Word: minis
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...fact that the sum in question is hardly big money in Manhattan's public relations world, and that a great many Americans are pro-Katanga without any help from political pressagents.) Chief culprits in the whole mess, said Rowan, were the big Belgian-run mining complex, Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, and "financial interests" bent on maintaining Katanga as their "safe little kingdom...
...pledge, the U.N.'s 6,000 Indian, Ethiopian, Swedish and Irish soldiers around Elisabethville might well resume their hail of shells, rockets and machine-gun fire. When one of Tshombe's platoons last week clashed with a group of Ethiopian soldiers who occupied the big Union Minière copper refinery at nearby Lubumbashi, the Ethiopians fought so bitterly that the ground was littered with Katangese dead as the survivors retreated in disorder...
...rightly credited with heading the slickest, tidiest and best policed of all the fragments of the old Congo. He paid the police, paved the streets and repaired the waterworks from a source of cash no other province enjoys. It is the cut Tshombe gets from Katanga's Union Minière, the firm that produces 8% of the world's copper, 60% of its cobalt, as well as cadmium, zinc, silver, etc. Union Minière this year is due to hand Tshombe's regime some $52 million in dividends, mineral export taxes and other fees, enough...
When the Congo got its independence last year, the portfolio of 18% of Union Minière stock, once "held in trust for the Congolese people" by the Congo's Belgian colonial administration, was supposed to be handed over to the new central government; somehow the transfer never occurred. Once Katanga declared itself independent, all the payments flowed into the National Bank of Katanga; Union Minière shrugs and says it was forced by Tshombe's government to hand over the money...
They range from Belgian teen-agers to businessmen who moonlight as soldiers; at least half a dozen Union Miniére du Haut-Katanga executives have reportedly doffed their dark business suits for camouflage outfits. One Elisabethville butcher sells meat in his shell-pocked shop all day, fights the U.N. most of the night...