Word: mobutu
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...young commissioners appointed by Colonel Joseph Mobutu made public a secret letter Nkrumah had written to Premier Patrice Lumumba three weeks ago. Nkrumah addressed Lumumba as "my brother," gave him detailed instructions on how to circumvent his Cabinet, urged him: "Don't make an issue of Kasavubu's treachery now. The time will come. You must not push out the United Nations until you have consolidated your position." Concluded Nkrumah: "When in doubt consult me . . . We know how to handle imperialists and colonialists...
...Welbeck was at his elbow at the in evitable press conference on the Premier's lawn. Becoming impatient, Welbeck interrupted Lumumba to announce that despite the sabotage of "certain individuals in the United Nations," he was ar ranging a reconciliation between Lumumba and President Kasavubu. As for Colonel Mobutu, Welbeck declared, "he has seen that he was misguided and will now follow the right path...
...yellow plaster house with a red tin roof on the outskirts of Leopoldville, Colonel Joseph Mobutu, 29, bit his fingernails, answered the telephone, coped with a stream of visitors, and tried to keep his three children (aged five, three, and nine months) from crawling off with state papers. In a big, three-story, official residence near the river, bespectacled Premier Patrice Lumumba peered out curtained windows, occasionally shouted invented communiqués to passing newsmen, and cried defiance at the world. On a grassy hilltop overlooking the foaming Congo rapids, stolid President Joseph Kasavubu huddled in his modern-design palace...
There were the usual alarms and excursions. A pro-Lumumba major tried to assassinate Colonel Mobutu, who wrestled the gun from the man's hand. A squad of pro-Mobutu soldiers arrived with a warrant to arrest Patrice Lumumba but were turned back by a Ghanaian officer of the U.N. corps because the warrant was not properly drawn. A big river boat loaded with 400 soldiers pulled up at a Leopoldville dock, and the panicky word went out that they were Lumumba troops from his upriver stronghold of Stanleyville. Truckloads of Mobutu's forces raced to the dock...
Chaos Ahead. Mobutu's coup seemed to be proceeding smoothly. He closed the cable office to wires by politicians of whatever stripe. He told Parliament to take a vacation for the rest of the year, and when the Deputies tried to meet anyway, his troops barred the doors and turned them away. There was even a good chance that Mobutu could get along with Kasavubu and with Katanga province's Moise Tshombe, an anti-Communist who last week said he had not even "dreamed" of seceding from the Congo until forced to by Lumumba's "dictatorship...