Word: mobutu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Originally, the U.N.'s Congo officials had condoned the takeover of power by Colonel Joseph Mobutu, 30, relieved to have someone try to impose order on the squabbling politicians. Now they were undermining the hapless young soldier...
...week long, the top aides of U.N.'s Congo Chief Rajeshwar Dayal of India made it obvious that the U.N. was ready to scrap Mobutu. The nervous colonel, they whispered, had asked Dayal for an apartment in Le Royal, the U.N.'s headquarters building. He no longer was in control of his army. He was about to flee the city. He was a poor officer. Ignoring the roughhouse tactics of Lumumba's own gangs, an official report spoke of "the highhanded and illegal activities" of Mobutu's army, accusing the army of "acts of lawlessness...
Guarding the Arsenal. Leopoldville's African quarter has been plagued for days by a wave of raping, looting and shooting. Many of the attacks were the work of gangs of roving civilian bullies. But some of Mobutu's soldiers, sent into the African city to search for arms and political enemies, had roughed up their quarry, had in some instances proved trigger-happy. Already angered by Mobutu's threat to bring an armored unit into Léopoldville to impose his will, Dayal called the bespectacled colonel on the carpet before an array of U.N. brass, issued...
...Mobutu protested he had not authorized violence, suggested that the political opposition was behind much of it. His intention, said Mobutu, was to cooperate fully with the U.N. "Then get the army off the streets," snapped India's General Inder Jit Rikhye, Dayal's military adviser. Meekly, Mobutu agreed to withdraw most of his troops to army headquarters outside the city, where the U.N. planned an intensive training program to inject some discipline into its ranks. But the U.N. let him keep his soldiers around Patrice Lumumba's house and at the radio station, and, for some...
...week's end rumors swirled through Léopoldville that the U.N. would disarm Mobutu's army, but Dayal's men denied it. Timorous Joseph Kasavubu sat in his presidential palace, sending out vague messages of endorsement for Mobutu but too frightened to get involved openly. Patrice Lumumba, nipping heavily at an always present bottle, also remained at home, awaiting the day when the confused maneuvering would let him emerge as the real boss again. If he did, it would probably not be long before he invited back all the Russian "technicians" that Mobutu had kicked...