Word: lumumba
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...your issue of Dec. 8, Moise Tshombe was nominated by one of your readers for Man of the Year. I feel that he should be Man of the Year for his greed, which has cost the world the lives of two of the greatest men of this century: Patrice Lumumba-that rebellious son of the African soil-and Dag Hammarskjold...
When the Congo's martyr-demagogue. Patrice Lumumba, died last winter deep inside Katanga, territory of his bitter political foes, the Katangese Minister of the Interior said: "If people accuse us of killing Lumumba, I will reply, 'Prove it.' " For six months, a U.N. Commission of Investigation* has been trying to prove it. Its report last week, based largely on hearsay, hunches and gossip, did not furnish proof, but added considerable evidence to show that Lumumba was indeed murdered in cold blood-and probably with the connivance of Moise Tshombe's own Katanga government...
...report discredits the Katanga story that Lumumba was killed by indignant tribesmen after he escaped from a farmhouse jail. One witness quoted by the commission swore that Tshombe's Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo himself, confronting the prisoner in Elisabethville, took the bayonet from a soldier's rifle and plunged it into Lumumba's chest, then let a Belgian officer named Ruvs finish off the victim with a bullet in the head. The body was then supposedly taken to a refrigerator in a nearby laboratory and later buried at a still undisclosed place. But in a different version...
...story should be treated with caution, the U.N. commission concluded that the prisoners were murdered on Jan. 17, in all probability "in the presence of Tshombe and Munongo." Moreover, said the report, blame for the crime must be shared by Congolese Central Government President Joseph Kasavubu, who handed Lumumba over to Tshombe in the first place...
None of the Africans seemed to consider that innumerable "offensive, fictitious and erroneous" tirades had been loosed on the U.N. by the Communists (including Khrushchev's shoe-pounding and other Reds' denunciation of Dag Hammarskjold as "Lumumba's murderer") without the West's calling for censure. Some Africans went even farther...