Word: lumumba
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Even then, Lumumba was not an easy subject to tackle. In the two months he served as prime minister before being overthrown in a coup and eventually executed, Lumumba had managed to alienate the outgoing Belgians, the United States and the U.N. Worse - from a Western point of view - he deigned to flirt with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. The accumulation of propaganda against Lumumba was so damning that Peck initially found it hard to focus on the man. "I couldn't feel any sympathy for Lumumba," he says. "It took me time...
...After interviewing hundreds of witnesses, a different image emerged - Lumumba as a self-educated nationalist reacting to a harsh colonial regime. "He was self-taught and he had a crash-course in world politics," says Peck. "He didn't really have time to develop an ideology or a message." The fact that Lumumba could be effective at all was something of a miracle. By the time of independence, the Belgians had allowed only 17 Congolese to obtain a university education. Larry Devlin, a CIA agent in the Congo at the time, agrees with Michela Wrong that Lumumba tried...
...Lumumba's flirtation with the Russians led the U.S. , Belgium and other Western powers to look for a more malleable alternative to rule the Congo. They settled on Lumumba's former aide, Joseph Desire Mobutu, who had been promoted to head of the army. Mobutu was flooded with Western money and arms, and within two months was able to out-maneuver the remnants of Congo's civil government, launching the newly-independent nation's long slide into institutional theft and ultimate bankruptcy. Lumumba was placed under house arrest, and after he escaped, was captured, tortured and turned over to Moise...
...Michela Wrong points out that Lumumba had been considered so dangerous by Washington that President Eisenhower actually signed off on an assassination plot. The idea was to slip him a poison that would mimic a fatal local disease. Devlin told Wrong that he kept the poison in his desk for several months and then dumped it in the river. In the end it wasn't necessary...
...deep was the charismatic Lumumba's popularity among Congolese that even after ousting him, Mobutu felt obliged to build him a monument as one of Africa's great heroes. Like many other projects, the monument was never finished. There was another plan to name a boulevard in the capital after Lumumba. That also fell by the wayside. So the best monument may, in fact, turn out to be Peck's film which is based on solid research and hundreds of interviews with key participants, including one of the Belgian secret agents sent to dispose of Lumumba's body. The film...