Word: belgians
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...whites surrounded by maddened savages on the Dark Continent: it was the sort of story that once gave a romantic veil to the sordid history of Africa's colonization. American newspapers seized on the invasion of Shaba province by Katangan rebels and the subsequent rescue mission by French and Belgian paratroopers, as if they had found a modern version of Stanley and Livingston. The Boston Herald-American screamed out "Whites Massacred in Zaire," while Newsweek, slightly less hysterically racist, went with "Massacre in Zaire." White casualties were carefully tabulated and lamented, but the death toll for blacks--a much higher...
...marauding blacks, drunk on white blood, systematically murdering every white they could find. But, as David Ottoway reported this week in The Washington Post, the massacre reports came from French and Zairean sources and "were deliberately exaggerated to gain quick Western public sympathy" for the French-Belgian intervention...
...lesson we should learn from all this is that the French-Belgian intervention, which Newsweek called "a gallant rescue mission" for the Europeans in Kolwezi, was actually a rescue mission for the shaky, uniquely corrupt and autocratic regime of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire. Even with the hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid that the U.S. has pumped into Mobutu's army, it broke and ran in the face of a few thousand Katangan rebels, and had to be bailed out by the French and Belgians. Mobutu's latest pronouncement on the subject was his call this week...
Zairean dissatisfaction with Mobutu has deep roots, going back to the early '60s, when Zaire--then the Republic of the Congo (Kinshasa)--won independence from the Belgians under the leadership of Patrice Lumumba. The Belgian record in Africa was particularly cruel, with a long history of massacres and torture in the Congo. By international agreement, the Congo was the personal fiefdom of Belgium's King Leopold, who grew notorious for the repression and exploitation he encouraged in the area...
...kind of operation going on without the Assembly knowing about it." He also charged that the legionnaires' intervention was not justified by France's cooperation agreements with Zaïre. Meanwhile in Brussels, government officials-who had felt all along that the French were intruding in a Belgian preserve-complained that they had not been given adequate notice of the paratroop drop on Kolwezi. "I was informed," said Premier Tindemans testily, "but my advice was not sought...