies elaborated elsewhere, is illustrated by the case of Moïse Tshombe, president of the secessionist State of Katanga, and later prime minister of Congo. Tshombe can be seen as serving the interests of Belgian mining capital, or as defending the interests of Katanga’s African elite (as opposed to the Luba-Kasai, who held many jobs in the mining companies, and also to the central government in Léopoldville/Kinshasa, which was dependent on revenues from Katanga’s mines). Tshombe has been described as a ‘Florentine’ – i.e. a master manipulator – by authors who seek to stress his autonomy (e.g. Brassine and Kestergat, 1991). Brian Urquhart of the United Nations described dealing with Tshombe as being like ‘trying to get an eel into a bottle’ (Power, 2000). Urquhart’s UN colleague, the Irish scholar–diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien, offered a more elegant interpretation, comparing Tshombe to the captain of the slave ship in Melville’s Benito Cereno. The captain ‘only appears to be the master of the ship; the real masters are the slaves themselves, who have revolted; the captain, who is, in fact, their prisoner, is serving to conceal the reality. It seemed to me that Tshombe was in a sense an inverted Benito Cereno, the slave who appears to have been made master of the ship, while the real masters are still the old slave-owners, now pretending to be simple passengers’ (O’Brien, 1965). This is terrific writing, and of course O’Brien was there and looked Tshombe and his colleagues in the eye. But it seems to me that the simile is too simple.

The Belgian journalists Davister and Toussaint offer a better summary, according to which the ‘prisoner’ remained the same while those who held him prisoner changed over time. Tshombe was always someone’s toy, ‘and the importance of his role was always directly proportional to the importance of those who, one after another, took charge of him’ (Davister and Toussaint, 1962).

Perhaps Tshombe was constantly being manipulated. But in my view, secessionist Katanga represented an alliance between European interests and fledgling African politicians including Tshombe. It is revealing that no one compared Godefroid Munongo, grandson of the legendary Msiri and pillar of the Katanga regime, to a prisoner. Decades later, it still is difficult to get a handle on Tshombe’s role.

Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, later Mobutu Sese Seko, poses a similar problem. For some people in Washington, he was ‘our man in Kinshasa’ (Pachter, 1987; see also Schatzberg, 1991; Kelly, 1993). Yet it is difficult to imagine Americans supporting, let alone dreaming up, some of Mobutu’s policies, such as breaking diplomatic relations with Israel in 1973. Mobutu is described as a ‘political genius,’ a master of divide-and-rule. Presumably, he acquired those skills over the years; but that leaves the observer with the problem of determining the degree of autonomy he possessed at a particular point in time.

Foreign governments intervened in Congo, notably the United States and Belgium; but here the level-of-analysis problem rears its head. One can assume that an ambassador speaks for his government. But ‘bureaucratic analysis’ (Allison, 1971; Allison and Zelikow, 1999) encourages us to look for distinctive organizational interests, and to the behavior of various agencies. The US State Department and the CIA, for example, might not always have been on the same page. Likewise, Belgium’s prime minister and king may have had somewhat different interests and approaches.

Foreign governments did not act only through their own representatives and (perhaps) their Congolese agents. In the early 1960s, ‘mercenaries’ played prominent roles in Congo. These so-called mercenaries – white men who served in the gendarmerie (police/army) of Katanga, then as special forces of Congo under Tshombe – ostensibly were hired by the Katangan or Congolese authorities. By definition, a mercenary does not work for his own government. Thus, Colonel Mike Hoare, a South African, worked for Katanga and then for Congo. However, by his own admission, and according to the statement of Bob Denard, Hoare was paid by the CIA. Can one be sure that Hoare was not working for South Africa as well? And what of the Frenchman Denard: was he perhaps working for his own country, France?

In short, the problems of sorting out agency and responsibility are considerable. Let us turn to two undoubted instances of criminal action – the assassination of Lumumba and the kidnapping of Tshombe – to see what specific problems they pose.

The murder of Lumumba

Any discussion of Western crimes in Congo must give priority to the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of Congo. A horrible event in itself, the murder set off waves of retaliation and counter-retaliation. The repercussions are being felt to this day.

Lumumba’s party, the Lumumba wing of the Congolese National Movement (MNC-Lumumba), was almost unique among Congolese parties in being both national in orientation and radical in its opposition to colonialism (Weiss, 1967). By March 1960, three months prior to independence, Belgian authorities had concluded the necessity of ‘eliminating’ Lumumba, according to Professor Jean Omosombo, who is completing a study of Lumumba based in part on hitherto secret Belgian government documents.1

Lumumba’s party did better than any other in pre-independence elections. He became prime minister despite Belgian attempts to find an alternative. The country attained independence on 30 June 1960, with Lumumba as prime minister and his rival, Joseph Kasavubu, as president. A week later, the Congo was plunged into chaos when the army mutinied against its Belgian officers. Belgium sent troops to protect its citizens, and mineral-rich Katanga seceded with Belgian backing. South Kasai, Congo’s main source of diamonds, followed Katanga into secession.

Kasavubu and Lumumba initially cooperated to restore order, but relations between the two soon deteriorated. Brussels and Washington attempted to persuade Kasavubu to dismiss Lumumba. In September, after Lumumba had obtained Soviet aid for his attempt to recapture South Kasai, Kasavubu agreed. He dismissed Lumumba, who responded by dismissing the president. Mobutu, an aide to Lumumba who had been put in charge of the army in the aftermath of the mutiny, then ‘neutralized’ both Kasavubu and Lumumba.

Lumumba escaped from house arrest in Kinshasa, nearly reaching territory whose population was favorable to his party before being recaptured. To Mobutu, Kasavubu, and their foreign backers the lesson was clear. So long as Lumumba remained alive, there was a danger he could regain power. To prevent this, he was sent to secessionist Katanga, where he was tortured and murdered – apparently by Katangan soldiers under Belgian command.

The problem in assigning responsibility in the case is that there are too many potential culprits. Belgium began working to replace Lumumba almost immediately after its military intervention in July 1960. Foreign Minister Pierre Wigny sent a diplomat to Congo to sound out his counterpart, Congolese Foreign Minister Justin Bomboko, about a possible coup d’état. Minister without Portfolio W.J. Ganshof van der Meersch (who had supervised the pre-independence effort to find another prime minister instead of Lumumba) now sent an agent of the Belgian security police to Congo to conduct undercover destabilization efforts (Péju, 2002).

In October, the Belgian minister for African affairs, Count Harold d’Aspremont Linden, sent a telegram ordering the elimination of Lumumba. The African leader was to be kidnapped as part of the so-called ‘Operation Barracuda.’ It is unclear whether the eventual murder of Lumumba was perpetrated under the auspices of a revised ‘Barracuda.’

The Americans launched their own covert action plan, ‘Project Wizard,’ in August 1960. Over the next few months, the CIA worked with and made payments to eight leading Congolese, including Kasavubu, Mobutu, Bomboko, Senate President Joseph Ileo, finance aide Albert Ndele, and labor leader Cyrille Adoula, ‘who all played roles in Lumumba’s downfall.’ (Weissman, 2002). Weissman reports that the CIA joined Belgium in a plan for Ileo and Adoula to engineer a no-confidence vote in Lumumba’s government, which would be followed by union-led demonstrations, the resignations of cabinet ministers (organized by Ndele) and Kasavubu’s dismissal of Lumumba. The ‘Special Group’ of the US National Security Council authorized CIA payments to Kasavubu on 1 September, according to classified documents consulted by Weissman. Four days later, Kasavubu (by now ‘persuaded’) dismissed Lumumba.

When Mobutu ‘neutralized’ the president and the prime minister, he established a ‘College of Commissioners’ to act as a temporary government. Presented as an apolitical group of university students and derided by some as the ‘student council’ (Hempstone, 1962), the College was an illegal government headed by CIA allies Bomboko and Ndele. After the failure of repeated attempts to establish an anti-Lumumba government, and continued disorder in the capital, the ‘College of Commissioners’ asked Kasavubu to move Lumumba to a ‘surer place.’ Kasavubu told security chief Victor Nendaka (another Project Wizard participant) to transfer Lumumba to one of the secessionist provinces (Katanga or South Kasai). On 17 January, Nendaka sent Lumumba to Katanga, where he was killed. The specific objective of preventing a Lumumbist comeback was highlighted by the identity of the two men killed with Lumumba. Joseph Okito, the Senate vice-president, was a rival of Ileo, while Maurice Mpolo was a rival of Mobutu for control of the armed forces.

The US and Belgium were staunch NATO allies, but their views of the Congo were not identical. Belgian motivations seem to have centered on protection of their citizens and investments, especially in Katanga. Their goal was a neocolonial Congo, similar to the result achieved by the French in many of their former colonies. Lumumba, seen as the principal obstacle to such a plan, was demonized (Halen and Riesz, 1997). Often, he was depicted as an agent of communism.

The Americans’ view was simpler. They focused on communism, as evidenced by a telegram sent by the CIA station in Léopoldville to its headquarters in Washington, early in August 1960:

EMBASSY AND STATION BELIEVE CONGO EXPERIENCING CLASSIC COMMUNIST EFFORT TAKEOVER GOVERNMENT – WHETHER OR NOT LUMUMBA ACTUALLY COMMIE OR JUST PLAYING COMMIE GAME TO ASSIST HIS SOLIDIFYING POWER, ANTI-WEST FORCES RAPIDLY INCREASING POWER CONGO AND THERE MAY BE LITTLE TIME LEFT IN WHICH TAKE ACTION TO AVOID ANOTHER CUBA. (United States Senate, 1975: 57)

One cannot exclude the likely influence of economic interests. Indeed, the reference to Cuba could be interpreted to mean that such interests were threatened. But I find the ‘business conflict’ model proposed by David Gibbs unconvincing (Gibbs, 1991). The Americans interpreted the Congo in Cold War terms; economic interests, real or potential, were secondary.

These differences in orientation between Washington and Brussels showed up notably in Belgian promotion of, and American opposition to, the secession of Katanga. But the differences should not be overstated. Belgium and the US agreed on the need to replace Lumumba, and cooperated to some extent to attain this goal.

During the period 1961–65, Congo careened from crisis to crisis. Power in the capital was held by the so-called ‘Binza Group,’ named for the wealthy suburb where most of its members lived. The Binza Group comprised most of the veterans of the Americans’ ‘Operation Wizard,’ including Mobutu, Bomboko, Ndele, and Nendaka. The Lumumbist opposition launched a series of insurrections, which took over about half of the country. These were put down thanks to coordinated efforts of the US and Belgium. A group of white mercenaries, at least some of them paid by the US, served as spearhead of the government counteroffensive. Late in 1965, when the tide had turned but the Lumumbist insurgents had not yet been completely defeated, President Kasavubu called for withdrawal of the mercenaries. This appears to have triggered the coup d’état of 25 November, which brought Mobutu to power.

Tshombe had been recalled from exile and named premier in 1964 to help President Kasavubu put down the Lumumbist insurgents. He was dismissed the following year as a result of his rivalry with Kasavubu, and returned to Spain. In 1967, after his return to the Congo was rumored, he was kidnapped and taken to Algeria, where he died of a heart attack in 1969. René Lemarchand points out the contradictory aspect of Mobutu’s involvement in the elimination of his rival Tshombe:

in an effort to allay suspicions that he was overwhelmingly dependent on the C.I.A. (a fact that had become patently clear during the 1964 rebellion, if not earlier), Mobutu decided to assume a more radical stance, and in order to give a substance of ‘authenticity’ to this new look, plans were made to bring Tshombe back from Spain and then stage a public execution of the ‘neo-imperialist’ stooge. For this primary reliance was placed on the C.I.A. The operation proved eminently successful, at least in its initial stage: on 30 June 1967, Tshombe’s plane was hijacked over the Mediterranean, and after a forced landing in Algiers the leader of the Katanga secession was surrendered to the Algerian Government. At this point, however, it became apparent that Boumedienne was unwilling to deliver Tshombe unconditionally to Mobutu, a fact which the C.I.A. had failed to anticipate. (Lemarchand, 1976: 415)

Tshombe remained in an Algerian prison, where he died, allegedly of a heart attack. Mobutu’s most dangerous rival disappeared, and in that sense the American government or the CIA can be considered to have achieved their objective of protecting ‘their man.’ But Mobutu was deprived of the public execution he had planned, according to Lemarchand. One could even argue that the kidnapping demonstrated Mobutu’s dependency on his foreign backers, since his own operatives could not have executed such a plan.

Complicity: the scholarship and the cable record

There can be little doubt that the West, and more specifically Belgium and the United States, were responsible for the death of the ‘radical’ nationalist Patrice Lumumba. The US bears the major responsibility for the death of the ‘moderate,’ regionalist Moïse Tshombe. These deaths, and the concomitant rise of Mobutu, reflect Western efforts to find an acceptable formula for decolonization, one in which Western political and economic interests would be protected.

What is not completely clear is the nature of the Americans’ and Belgians’ contributions, and the extent to which their efforts were coordinated. Part of the difficulty is that research on each side of the Atlantic has tended to incriminate or exculpate the individual government in question, rather than examining the question of shared responsibility.

The murder of Lumumba was a subject of intense interest in Belgium. However, in the absence of hard data, many early books on the subject were virtually works of fiction. Pierre De Vos’s Vie et mort de Lumumba (De Vos, 1961) is an example. Other works used a documentary approach, based largely on published materials, such as the yearbooks published by CRISP (Congo 1960, Congo 1961, and so on). It was not until the 1990s that the murder of Lumumba was re-examined in Belgium. Professor Jean-Claude Willame (1990) ‘revisited’ the Congo crisis. Jacques Brassine, a minor actor in the Katanga secession, defended a doctoral dissertation at the Université Libre de Bruxelles that served as the basis for a nonscholarly publication, written in collaboration with the journalist and Congo specialist Jean Kestergat (Brassine and Kestergat, 1991). The main point of both the dissertation and the book was that Congolese (notably the ‘Florentine’ Tshombe) had killed Lumumba. Belgium, accordingly, was exonerated.

A Belgian sociologist, Ludo de Witte, took up the gauntlet thrown down by Brassine and Kestergat (De Witte, 1999, 2000, 2001). After several years of archival research and interviews, De Witte presented a detailed account of the assassination. He traced the links between Belgian policy and Belgian actions in Katanga. The book led to a parliamentary inquiry, which in turn led to the Belgian government statement accepting ‘moral responsibility’ for Lumumba’s murder. De Witte, understandably, was interested mainly in establishing the responsibility of the Belgian government for Lumumba’s death, which he felt had been played down by Brassine and Kestergat, as well as by conservative media such as the Brussels daily La Libre Belgique.

The parliamentary inquiry heard testimony from a wide variety of witnesses, including Belgians (such as Brassine) and Congolese. Among the latter were Victor Nendaka, head of the Sûreté in Kinshasa at the time of the murder; and Jean-Baptiste Kibwe, finance minister under Tshombe. Neither the Belgians nor the Congolese shed much new light on the issue of responsibility for the murder. Little attention was paid to the American connection, and next to none to the role of the late King Baudouin – still a very sensitive question in Belgium.

Early American treatments of the death of Lumumba were scarcely more serious than that of De Vos. Journalist Smith Hempstone published a pro-Katanga, anti-United Nations piece (Hempstone, 1962), but shed little light on the precise circumstances of Lumumba’s death. Stephen Weissman’s University of Chicago dissertation was eventually published by Cornell University Press (Weissman, 1974), apparently after being turned down by the University of Chicago Press for political reasons. In this work of high scholarly quality, the author laid out the contrasting versions of Cold War ideology that motivated the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. He was unable, at that point, to pinpoint American involvement in the death of Lumumba. However, the broad outline of Weissman’s argument has stood the test of time.

American criticism of US Congo policy reached a peak in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The decolonization of Angola, with its Congo parallels, probably reinforced US interest in the Congo question. In this context, the Church Committee of the US Senate interviewed a minutes-taker for Eisenhower’s National Security Council, who attested to the president’s order to eliminate Lumumba. The committee also reported on several CIA attempts to kill Lumumba. However, the committee concluded that the US had not been involved in the actual murder. It should be noted that the Church Committee had no interest in diluting criticism of the US role by examining that of the Belgians.

In 1982, Madeline Kalb demonstrated the advances that could be made when detailed information became available. She made good use of ‘Congo cables’ sent from CIA and State Department representatives in Congo to their respective headquarters in Washington. These cables demonstrate American involvement in the death of Lumumba, well beyond what the Church Committee was willing to conclude (Kalb, 1982). And in 1992, on the basis of other documents obtained in Washington, Weissman was able to identify specific decisions and authorizations of payment to Kasavubu, Mobutu and other Congolese actors (Weissman, 2002a, 2002b).

The Americans and Belgians certainly shared an antipathy to Lumumba. They doubtless consulted with one another during 1959–60. A Belgian official who helped to engineer Lumumba’s transfer to Katanga told Belgian researcher De Witte that he had kept CIA Kinshasa station chief Lawrence Devlin fully informed of the plan. ‘The Americans were informed of the transfer because they actively discussed this thing for weeks,’ De Witte reports (De Witte, 2001). Devlin denied any prior knowledge of the transfer, but this denial is implausible. Why should he and his agency not have concluded that the transfer of Lumumba and his colleagues to Katanga, where they certainly would be killed, was a suitable way of carrying out the task assigned by Eisenhower?

Circumstantial evidence of a joint American–Belgian role can be seen in two declassified American cables. On 13 January, apparently fearing that Lumumba would somehow manage to thwart American plans, Devlin or someone else in Kinshasa sent the following cable to Washington:

THE COMBINATION OF [LUMUMBA’S] POWERS AS DEMAGOGUE, HIS ABLE USE OF GOON SQUADS AND PROPAGANDA AND SPIRIT OF DEFEAT WITHIN [GOVERNMENT] … WOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY INSURE [LUMUMBA] VICTORY IN PARLIAMENT … REFUSAL TAKE DRASTIC STEPS AT THIS TIME WILL LEAD DEFEAT OF [UNITED STATES] POLICY IN CONGO. (Kalb, 1982: 190)

Whether or not Washington was refusing to take ‘drastic steps,’ it appeared that someone was willing to take them. Just four days later, Mobutu and Kasavubu sent Lumumba, Okito, and Mpolo to Elisabethville, where they were killed. On 19 January, the CIA base chief in Elisabethville cabled headquarters:

THANKS FOR PATRICE. IF WE HAD KNOWN HE WAS COMING WE WOULD HAVE BAKED A SNAKE. (Kalb, 1982: 191)

‘If we had known’ might be interpreted as meaning that the CIA man in Katanga had not been told Lumumba was coming. But the cable-writer gives the game away by thanking his bosses (not Mobutu and Kasavubu, and not the Belgians) for sending Lumumba.

Conclusion

The murder of Lumumba – a terrible crime in itself – has poisoned Congolese political life for decades. The ‘Lumumbist’ rebellions of 1964–67 were directed against the Kinshasa government of Kasavubu, Mobutu, and others, and of course against the US and Belgium. Lumumbist Laurent Kabila continued the struggle against Kinshasa into the 1980s. When then-Zaire began an abortive transition to democracy in the early 1990s, the National Conference held hearings on Lumumba’s death. And when Kabila came to power in 1996, as successor to Mobutu, he called for a new investigation into the murder.

The main facts of the assassination are not in dispute. The work of Kalb, De Witte, Weissman and others has made it clear that the US and Belgium were active participants. In particular, Weissman’s identification of American payments to major Congolese figures enables us to set aside earlier talk of ‘puppets.’ What is still needed is an inquiry focused on the specific question of the linkages between Belgium and the United States. Only when such an inquiry has published its results can Congo and the West begin to cooperate once again, on a healthier and more equitable basis.

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