Word: hammarskjolds
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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...
...fact that the U.N. troops were hampering his efforts to invade secessionist Katanga province. For two weeks, Lumumba's fast-shooting soldiers had been prowling along the Katanga frontier from their Kasai stronghold, gathering strength for the assault. This threat of civil war was bad enough, but Hammarskjold was now more alarmed at the busy activities of Soviet Russia, which had first come in to help under the U.N.'s aegis, was now operating high, wide and handsome on its own. Fifteen Ilyushin transports, with "Republique du Congo" freshly painted on their sides, were flying...
Seizing on the pretext that the falling out between Kasavubu and Lumumba might lead to civil rioting that the U.N. would have to deal with, Hammarskjold's officers ordered the main airports closed to all but U.N. planes, and Hammarskjold reported to the Security Council that "certain assistance from outside" was keeping the threat of civil war alive and gravely handicapping the U.N.'s task. In Washington, President Eisenhower considered the Russian intervention so serious that he had a special statement ready at his press conference warning the Soviets "to desist from unilateral activities." Ike charitably admitted there...
...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...
...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...