Word: congos
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...week of triumph for the Congo's professionals. In a freelance foray, a band of 14 white mercenaries blithely recaptured the strategic Congo River port of Lisala, despite orders from the timorous Congolese army high command not to overextend their supply lines. The mercenaries - mostly Southern Rhodesians - cut down 160 of the 3,000 well-armed rebel defenders, had to drive their Jeeps over mounds of rebel dead to enter the Moyen Congo provincial capital. Another mercenary band took back the North Katanga town of Kongolo, found that, as usual, the rebels had slaughtered the whole "intellectual" population...
...their success, the mercenaries remained in bad odor with the rest of black Africa. But Premier Moise Tshombe, in Nairobi for talks with the Congo Reconciliation Committee headed by Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, made it clear that though he wants black African help in quelling the rebellion, he would brook no "interference in the internal affairs" of his country. That seemed to mean the mercenaries would stay-for the time being at least...
Clawless Cat. The assembly turned out to be most reluctant to fulfill his request. Most delegates, in fact, had come to Addis Ababa convinced that Tshombe was a traitor to Africa's cause, and that the Congo's crisis was essentially an ideological battle between patriots and traitors. Not so, declared Tshombe during five days of debate, insisting that the real problem was the complete breakdown of law and order that followed the Belgian departure in 1960-which the Communists have been able to turn to their advantage...
...stream of criticism with patient restraint. He was, as one delegate put it, "a cat in hell without claws." So successfully did he make his case that even such violent critics as Ghana ended up supporting him, and the foreign minister of his bitter enemy, the neighboring Brazzaville Congo, was moved to offer Tshombe his hand and praise his "African sense...
Adoula, then helped lead a Tshombe-backed plot to grab the eastern Congo. Rebellion was nothing new in the Congo, but the latest turn in Stanleyville brought French Ambassador Jacques Koscziusko-Morizet hurrying back to Leopoldville from consultations in Paris. Asked by his chauffeur why he had returned so soon, the ambassador shrugged, "Because of the situation." The chauffeur nodded sympathetically. "Things are pretty bad in Paris?" he asked...