Word: katanga
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...circling DC-4 bounced through the tropical thunderstorm over Elisabethville, a cryptic message crackled down to the tower: "I've got a big parcel for you fellows." Minutes later, the parcel stumbled down the plane ramp into the eager hands of the tough Katanga gendarmes. It was Patrice Lumumba, blindfolded and shackled to two of his government lieutenants. The Katanga cops fell on all three, dropped them to the ground in a hail of swinging rifle butts. Then they flung Lumumba into a waiting Jeep. With four gendarmes sitting on him, Lumumba was whisked...
...energetically subverting the loyalty of the troops guarding him. For a few hours, no one was certain whether it was Lumumba or Kasavubu who was the prisoner. When order was restored, Kasavubu decided that it was time to move Lumumba to a safer place. He opened negotiations with Katanga's Moise Tshombe. Late one night Lumumba was hustled on board a chartered Air Congo plane and delivered to Elisabethville. En route, the guards pummeled Lumumba so severely that the alarmed pilot went back to the cabin to warn against damage to the plane...
...some missionaries, rifled mission collection boxes. Arms and supplies came from Gamal Abdel Nasser's U.A.R. troops, who man a U.N. base in Equator. The head of the U.N. Congo force, India's Rajeshwar Dayal, seemed to be at least tacitly helping the Lumumba cause. In northern Katanga, where Gizenga's troops marched into a U.N.-protected "neutral zone" unimpeded by Dayal's troops, the U.N. was accepting the interlopers as permanent occupiers; many U.N. unit commanders were grumbling that their orders from Dayal clearly were aiding the pro-Lumumba side...
Using Kivu as their staging area, 600 of Gizenga's men invaded the Katanga stronghold of Secessionist Moise Tshombe. Installing two Lumumba supporters (one of them Lumumba's cousin) as heads of a new territory to be known as "Lualaba," the invaders occupied village after village in Katanga's northern wilds, where the local Baluba tribesmen were happy to welcome any enemies of the Tshombe regime. At Manono, center of Katanga's tin mining, the interlopers stopped, dug in, and announced establishment of Lualaba's new capital...
Enraged at this brazen invasion of his region, Tshombe accused the local U.N. troops in North Katanga of carelessness or complicity, for Gizenga's soldiers obviously had traveled through dozens of miles of the "neutral zone," which Tshombe had agreed to leave under the sole protection of the U.N. forces themselves. The U.N. urged Tshombe not to retaliate, but planes of Tshombe's little air force, manned by Belgian pilots, flew off to strafe the enemy with machine guns and hand-hurled bombs. In this first use of air power in the Congo crisis, ground fire from...