I WAS SITTING IN THIS BAR IN LUXEMBOURG...
Black, Jan Knippers
I WAS SITTING IN THIS BAR IN LUXEMBOURG... . . . and he said, 'Let's go to Katanga' by Jan Knippers Black The cast of characters at Kinshasa's Intercontinentai Hotel was worthy of Graham...
...But it soon appeared that our allies, especially Zairian government troops and French foreign legionnaires, were killing more innocents than the invaders were...
...I'm not sure anybody knew...
...If Congress could be persuaded that the remote struggle in Shaba was really a looming confrontation with Moscow, perhaps the restrictions would be lifted...
...On the other hand, it wouldn't go over well-on television especially-to pack Shaba with French and Belgian soldiers...
...The most important local asset of the United States in this sorry plot was General Joseph Mobutu...
...The front section of the plane, filled with crates of howling dogs, added a touch of surrealism...
...We only saw what they had left behind...
...This was strictly a forwhites- only project, in which the citizens of Shaba were treated as the enemy and were assumed to be sympathetic to the invaders-a reasonable assumption, since many of the invaders were fathers, brothers, cousins, and friends who had previously' been driven out of Shaba...
...When the Congo declared independence in June 1960, old colonialists arid neocolonialists alike rushed in to grab whatever they could before it was too late...
...Zaire's annual inflation rate hovers these days at nearly 200 percent, and the purchasing power of the urban worker, even with wage increases, dropped 74 percent between 1960 and 1976, according to political scientist Guy Gran...
...I played my role gratefully, spilling coffee and wine all over the passengers on the 30-hour trip back to Luxembourg...
...Actors and scripts may change, but roles and plots seem to rel11ain the same, confirming for me that the United States is congenitally incapable of learning anything from past experience...
...No curfew, we were told...
...Certainly they were...
...Where's that...
...The proposal was turned down by the Organization of American States (OAS...
...I had no ticket and no apparent reason for being there in the first place...
...As if there were nothing to be learned from the failures of European colonialism and from our own efforts to pick up where the Europeans left off, the United States in 1978 joined forces with Belgium and France to intervene in Zaire once again...
...I felt momentarily nostalgic for Seven Seas Airlines...
...The United States took a firm public stand against colonialism of any kind, but at the same time the CIA went to work plotting the assassination of nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba, as we were to learn many years after the fact...
...If the Belgians weren't worrying, why should we...
...My introduction to the complex conflict in the Congo began at the Elizabethville airport, where we were met by United Nations troops...
...Nobody bothered to tell me there was a war going on in Katanga...
...I asked about a ticket...
...Zaire's foreign debt, meanwhile, has climbed to about $4 billion, of which more than a fourth is owed to U.S...
...Accordingly, the idea of a "panAfrican peacekeeping force" was floated...
...Right...
...And then I ran across the son of the man who had identified himself to me as the manager of Seven Seas...
...And that transformed a remote struggle into a test of wills between the superpowers-something which it seems every U.S...
...By early evening the streets were deserted...
...government...
...Final~ ly, one of the Seven Seas co-pilots, amused at my wide-eyed wonder, turned to me and asked if I'd like to go to Katanga...
...The World Health Organization says half the children born in rural areas of Zaire can expect to die before reaching the age of five...
...The reasons for their desperation were soon clear...
...No problem, they said...
...I would gladly have borrowed one of their stewardess uniforms again, if they would only rescue us...
...In the summer of 1961, a naive 21-yearold woman from rural Tennessee vagabonding across Europe, I stumbled upon a nest of Americans at the Hotel Dolphin in Luxembourg...
...was trying to extricate itself from the Dominican RepUblic...
...They told me, more or less, but time was short and there were things to do...
...Curfew...
...My airline posts, however, kept me on a short leash...
...Two weeks after the invasion of Shaba, President Carter charged Fidel Castro with complicity in the attack...
...As has been the pattern in several U.S...
...At the last minute, the Seven Seas crew found me a stewardess uniform and put ine aboard the plane...
...I learned that I was to be detained...
...military interventions-the Congo in 1964, the Dominican Republic in 1965, for example- the initial excuse was to protect innocent lives...
...Hotter than a pistol in Singapore today, " they would say...
...Ripples from Seven Seas Arriving at Kinshasa International Airport in the summer of 1978, my husband and I were immediately set upon by a crowd of shouting men with outstretched hands, demanding tips, bribes, or protection money...
...Why should this latest tribal conflict in the heart of Africa be seen as a crisis for the United States...
...Those fortunate enough to be employed at all constitute a minority of the able-bodied population...
...I was rushed into Brussels for a visa and a yellow fever shot, back-dated...
...All this finally became a matter of record in 1975 as the result of investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee...
...We'd had a hard time controlling our trainees...
...The reliable Moroccan monarchy agreed to participate, but elsewhere in Africa the proposal was resoundingly rejectedmuch as a similar idea for an "interAmerican peacekeeping force" had been rejected by Latin Americans when the U.S...
...Mobutu remains the ruler of Zaire today, reportedly amassing vast personal wealth while the people he rules struggle to cope with it rapidly unraveling economy...
...Given this sad state of affairs, and recognizing the Carter administration's principled stand on human rights, it can be reported that when tribal warfare broke out in 1978 the United States saw an opportunity to curb Mobutu's abuses...
...president must face at one time or another in all kinds of places under all sorts of guises...
...The answer is that the Belgians weren't faced with a crisis unique to American politics...
...It was blown up a few weeks later...
...The way this argument went, the Cubans had trained them, and so had a responsibility for controlling them...
...It turned out, however, that the evidence was inconclusive, forcing the administration to retreat to the peevish argument that the Cubans could have done more to stop the invaders...
...authorities ih Katanga had been much embarassed by their inability to tell Tshombe who I was, and, after my unauthorized departure, I was declared persona non grata...
...They were full of horror stories about nuns being chopped to pieces in broad daylight in the' middle of the city...
...In May 1978, the Congo-now Zaireand its secessionist province, Katanganow Shaba-were once agaih in the headlines...
...Sure," I said...
...For several days, I sat in the Dolphin's bar at cocktail hour, entranced by the spectacle of the crews staggering in...
...It was painfully clear from the start that the first priority of our mission to Shaba was to protect not people but copper and cobalt and diamonds...
...Strangely enough, the rumors of war issuing from the National Security Adviser's office ceased shortly thereafter, although the turmoil in Shaba continued...
...I would be a guest of the airline...
...In mariy ways, it was a replay of a scene in which I had appeared nearly 20 years earlier as a perplexed walkon...
...He staged a coup in September 1960, closed the fledgling Congolese parliament, and obliged the CIA by having Lumumba captured and transported to Katanga, where he was murdered by Tshombe's soldiers...
...At the time, the Katanga trip seemed merely a bizarre adventure, something worth telling about back in Tennessee...
...Before the fall of Somoza, the Carter administration revived the idea of an inter-American force to control the strife in Nicaragua...
...I don't remember why the dogs were aboard...
...Brzezinski and Turner had reportedly wanted to use Zaire as a base from which to revive the clandestine war against the Angolan government...
...A similar invasion of Shaba the previous year had caused hardly a ripple of concern in Washington...
...Congress, momentarily lucid between elections, was not persuaded...
...There's no curfew, we were told...
...That's who...
...he said the U.S...
...Zaire takes in more than $400 million a year from the export of coffee, but an estimated three fourths of that is diverted to private overseas bank accounts...
...The Carter administration in fact moved to save Mobutu's regime from dismemberment...
...Or: "You haven't seen a mob scene until you've seen Cairo...
...There were few flights out of the country (planes had a habit of running into bullets on take-off) and there was a long list of whites waiting desperately to get out...
...A State Department official in Hong Kong told me Seven Seas Airlines really had been working for the United Nations...
...And "able-bodied" itself may be a misnomer, since most Zairians suffer from malnutrition...
...After all, the Belgians- still the major foreign shareholders in Shaba's mines-had permitted representatives of the invading group, the Front for the National Liberation of the Congo, to maintain offices in Brussels...
...The flight, in a seasoned four-engine propeller plane, took nearly 30 hours, including stopovers in Algiers and Kano, Nigeria...
...Neither borrowed money nor earnings from exports trickles down far enough to benefit most ordinary citizens...
...A businessman in Morocco told me Seven Seas really had been working for Tshombe...
...We learned that Mobutu's troops were not being paid regularly, so they were driving around at night in their trucks and jeeps, looking for people to rob...
...Jan Knippers Black is a political scientist at the University o/' New Mexico *We never learn in Latin America either...
...This is terrific, I tho~ght...
...Our allies the Belgians were, it seemed, prepared to deal with the invaders had they succeeded...
...As things turned out, we didn't see anybody from Seven Seas...
...They turned out to be the m(inagers and crewmen of two non-scheduled airlines called Intercontinental and Seven Seas...
...But as the years went by I became more and more curious about the intrigue in which I had been involved...
...Lunda and Balubii tribesmen had invaded Shaba, and from the cry that went up in the White House you might have thought they were marching on Atlanta...
...The first problem arose when we made ready to leave Elizabethville...
...Considering the highly publicized posture of the Carter administration on the issue of human rights, a first assumption might be that Washington was disturbed by reports that human rights were being violated...
...This gave me pause, but I was still anxious to get out into the countryside...
...In downtown Kinshasa we found the skyscraping shells of a modern city hovering incongruously over ragged people begging-and mugging-on the sidewalks below...
...Who do you suppose supported the invasion of Shaba...
...The administration's case wasn't bolstered by the disclosure that Brzezinski and CIA Director Stansfield Turner had approached members of Congress prior to the Shaba invasion with a suggestion that Congress consider relaxing restrictions on presidential wars...
...On the other hand, this had been the norm for the area ever since King Leopold II of Belgium had gotten possessive about it in the 1880s...
...He recalled my escapade...
...This was no mission to compete for hearts and minds...
...This was a difficult undertaking, because the undisciplined Zairian troops were not considered trustworthy...
...I thought our hotel-the Leopold, a busy but elegant and unfrenzied place-was altogether too safe to be interesting...
...At the official exchange rate, our cabfare for the 20-minute ride to the hotel came to $50...
...The Zairian government troops maintained control with a straightforward reign of terror...
...Et Tu, Mobutu...
...Wrong...
...The CIA also collaborated with the Belgians and their puppet, Moise Tshombe, in a scheme to take control of Katanga-at least until Lumumba could be removed from the scene and the entire Congo brought under more acceptable leadership...
...Communists...
...Encountering thi~ motley collection in Zaire some months ago, I had a powerful sense of deja vu...
...Several of those nameless accounts reportedly belong to Mobutu, and Zaire specialists rank him as one of the seven or eight richest men in the world...
...The plane was surrounded by surly policemen who kept their machine guns pointed at the cabin door, and we were not allowed to disembark...
...Both Intercontinental and Seven Seas had belonged to the CIA, he said, and on that occasion in 1961 Seven Seas had indeed been under overt charter to the U.r·t, but covertly-without the knowledge even of most State Department officials-had been put at the disposal of Tshombe...
...The soldiers were fair~ haired and pink-cheeked, confused and obviously frightened European boys even younger than I was...
...A few months later, in the wake of the flap about the Russian troops in Cuba, the Carter administration tried-unsuccessfully- to revive the idea...
...banks or to the U.S...
...Well, okay, the Cubans undoubtedly weren't under the illusion that their trainees were going to be used for traffic control...
...The son confirmed what I already suspected: his father, now retired, was a career CIA officer...
...The congressional subcommittee on Africa reported, for instance, that Zairian troops flown into Shaba aboard American C-130 transports slaughtered nearly a thousand local civilians in Kolwezi soon after deplaning...
...With Zbigniew Brzezinski setting the tone, the administration unleashed a volley of on-therecord and off-the-record statements angrily "responding" to the latest "evidence" of Cuban/ Russian mischief-making on the Dark Continent...
...why shouldn't the Cubans be permitted to have a hard time controlling theirs...
...But the unseemly scramble to "protect" Shaba's mineral wealth doesn't fully explain why the White House was so worried about events in Zaire...
...What, then...
...But Mobutu's troops were not being paid regularly, so they were driving around at night looking for people to rob...
...He administered the colony as his personal estate, and the miners of Katanga worked under a very compelling productivityincentive program: a miner who failed to meet his quota ran the risk of having a hand chopped off...
...On the other hand, some of the very same people had been previously trained by Americans and Belgians for the purpose of breaking Katanga loose from the Congo...
...A tourist agile enough to avoid the marauding soldiers could expect to be set upon by unemployed civilians who had taken to stealing in order to eat...
...We assumed there was a curfew and asked about it...
...and he said, 'Let's go to Katanga' by Jan Knippers Black The cast of characters at Kinshasa's Intercontinentai Hotel was worthy of Graham Greene: missionaries and mercenaries, newsmen and con men, diplomatic troubleshooters and Middle East oil magnates...
...This brought me to the attention of the local troops working for Moise Tshombe, who controlled the breakaway province of Katanga, and they treated me with suspicion...
...The stopover in Algiers was memorable because it set the tone for the entire adventure...
Vol. 12 • July 1980 • No. 5
