Word: katanga
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With Tshombe's Katanga now largely under U.N. control, Central Government Premier Cyrille Adoula began flexing his muscles in Leopoldville. He demanded that the British and Belgian consuls in Elisabethville leave the country because they had acted as mediators for Tshombe in hopes of arranging a ceasefire. He spurned a $2,000,000 gift from the British government because of its "subversive policy" on Katanga, and one of his officials sniffed: "We are not a little child who can be given a lump of sugar to keep quiet...
...Score. Exuberant as Adoula was over Tshombe's plight, there was not much for him to crow about. Even if Katanga is successfully reintegrated, he will still face the equally formidable problems of administrative incompetence, official corruption, army indiscipline and-worst of all-rivalries among the Congo's 200 tribes. The point was underlined in blood last week in Kasai province, where feuding tribesmen were at one another's throats over a border dispute. Natives kidnaped and reportedly ate two Belgian lumbermen, then began slaughtering one another in the town of Kakenge. Such gruesome incidents no longer...
Though its mines provided the uranium for the Nagasaki and Hiroshima A-bombs, the durable giant known as the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga had never been so preoccupied with explosives as it was last week. Outside the southern Katanga town of Kolwezi, unruly "gendarmes" in the service of Katanga's President Moise Tshombe had wired demolition charges to two huge Union Minière power dams and threatened to push the plunger...
Destruction of the Kolwezi dams would unleash huge floods, wipe out at least one-fifth of Union Minière's $600 million investment in Katanga and cut off 80% of the province's power supply. Some engineers doubted that the Katangese were expert enough to destroy the Kolwezi dams. And on the basis of the past track record of the Union Minière (which is controlled by Belgium's all-pervading Société Générale), many another observer was prepared to bet that the Kolwezi dams would survive...
Union Minière defends the fact that it has paid taxes to Tshombe rather than to the Congo's central government with the realpolitik argument that up to now Tshombe has been the effective power in Katanga. Last week, with Tshombe's star apparently sinking, the company began negotiating with the central government over future payments. To charges that the company has been meddling in Congolese politics. Union Minière Director Herman Robiliart snaps: "The policy of Union Minière is to produce copper...