Today, January 17, fifty years to the day after the assassination of Congolese Prime MInister Patrice Lumumba, with his colleagues Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo in what was then Elizabethville, Katanga, let us remember, reconsider, and look forward.
This crime has long been presented as a fratricidal crime by Congolese. The NATO countries only have admitted that they tried to do it but failed and have justified the crime as an act to save the free world from communism. Two who should know well the falsity of this justification, Mark Eyskens in Belgium and Frank Carlucci in the US, have both recently come forth with disinformative statements along these lines. Theirs are just the most recent of a huge corpus of falsified writing about the murder.
But, little thanks to either country’s declassification programs, which, with the UN, still censor most of the relevant archives, enough evidence of what happened has finally leaked out to allow these stances to be revised and rejected.
Far from being a “Bantou affair”, Operation Lumumba was very much a “NATO affair”, an expansive conspiracy by Belgium and the US with some help from England, France, Portugal, and South Africa. Though Congolese figureheads and men willing to look the other way were definitely used as cover for both his removal and his death by shooting, these acts were conceived, planned, staffed, funded, armed, and carried out by Westerners. We can forget the various other scenarios promoted over the years. All are false, even the one in Raoul Peck’s movie on the assassination. There were no enraged villagers, no sinister bayonet-wielding ministers, and no Katangan firing squads. The truth is less dramatic, more grisly, and even more sad. The three men, who had served their country honorably in extremely difficult circumstances, were taken to an empty farmhouse, beaten, tortured, and shot in the head gangland style by members of what the CIA reported was an “all White” squad.
The leaders of this death squad and the superiors who commanded them were under-cover Belgian security officers working with both the Belgian government and the CIA. The transfer of the prisoners to their doom was organized by them in cahoots with Sabena airlines officials. Both countries’ armed forces were put on readiness for the two days of the event, so they could invade Congo if Lumumba escaped. The CIA chief transported Lumumba’s body, and a Belgian officer employed by the CIA did the job of destroying it in sulfuric acid. (He kept body parts and showed them gleefully on TV a few years ago.) The use of acid was suggested by the Belgian field assassination project field director, and the UMHK mining company probably supplied it. The Belgian field director wrote the Lumumba Soviet forgeries, false cover-up stories for Katangan leaders to deliver, and forged transfer and execution orders implicating Congolese and Katangan ministers.
An investigation to find and punish the murderers ordered by the Security Council was kept out of Congo by UN secretariat officers working with the CIA. The Belgian field director fed the commission further false accusations about Katangan ministers.
Belgian officers on the assassination team, most of whom came from so-called colonialist “Ultra”, secret White Supremacist and anti-communist groups, carried out war crimes of racial cleansing among tribes who supported Lumumba’s party at the time. They organized, staffed, armed, transported, and directed squads of foreign paramilitaries to shoot tribespeople on sight, burn their villages, and interrogate and kill prisoners. A low estimate given of the deaths was 7,000.
If both governments and the UN are still withholding their archives on the crimes, where has this information on criminal culpability come from? Mainly from publications and testimony by the perpetrators, who were boastful and hungry for recognition. Within hours of the murder they were drunk and blabbing about town (The first to leak was a Belgian CIA agent from the team.), and soon many people had heard the tale from their lips.
Yet neither the assassinations nor these war crimes were ever investigated or brought before a judge or jury. The three commissions formed to investigate covered up rather than illuminated the crime. Why could they do this? Because of the overweening power of the Western nations compared to post-colonial countries. The West has long controlled the money, technology, transportation, the international arena, the press, and the academic community that still dominates discourse about the murders.
More than 16 members of the Lumumba operations team are still alive, and several are still working covertly against the interests of Congo. There are at least three in the US, one in South Africa, one in Germany, and the rest, in Belgium. These men must be brought to justice and removed from public spheres where they can still do damage. A team of courageous lawyers in Belgium have begun the process by writing a criminal complaint. Many human rights scholars and workers are helping them with their research findings. May their work bear fruit.
Billions of dollars were spent on these crimes, so these countries owe Congo and the families of the victims that much and more in reparations. They should also supply high speed internet and netbooks for all Congolese for the next 50 years and provide the where-with-all for advanced transportation and sustainable energy systems.
As anthropologists have shown, African societies have a long tradition of communal leadership and justice. Of all those involved in the crisis, it was Congolese who held most firmly to the principles of democracy. A much larger proportion of registered voters voted than do in the West. Parliament held firm in its support for Lumumba as long as he lived. The constant drumbeat against the elected leaders and Parliament came from the West, and it was the West that ultimately engineered the abusive thirty-year dictatorship of Mobutu.
Congo deserves and will one day have the peace, prosperity, success, power, and influence that it deserves. With its history of rich, technologically and culturally advanced, long-lived empires and kingdoms such as the Luba, Kuba, Kongo, and Mangbetu, this country has the cultural heritage for making the most of its size, resources, population, and location. Let all good-willed people work to make that happen.
Long live the Congo!
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