Word: munongo
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Dates: during 1961-1961
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This was war, and although Katanga's President Moise Tshombe was away in Paris, Katanga Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo proclaimed: "We are all here, resolved to fight and to die if necessary. The United Nations may take our cities. There will remain our villages and the bush. All the tribal chiefs are alerted. We are savages; we are Negroes. So be it. We shall fight like savages with our arrows...
Holes in the Fuselage. As Munongo spoke, the radioteletype to New York was chattering in U.N. headquarters 1,000 miles away at Leopoldville, seat of the Congo's central government. On the line was U.N. Acting Secretary-General U Thant in Manhattan, with his approval for any action the U.N. authorities on the scene deemed necessary, on the ground...
...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...
Although noting that the details of the 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...
Other U.N. troops were deployed throughout the city. Indians took the state radio building after a charge with fixed bayonets. Swedish troops attacked the home of Tshombe's Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo (who had fled). Shortly after dawn, the U.N. forces gained their objectives, and O'Brien called a press conference to announce that "the Katanga secession is over. Katanga is now a Congolese province." The cease-fire announcement was vastly premature...