Contact with Reality

Outside Leopoldville's ugly new Palace of Culture, a mob of his countrymen waited for Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba to arrive for the opening of the Congo's much-heralded African "summit" conference. As Lumumba drove up elegantly in an open Lincoln Continental once reserved for Belgium's King Baudouin, the crowd suddenly hoisted signs reading "Fascist"' and "Dictator," burst into the distinctive "whoop, whoop, whoop" that is the Congolese version of a boo. Seemingly undismayed by their jeers --and by the fact that his summit conference had attracted mainly minor bureaucrats instead of the 20 heads of state he had invited--Lumumba strode to the stage of the Palace of Culture to cry to his guests: "Gentlemen, you are now making contact with Congolese reality!"

As Lumumba spoke, the tumult outside the hall all but drowned him out.

Slamming their way into the crowd, Congolese police and gendarmes had begun to arrest anti-Lumumba demonstrators, first clubbing them to the ground with batons, then punching at them with rifle butts. When some of the retreating demonstrators tried to defend themselves with rocks, a ragged line of police chased after them, firing from the hip: all that prevented a massacre comparable to South Africa's Sharpeville (TIME, April 4) was the cops' bad aim. Circling unhappily in the background, Lumumba's Red-lining press adviser, Frenchman Serge Michel, passed a one-word judgment on the whole affair: "Maladroit."

On to Kasai. Maladroit as he was, bearded Patrice Lumumba last week staged an erratic but undeniable demagogic comeback. As the week opened, secessionists in Katanga and Kasai provinces still held large portions of his nation. In the Congolese Parliament, Senator Sebastian Fele, newly sprung from a Lumumba jail, won cheers from his col leagues when he roared that the Premier should be removed from office. To restore his sagging power, Lumumba badly needed a quick, dramatic victory.

To get it, he hastily promoted Congolese army corporals and sergeants to officer rank, ordered hundreds of his troops into requisitioned Sabena planes to be flown to Luluabourg, deep in Kasai province. "National emergency," explained Army Chief of Staff Colonel Joseph Mobutu, suggesting that it was only an expedition to quell new fighting between Baluba and Lulua tribesmen. But the moment they landed, the troops struck out by rail and truck along the 166-mile road to Bakwanga, stronghold of onetime Lumumba pal, Albert Kalonji, who had declared the diamond-rich region an independent nation called Mining State. Swearing that his tribesmen, mainly armed with bows and arrows, could resist the "invaders," Kalonji hastily flew off to Elisabethville to beg aid from his fellow secessionist, President Moise Tshombe of Katanga--the mineral-rich province immediately to the southeast. But Lumumba's platoons, led, so Kalonji claimed, by Czech officers, rolled into Bakwanga and took over the town and its nearby diamond mine with scarcely a shot.

Then, a column moved down the dusty road toward Katanga itself, 100 miles away. There, Tshombe's hastily mobilized Katanga army was deployed, in grim determination to resist with machine guns, mines and booby traps. Stretches of the single-track rail line leading into Katanga from Kasai were ripped up, and armed Katangans with dynamite rushed out to block the few dirt roads at the Kasai frontier. Most of Tshombe's force was a ragtag outfit, but Belgian officers at Kamina airbase were openly supplying him with spotter planes and tactical advice. At week's end the Lumumba troops paused 20 miles from the frontier, awaiting the attack order. Unlike Kalonji's Mining State, Katanga would scarcely fall without a fight--a fight that the 4,000 U.N. troops stationed in Katanga presumably would watch in strict neutrality.

Logical Question. Flushed with his Kasai victory, Lumumba once more rounded on his favorite whipping boy: the U.N. Early in the week, he and his government had warmly expressed gratification at Dag Hammarskjold's message that the Belgians had promised to remove all their combat troops from the Congo "within, at the most, eight days." Now, in an about-face so sudden that no one knew whether it was a decision of the moment or one he might abide by for 48 hours, Lumumba demanded that U.N. troops leave the Congo as soon as the last Belgian did. "We do not want another occupation," he huffed. Sighed a U.N. official: "The man is sick in the head."

Trouble was that his sickness was catching. Egged on by Lumumba's rantings. unruly Congolese troops went on the warpath against the U.N. all over again. When Lumumba suddenly announced plans to fly to Stanleyville to demonstrate "how peaceful everything there is." a rumor swept the waiting crowd that Belgian paratroops were coming to grab the Premier. At that unfortunate moment, a U.S. Air Force Globemaster roared in to Stanleyville from Toronto, carrying Canadian signal equipment and personnel. Surrounding the plane, the howling mob dragged out the eight American crewmen, beating them with rifle butts and sticks. U.N. Ethiopian troops rescued three of the Americans and several bruised Canadians whom the Congolese had hauled off to prison. But in the meantime, other Congolese troops had invaded and sacked the U.N. headquarters in Stanleyville.

Landing at Stanleyville in his Ilyushin-14 only minutes after the attack on the Globemaster's crew. Patrice Lumumba ignored the patches of blood on the runway, shouted to thousands of cheering ill-clad supporters: "I am very happy to see you in combat uniform ready to descend on Katanga." Back in Leopoldville. the U.N.'s Ralph Bunche fired off an angry protest to the Congolese government. Assuring Bunche of his "deep and .sincere personal regrets," the Congo's able young Foreign Minister Justin Bomboko concluded his reply: "But what can I do?" It was a fair question. What, indeed, could anyone do to transform Patrice Lumumba's Congo into a reasonable facsimile of a civilized state?

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