An Assassination's Long Shadow

By ADAM HOCHSCHILD
San Francisco

NYTimes, January 16, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/opinion/17hochschild.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=patrice%20lumumba&st=cse

TODAY, millions of people on another continent are
observing the 50th anniversary of an event few
Americans remember, the assassination of Patrice
Lumumba. A slight, goateed man with black, half-framed
glasses, the 35-year-old Lumumba was the first
democratically chosen leader of the vast country,
nearly as large as the United States east of the
Mississippi, now known as the Democratic Republic of
Congo.

This treasure house of natural resources had been a
colony of Belgium, which for decades had made no plans
for independence. But after clashes with Congolese
nationalists, the Belgians hastily arranged the first
national election in 1960, and in June of that year
King Baudouin arrived to formally give the territory
its freedom.

"It is now up to you, gentlemen," he arrogantly told
Congolese dignitaries, "to show that you are worthy of
our confidence."

The Belgians, and their European and American fellow
investors, expected to continue collecting profits from
Congo's factories, plantations and lucrative mines,
which produced diamonds, gold, uranium, copper and
more. But they had not planned on Lumumba.

A dramatic, angry speech he gave in reply to Baudouin
brought Congolese legislators to their feet cheering,
left the king startled and frowning and caught the
world's attention. Lumumba spoke forcefully of the
violence and humiliations of colonialism, from the
ruthless theft of African land to the way that
French-speaking colonists talked to Africans as adults
do to children, using the familiar "tu" instead of the
formal "vous." Political independence was not enough,
he said; Africans had to also benefit from the great
wealth in their soil.

With no experience of self-rule and an empty treasury,
his huge country was soon in turmoil. After failing to
get aid from the United States, Lumumba declared he
would turn to the Soviet Union. Thousands of Belgian
officials who lingered on did their best to sabotage
things: their code word for Lumumba in military radio
transmissions was "Satan." Shortly after he took office
as prime minister, the C.I.A., with White House
approval, ordered his assassination and dispatched an
undercover agent with poison.

The would-be poisoners could not get close enough to
Lumumba to do the job, so instead the United States and
Belgium covertly funneled cash and aid to rival
politicians who seized power and arrested the prime
minister. Fearful of revolt by Lumumba's supporters if
he died in their hands, the new Congolese leaders
ordered him flown to the copper-rich Katanga region in
the country's south, whose secession Belgium had just
helped orchestrate. There, on Jan. 17, 1961, after
being beaten and tortured, he was shot. It was a
chilling moment that set off street demonstrations in
many countries.

As a college student traveling through Africa on summer
break, I was in Leopoldville (today's Kinshasa),
Congo's capital, for a few days some six months after
Lumumba's murder. There was an air of tension and gloom
in the city, jeeps full of soldiers were on patrol, and
the streets quickly emptied at night. Above all, I
remember the triumphant, macho satisfaction with which
two young American Embassy officials -- much later
identified as C.I.A. men -- talked with me over drinks
about the death of someone they regarded not as an
elected leader but as an upstart enemy of the United
States.

Some weeks before his death, Lumumba had briefly
escaped from house arrest and, with a small group of
supporters, tried to flee to the eastern Congo, where a
counter-government of his sympathizers had formed. The
travelers had to traverse the Sankuru River, after
which friendly territory began. Lumumba and several
companions crossed the river in a dugout canoe to
commandeer a ferry to go back and fetch the rest of the
group, including his wife and son.

But by the time they returned to the other bank,
government troops pursuing them had arrived. According
to one survivor, Lumumba's famous eloquence almost
persuaded the soldiers to let them go. Events like this
are often burnished in retrospect, but however the
encounter happened, Lumumba seems to have risked his
life to try to rescue the others, and the episode has
found its way into film and fiction.

His legend has only become deeper because there is
painful newsreel footage of him in captivity, soon
after this moment, bound tightly with rope and trying
to retain his dignity while being roughed up by his
guards.

Patrice Lumumba had only a few short months in office
and we have no way of knowing what would have happened
had he lived. Would he have stuck to his ideals or,
like too many African independence leaders, abandoned
them for the temptations of wealth and power? In any
event, leading his nation to the full economic autonomy
he dreamed of would have been an almost impossible
task. The Western governments and corporations arrayed
against him were too powerful, and the resources in his
control too weak: at independence his new country had
fewer than three dozen university graduates among a
black population of more than 15 million, and only
three of some 5,000 senior positions in the civil
service were filled by Congolese.

A half-century later, we should surely look back on the
death of Lumumba with shame, for we helped install the
men who deposed and killed him. In the scholarly
journal Intelligence and National Security, Stephen R.
Weissman, a former staff director of the House
Subcommittee on Africa, recently pointed out that
Lumumba's violent end foreshadowed today's American
practice of "extraordinary rendition." The Congolese
politicians who planned Lumumba's murder checked all
their major moves with their Belgian and American
backers, and the local C.I.A. station chief made no
objection when they told him they were going to turn
Lumumba over -- render him, in today's parlance -- to the
breakaway government of Katanga, which, everyone knew,
could be counted on to kill him.

Still more fateful was what was to come. Four years
later, one of Lumumba's captors, an army officer named
Joseph Mobutu, again with enthusiastic American
support, staged a coup and began a disastrous, 32-year
dictatorship. Just as geopolitics and a thirst for oil
have today brought us unsavory allies like Saudi
Arabia, so the cold war and a similar lust for natural
resources did then. Mobutu was showered with more than
$1 billion in American aid and enthusiastically
welcomed to the White House by a succession of
presidents; George H. W. Bush called him "one of our
most valued friends."

This valued friend bled his country dry, amassed a
fortune estimated at $4 billion, jetted the world by
rented Concorde and bought himself an array of grand
villas in Europe and multiple palaces and a yacht at
home. He let public services shrivel to nothing and
roads and railways be swallowed by the rain forest. By
1997, when he was overthrown and died, his country was
in a state of wreckage from which it has not yet
recovered.

Since that time the fatal combination of enormous
natural riches and the dysfunctional government Mobutu
left has ignited a long, multisided war that has killed
huge numbers of Congolese or forced them from their
homes. Many factors cause a war, of course, especially
one as bewilderingly complex as this one. But when
visiting eastern Congo some months ago, I could not
help but think that one thread leading to the human
suffering I saw begins with the assassination of
Lumumba.

We will never know the full death toll of the current
conflict, but many believe it to be in the millions.
Some of that blood is on our hands. Both ordering the
murders of apparent enemies and then embracing their
enemies as "valued friends" come with profound,
long-term consequences -- a lesson worth pondering on
this anniversary.

Adam Hochschild is the author of "King Leopold's Ghost:
A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial
Africa" and the forthcoming "To End All Wars: A Story
of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918."

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