Word: katanga
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This was war, and although Katanga's President Moise Tshombe was away in Paris, Katanga Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo proclaimed: "We are all here, resolved to fight and to die if necessary. The United Nations may take our cities. There will remain our villages and the bush. All the tribal chiefs are alerted. We are savages; we are Negroes. So be it. We shall fight like savages with our arrows...
...action was already in the works, for just that afternoon one of Katanga's Dorniers had dropped three bombs near U.N. troops at the airport. Next morning all 15 of the U.N.'s jets-Indian Canberras, Swedish Saabs and Ethiopian Sabres-were off in search of Katanga's meager air force. The Indian jets found four planes on the ground at nearby Kolwezi and destroyed them all. The air strike was just in time, for some of the Kolwezi planes were loaded with bombs and ready for another counterattack against the U.N. in Elisabethville...
Bombs in the Garden. One group in particular difficulty was the team of Seventh-day Adventist missionaries and their families. 29 people in all, trapped in their mission building. They were at a dangerous spot: halfway between U.N. headquarters and an important Katanga army building a few hundred yards away. For hours the missionaries ducked, as blast after blast struck their walls and plowed up the garden outside. Then they realized that badly aimed bazooka shells from the U.N. compound itself were doing the damage; during a lull in the firing, they hastily evacuated the buildings...
...government, reported Correspondent Robins, constantly prodded Katanga's civilian populace to fight against the U.N. "Bring out your guns, spears, knives, axes and clubs, and kill all the U.N. to combat the murder campaign of Secretary-General U Thant and his international minions!" demanded a government proclamation. Cried Radio Katanga: "Please attack the United Nations dogs!'' But things were not all serious. Radio Katanga also played "victory" cha cha chas. And after the heat of battle was over one day, most of the Katangese officers, chewing their entrecôtes de veau and pommes frites...
...foreign United Nations soldiers, supplied by U.S. planes, blasting the buildings and shooting at native troops in the Congo. There was some legitimate doubt as to whether the U.N. should be there at all, even though it was responding to violence or threats of violence on the part of Katanga. The U.S. firmly backed the U.N., but Britain, although on record as favoring the U.N.'s presence to keep the peace, was deeply unhappy about the armed intervention. "We support a unitary Congo state," declared Whitehall, "but we oppose the use of force by the U.N. to impose political...