Word: urquhart
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...URQUHART...
...shooting started after a week of growing tension. The brutal beatings of Acting U.N. Katanga Chief George Ivan Smith and Special Adviser Brian Urquhart (TIME, Dec. 8) had already left the U.N. soldiers tense, angry, and spoiling for a fight. Many of Tshombe's troops, whipped up by the strident anti-U.N. propaganda of Radio Katanga, were drinking heavily and walking through town with guns at the ready. Something had to happen; it did, one afternoon at the main airport. When brawling Katangese soldiers molested airport workers, Indian soldiers arrested 32 of them in a flurry of gunfire...
...Elisabethville society. When a sedan with U.N. license plates drove up, the soldiers were sure some kind of plot was being hatched. Quickly they surrounded the car, shouting and gesticulating wildly at the two startled occupants. Australian-born George Ivan Smith, acting U.N. chief in Katanga, and Brian Urquhart, a Briton transferred to the Congo from U.N. Manhattan headquarters only a few days before...
Breaking through the angry, milling mob. Smith, 46, and Urquhart, 43, ran into the house, where the first guests were already sipping their drinks. The screaming troops were right on their heels; grabbing the hapless pair, they smashed Urquhart's nose, pommeled Smith into submission, then dragged them both toward a truck outside. When a woman official from the Irish Foreign Office tried to intervene, the soldiers cuffed her roughly, bloodying her dress, ordered her to stay out of the fight...
...Urquhart was still their prisoner. They hauled him to a military camp outside town, beat him on and off for two more hours. Every time a car approached the camp, the soldiers, fearing the arrival of the U.N.'s tough Gurkha soldiers of the local Indian contingent, put submachine-gun muzzles to Urquhart's head and vowed to shoot if the U.N. tried to intervene. Not until angry U.N. aides induced Tshombe and two of his Cabinet ministers to drive to the camp was Urquhart released. "I was sure I was going to die there...