Word: congos
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Nine months ago bloody nationalist riots in the Congo (TIME, Jan. 19) shocked all Belgium into realizing that the death knell was tolling for Belgian colonialism, too. Last week from Brussels, Belgian Minister of the Congo Auguste de Schrijver (rhymes with driver) broadcast the most conciliatory message yet to the freedom-hungry Congolese. But the words he used, though unthinkable a year ago, already seemed to come too late...
...first time, Schrijver openly offered the vast (900,000 sq. mi.) colony a definite timetable for achieving its freedom. By next fall, he said, the Congo will have its own Parliament. Within four years after that, it can decide whether to break with Belgium entirely or adopt a modified independence that would leave control of currency, defense and foreign policy to Brussels. Whatever the ultimate decision, added Schrijver sternly, "I wish to stress that responsibility for democratic government will really be in the hands of the Congolese people...
...prosperous half-century, tiny Belgium successfully ruled the vast, mineral-rich Congo with what seemed to be the most foolproof of colonial formulas: steady economic progress, combined with almost no political progress at all. But as the virus of nationalism spread across Africa and the newly autonomous republics of Charles de Gaulle's French Community sprang up throughout the continent, the Belgian Congo suddenly caught freedom fever. Early this year, after Leopoldville, capital of the Congo, exploded in the bloodiest race riots the colony had known in a decade (TIME, Jan. 19), Belgium hastily promised gradual independence "without fatal...
Since January, a bewildering array of 60 political parties has emerged in the Congo. New groups and splinter groups form with such rapidity that one Congolese leader found that the party he heads had split in two while he was flying from Leopoldville to Brussels last week. The most powerful Congolese politician is Joseph Kasavubu, 42, one of Leopoldville's ten native commune burgomasters. But Kasavubu's Abako Party represents mostly the Bakongo people of the southwest, who want immediate independence only for themselves. Abako's chief rival is the National Congolese Movement Party, headed...
...Assembly resolution branding Red China a violator of human rights by its repression in Tibet. Ghana's Ako-Adjei charged that Nyasaland is "a police state under British rule." Belgium's Pierre Wigny announced that his country is "now organizing political democracy" in the riot-swept Congo, and Austria's Dr. Bruno Kreisky warned that if Italy does not grant autonomy to the German-speaking people of the South Tyrol-an area that Italy acquired as World War I spoils-he would demand U.N. intervention...