Word: belgians
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...with whom to negotiate. Meantime, both Washington and Brussels had put out an all-fronts alarm. Working through Arab and African nations, they piled diplomatic pressure on the Gbenye regime to release the hostages. U.N. Secretary-General U Thant appealed in vain for a mercy mission to Stanleyville. The Belgian government got Premier Moise Tshombe to offer the rebels a halfhearted amnesty...
...Would Die. There was always the chance that the rebels were bluffing. But a battalion of 600 crack Belgian paratroopers was loaded aboard U.S. C-130 turboprop transports at Belgium's Diest airbase, flown to a little-used U.S. military base on Ascension Island, a British outpost in the South Atlantic only six air hours from Stanleyville. If necessary for humanitarian reasons, the Belgian government later announced, the paratroopers would be dropped on Stanleyville...
...they worked, Belgian Bishop Emile Josef De Smedt rose to give the speech that was to have introduced the declaration. When he sat down, after pleading that "religious liberty is demanded by human dignity itself," there were tears in his eyes. He was rewarded with applause that rolled on and on, the moderator powerless to stop...
Such was the nightmare ordeal of 24 Europeans held prisoner by Communist-backed rebels in the Congolese town of Kindu, as recounted by a Belgian tin-mine employee. As things turned out, the children were disappointed, for at the last moment one of Moise Tshombe's government bombers buzzed the town, and the rebels fled. But this and other stories coming to light last week added up to a grim composite picture of the Congolese rebels...
Blackened Pavement. For all their claim of being "nationalists"-a label that in present-day Africa automatically draws a certain respect-the rebels are really just savage hoodlums on the loose. At Kindu airport, waiting to be flown out, a weeping Belgian woman told how rebel youths had speared and knifed her husband and two sons to death before her eyes in the family's backyard. In the village of Kibombo, three elderly Belgian men were murdered with shotguns...