Word: sabena
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Well-fed Belgians, the tails of their sports shirts hanging over their khaki shorts, clogged the noisy Manhattan Bar at Leopoldville's Hotel Regina, and diners at the Sabena guest house could still enjoy coquilles St. Jacques, snails and mussels flown in from Brussels. With the flood of U.N. soldiers in town, the souvenir business was bigger than ever; on every street corner, the inevitable Hausa traders from Nigeria offered carved ivory, lizard handbags and ebony figures at prices tailored to the foreigners' handsome wages...
...make up for the $215 million a year that Belgium had been accustomed to extracting from the Congo. The new year saw the freakish collapse of a slag heap near Liege, burying six homes and eleven persons. It also brought the worst air disaster in Belgian history, a Sabena jet crash that killed 73. In anger over the Congo, often under Communist leadership, Belgian embassies and consulates were being looted and burned around the world. In the streets of Brussels, pro-Lumumbist demonstrators tried to march on Congolese Army recruiting centers; others, carrying banners declaring ENOUGH HUMILIATION WITHOUT REACTION...
...passenger list of Sabena Airlines' 707 Jet Flight 548 for Brussels counted all the types that have become so familiar to airline attendants at New York's Idlewild International Airport. There was the young man bound for Warsaw to the bedside of his cancer-ridden mother, the teen-age wife of a Europe-based serviceman making her first flight, the pregnant young wife of another overseas G.I., the middle-aged priest going to Brussels for a reunion with his parents, the tourists brimming with language books and visions of Notre Dame and Rimini, the comfortably tired Brussels businessman...
...would probably be months before investigators - helped by U.S. experts -could piece together the causes of the disaster, but the facts could scarcely lighten the burden of the tragedy itself. It was proud Sabena's worst disaster, and the first crash involving a regularly scheduled commercial Boeing 707 (two other 707 crack-ups occurred during training flights). No one life could claim a value above another, but the deaths of brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, fathers and sons dealt one of the worst blows to whole families of any crash ever. In all, there were multiple deaths...
...Baudouin's presence did nothing to soothe the strikers. Next day a rampaging mob of 5,000 clashed with saber-swinging police in front of the Sabena airlines of fice; in the crowd, someone pulled a pistol and fired wildly, fatally wounding one striker, injuring others. It was the first serious bloodshed, but perhaps not the last, since the Socialists swore to keep the protests going indefinitely...