Word: katanga
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reported TIME Correspondent Eric Robins last week from Elisabethville, the dry and dusty capital city of the province that wants to be a nation-the Congo's Katanga. Only a few miles away are the mine shafts and chimneys of the huge copper and cobalt complex that makes secessionist Katanga the envy of its neighbors. For months the United Nations had kept its uneasy peace in Katanga, always hopeful that somehow the territory could be brought back into the Congo fold. Now, for the second time in three months, the U.N. was trying, with no great success...
...shooting started after a week of growing tension. The brutal beatings of Acting U.N. Katanga Chief George Ivan Smith and Special Adviser Brian Urquhart (TIME, Dec. 8) had already left the U.N. soldiers tense, angry, and spoiling for a fight. Many of Tshombe's troops, whipped up by the strident anti-U.N. propaganda of Radio Katanga, were drinking heavily and walking through town with guns at the ready. Something had to happen; it did, one afternoon at the main airport. When brawling Katangese soldiers molested airport workers, Indian soldiers arrested 32 of them in a flurry of gunfire...
That did it. Suddenly, Elisabethville's streets were alive with Katanga patrols. Seeking revenge, one Katangese squad swooped on a U.N. villa where ten sleeping U.N. staffers, mostly Swedish, were awakened, arrested and hustled away. At the same time, roadblocks, guarded by armored cars and Tommy-gun-waving soldiers, went up on the main roads from the town to U.N. installations outside. When a car with three Swedish soldiers tried to drive through one barrier at a strategic highway tunnel, the Katangese shot the driver in the stomach, then mowed down the other two after the vehicle crashed into...
...Lone Dornier. Strongest of all the roadblocks was established on the airport road a day later; there, a company of Katanga's paracommandos cut the highway with three armored cars and several 60-mm. mortars. At least three white men in civilian clothes were with them, apparently in command; they seemed to be part of Tshombe's force of hired Belgians, Rhodesians, British and South Africans, which the Katanga government only a week earlier had said was disbanded and out of the country...
Three times, U.N. Civilian Chief Smith communicated with Katanga's Foreign Minister Evariste Kimba, demanded that the roadblock be removed. Kimba promised to comply, but as time went by, it became clear that he had little or no control over the determined Katanga forces. It was now apparent that the U.N. personnel could reach the town only by using force. Then came word that Katangese units were moving up to encircle the airport itself, and one of Katanga's Dornier planes flew over the field. Certain that an attack against the U.N. was imminent, Smith turned...