Word: katanga
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...Swahili, demands were megaphoned that the garrison yield the building. The answer was the rattle of machine guns. The U.N. returned fire, and for two hours streams of red tracer bullets crossed each other in the predawn darkness. An Indian soldier was hit in the face; he screamed. A Katanga gendarme, hit in the belly, fell from a second-story window, picked himself up, staggered away with his entrails hanging out. The driver of an armored car was decapitated, and his car lunged weirdly into a wall...
When the deadline passed, U.N. Congo Chief Sture Linner reported: "At least 104 foreign personnel failed to give any account of themselves." O'Brien de manded compliance. In answer, Katanga's white-led political police arrested O'Brien's deputy, Michel Tombelaine. Reported Linner, with undisguised frustration: "This was the culmination of a long series of wrongful acts by these officers, including the organization of attacks on the United Nations, repeated threats, and incitements to violence." O'Brien issued an ultimatum: remove all remaining white officers, or else. When Tshombe flatly refused, U.N. troops went...
...This operation bears no comparison to anything else in United Nations history," said the U.N.'s senior officer in Katanga. Conor Cruise O'Brien was vastly understating the case. In recalcitrant Katanga last week, scattered bands of blue-hel-meted troops-Indian, Swedish, Irish-were engaged in a battle to the death with a weird and formidable foe: the troops of Katanga President Moise Tshombe, some of them Baluba warriors smeared with warpaint, led by Europeans and backed by jet fighters...
Ultimatum. Since February, United Nations forces in the Congo had been armed with a Security Council resolution calling upon Tshombe to dismiss the 500 European officers leading his null army-and actively working toward maintaining Katanga's secession from the central Congo government, even at the cost of civil war. Last month, the Congo's moderate Premier Cyrille Adoula asked the U.N. to enforce the resolution. O'Brien gave Tshombe until Sept. 9 to get rid of the Europeans...
...Indians took the state radio building after a charge with fixed bayonets. Swedish troops attacked the home of Tshombe's Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo (who had fled). Shortly after dawn, the U.N. forces gained their objectives, and O'Brien called a press conference to announce that "the Katanga secession is over. Katanga is now a Congolese province." The cease-fire announcement was vastly premature...