Word: kolwezi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...year siege that brought the U.N. close to bankruptcy, set the U.S. at odds with its principal European allies and threatened to immerse Central Africa in blood. Now, Katanga's Rebel Moise Tshombe sat wanly behind a desk in a stucco cottage in the copper town of Kolwezi and declared, "I am ready to proclaim immediately before the world that Katanga's secession is ended...
...last moment, Tshombe wavered. Having fled from Elisabethville "a frightened and dejected man," in the words of British and Belgian officials, he turned up last week in Kolwezi, where the last 3,000 of his 20,000-man gendarmerie were holed up. A two-man peace mission composed of Jacques Houard, Belgium's consul general in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, and André Van Roey, director of Katanga's National Bank, followed him there. For 36 desperate hours, the two urged him to yield rather than carry out his threat to blow up the huge dams and copper...
Later, apparently to show newsmen what might have happened, he drove them to a minor hydroelectric substation 70 miles outside Kolwezi, aimed a six-pound artillery piece at it and pulled the lanyard. The shot was right on target. The substation, apparently loaded with dynamite, disintegrated while Tshombe guffawed. As a final act of obstreperousness he had Peacemaker Houard thrown...
Diversionary Actions. Just now the Union Minière is not producing any copper; its installations at Elisabethville and Jadotville, now under U.N. control, have been temporarily damaged, and its Kolwezi facilities are occupied by the Katanga gendarmerie. But with its usual instinct for survival, the company has labored to appease both sides. At the big Jadotville copper and cobalt plant, Union Minière officials thwarted the "scorched earth" tactics of Tshombe's men by directing them to relatively easily replaceable facilities which were damaged with much fanfare. Shortly later, the same officials, many of whom had long...
...expected to exaggerate in the hope of dissuading the Katangese from doing any more damage, says that the Jadotville plants could start rolling again in two to four months. Most outside observers figure that Union Minière will again be producing full blast well before that-provided the Kolwezi dams are not blown...