Word: congos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Vanishing Guards. At week's end Dag Hammarskjold was clearly fed up with his Congo problem child. Before an emergency session of the Security Council, he demanded more power and a clear field to work unhampered. The facts were, said he, that the Congo is near bankruptcy and total administrative collapse. ''Some [army] units have not got any pay for two months, and they have no food, with the result that they disobey orders and loot from the civilian population." The Congolese army in Kasai province was running wild, "engaged in slaughter not only of combatants...
Hammarskjold's task was made all the more difficult when the Belgians flew nine tons of ammunition into Katanga, the wealthy and dissident Congo province run by its self-styled Premier, Moise Tshombe. Abruptly closing all of Katanga's airports. Hammarskjold now incurred the wrath of Tshombe, who had reports that a Lumumba task force was crossing into Katanga from the north. Flouting the U.N.'s orders, Tshombe rushed truckloads of armed Katanga troops to Elisabethville's airport, forced the field's U.N. traffic controller at gunpoint to order the obstacles removed from the strip...
...head off further intervention by Russia or Belgium, he asked the Council formally to call on all outside countries to cease unilateral aid. To head off Lumumba's wild adventures, he sought authority to disarm all military groups-both Congolese and Katangan-and negotiate a settlement of the Congo's internal differences...
...even before the Council could vote, Hammarskjold had decided to act in Leopoldville. Suddenly the Congo army guards whom Lumumba had ordered to guard key government offices disappeared from their posts. At sprawling Camp Leopold II, troops were stacking their arms, ignoring the screams of anger from Lumumba. Behind the Premier's back, Congolese army leaders and U.N. officers had worked out arrangements of their own: weapons were to be kept locked in central arsenals, and a cease-fire was arranged in the Katanga campaign. Lumumba insisted it was all a mistake, but the fact remained that the Premier...
...talked of loosening NATO's military ties, De Gaulle, with no apparent sense of inconsistency, demanded a kind of Big Three superdirectorate to coordinate NATO political and military strategy not just for Europe but for the whole world. He implied that much of the chaos in the Congo might have been averted "if the U.S., Great Britain and France had discussed together their positions in this matter from the beginning of the crisis" (and, by implication, imposed a course of action on Belgium) rather than "effacing ourselves before the inadequate and very costly action" of the U.N., which...