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Flashmag February 2021 www.flashmag.net
“the real operation”.
In Léopoldville, the Prime Minister of Congo lives in a cloister. His phone line is cut off, he is under house arrest. A first circle of Ghanaian U.N. peacekeepers protects him; a second circle of Congolese soldiers is watching him. On November 27, 1960, the "prisoner" escape. No one inspected the Chevrolet in which the servants were seated at the end of their service.
Lumumba leaves the capital. Direction: Stanleyville (Kisangani), its political stronghold. He hopes to find troops and nationalists who have remained loyal to him.
This manhunt will be the subject of a cascade of short "very urgent" and "confidential" telegrams. The French Embassy seeks to keep Quai D'Orsay informed of the latest developments.
One of these telexes, dated December 2, 1960, reports that Lumumba was arrested by Colonel Mobutu's soldiers in Port-Francqui (now Ilebo) on the Kasai River. Ghanaian peacekeepers surround the house where he is being held but retreat when ordered to do so.
"Transported by plane to Leopoldville, Mr. Lumumba was transferred upon his arrival at Colonel Mobutu's para-commando camp," said Ambassador Pierre-Albert Charpentier. He was then taken during the night, under military escort, to Thysville where he was imprisoned.”
At Camp Hardy, not far from Thysville, the garrison town now called Mbanza-Ngungu, it is the beginning of the end. Lumumba will be beaten by soldiers. This increasingly cruel mistreatment culminated in his assassination on January 17, 1961.
Accompanied by soldiers and police, Lumumba and two other prisoners, Maurice Mpolo (ex-Minister of Sports) and Joseph Okito (ex-vice-president of the Senate), are brought, once night has fallen, about fifty kilometers away, in a wooded savannah. They will be shot by three firing squads on the orders of a Belgian officer. And their bulky remains will be dissolved in acid.
Ironically Thomas Kanza, emeritus professor of political science one of the closest collaborators of Lumumba faithful to the end will try in vain, to use his connections in Washington, for a race against time, hoping that the change of administration in Washington would save Lumumba, because Kennedy thought that Lumumba was not that dangerous, alas Allen Dulles and Eisenhower will accelerate the infernal machine, kennedy will take the oath 3 days after the assassination of Lumumba on January 20, 1960, and will confirm Allen Dulles as Director of the CIA.
The drama will not stop there; 9 months after Dag Hammarskjold the U.N. secretary will die in a suspicious plane crash as he was about to bring the peace between Katangese separatist and help unite the Congo. In 2016 new inquiry alleged that Dag Hammarskjold, one of the most revered secretaries-general in the organization’s history, was assassinated by an apartheid-era South African paramilitary organization that was backed by the CIA, British intelligence, and a Belgian mining company, according to several officials familiar with the case. after the end of the Apartheid era, South African government disclosed decades old intelligence documents detailing the alleged plot, dubbed Operation Celeste, that was designed to kill Hammarskjold. No doubt his efforts to pacify the Congo, and the rich Katanga region, were not appreciated by everyone.
After the death of Lumumba, the Congo cccccwill be controlled by a western puppet Joseph Désiré Mobutu, who clang to power till the end of the 90s, to ironically be kicked out of power in 1997 by a rebellion lead by a Lumumba follower, Laurent Désiré Kabila who himself will be killed January 15th 2001.
Sources RFI Lumumba - how the West made an enemy
1 OMASOMOBO Jean and VERHAEGEN Benoît, Patrice Lumumba Political actor. From prison to the gates of power. July 1956- February 1960. L’Harmattan, Paris, 2005
2 Royal Museum for Central Africa (MRAC). Note “Congolese policy” on headed paper of the “Prime Minister's office”, stamped “Very secret” and dated from Brussels, February 27, 1960 quoted by GIJS Anne Sophie, Une ascension politique tinted with red. Authorities, State security and large companies facing the "Lumumba danger" before the independence of the Congo (1956-1960), Journal of Belgian History XLII, 2012, 1, pp. 11-58.
3 RMCA, Frédéric Vandewalle fonds containing private documents of H. of Aspremont Lynden. Note to the Prime Minister, Conversation with Monsieur Doucy - March 1, 1960. Quoted by GIJS Anne Sophie, op. cit.
4 The contents of the telegram were relayed in the days that followed by the Tass agency and published by the newspaper Le Monde in its edition of July 18, 1960.
5 Note from H. D'Aspremont Lynden to Prime Minister Eyskens, July 14, 1960 4:45 pm; PVDW cited by DE VOS, GERARD, LIBOIS and RAXHON, The secrets of the Lumumba affair, Brussels, Editions Racine, 2005, p 48.
6 GERARD Emmanuel and KUKLICK Bruce, Death in the Congo. Murdering Patrice Lumumba, Harvard University Press, 2015.
7 KALB Madeleine, The Congo cables. The cold war in Africa - From Eisenhower to Kennedy, New York, Macmillan Publishing, 1982, pp 51-53
8 Commission formed in 1975 in the wake of the Watergate scandal to investigate illegal, irregular or unethical activities that may have been carried out by an agency of the US federal government.
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