Britain and Katanga

...They include leading Conservative figures among their directors and have assets of more than $400 million...

...Nevertheless, a dozen Rightwing Conservatives ostentatiously abstained from supporting Prime Minister Macmillan in the lobby, and one maverick Tory actually voted with the Labor and Liberal parties against him...

...It merely reaffirmed the Security Council resolution of November 24 and said that UN officials Robert Gardiner and Ralph Bunche were in Leopoldville trying to improve the situation...

...Under Secretary of State George Ball stated in a powerful rebuttal of Macmillan's position, an immediate and unconditional cease-fire before the UN forces had achieved their minimum objectives would be rightly regarded throughout the world as a humiliation of the entire UN...

...The British government has tried to maintain that Katanga, for whatever reason, is at least an island of peace and order in an anarchic Congo...

...the State Department, or Downing Street and the White House...

...It is against this background that the so-called Katanga lobby enters the scene...

...But there are counter-arguments which have always seemed decisive to the majority of the United Nations, and to the United States since President Kennedy took office...

...But Bunche and Gardiner had started their mission in Leopoldville before the British demand for a cease-fire, and U Thant had made it crystal clear that their task was political reconciliation and had nothing to do with the fighting in Katanga as such...

...Britain & Katanga By Denis Healey London The curtain fell on another act in the shabby drama of Britain's vacillating Congo policy when, after the most heated debate on foreign affairs since Suez, the Government's call for an immediate and unconditional cease-fire in Katanga won a majority in Parliament...

...His troops have massacred rival Baluba tribesmen on a scale described by Dag Hammarskjold as genocide...

...Over the last 10 years, he has built up a powerful and efficient public-relations machine inside Britain itself which is now capable of influencing the majority of Conservative opinion on any issue concerning Central Africa...

...Powerful British corporations, Tanganyika Concessions and the British South Africa Company have a large holding in the Belgian-dominated Union Minière...

...For, as U.S...

...At the very end of his speech, the Prime Minister read out a letter from United Nations Acting Secretary General Thant that had just been received by the British representative in New York...

...Thus, although it has been proved impossible to get rid of the mercenaries without force, Britain has consistently opposed giving the UN the right to use force for this purpose...

...On the whole, the British Conservative party has adapted itself with astonishing ease to the decline of imperialism and the emergence of international authority...

...The UN might have faced some difficult moral and political decisions on this issue if the Katangese armed forces had not continually played into its hands...

...As Labor spokesman Harold Wilson said, the Government was not really concerned about obtaining a cease-fire in the Congo, but only about a cease-fire with the extremist rebels in the Conservative party...

...Thus, only three days before, it had used Swedish press reports of an alleged interview with the head of the UN's Congo operations, Dr...

...British opinion has been rightly disturbed by this evidence that major issues of foreign policy can be determined by small pressure groups inside the Conservative party—an abdication of responsibility by Macmillan that is all the more striking when contrasted with Gaitskell's long resistance to similar extremist pressures in the Labor party...

...The Rhodesian Federal Prime Minister, Sir Roy Welensky, who is fighting desperately in his own federation against an overwhelming African majority, is thought to have alternative plans for a union of rich, white-dominated regions in Central Africa, including Southern Katanga, the Northern Rhodesian copper belt and Southern Rhodesia...

...The British government has never had illusions about the extent to which Tshombe's survival depends on the few hundred white mercenaries who command his armed forces...

...That is not their mandate and not their business...

...The main purpose of the UN presence in the Congo has always been to fill a vacuum which might otherwise suck the major powers into a new Korean War...

...These arguments obviously have some validity...

...In the first place, there are very intimate personal and financial links between the European mining interests in Katanga and those in the neighboring copper belt of Northern Rhodesia...

...Before one accepts too simple and sinister an explanation of Conservative behavior over the Congo, however, one must take account of the basic psychological trauma left by the Suez affair—and of the traditional Conservative attitudes from which Suez itself was born...

...What is certain is that unless the UN can exclude the possibility of covert European intervention in Katanga it has no chance whatever of achieving any of its agreed objectives...

...That Britain has consistently refused even to consider the counter-arguments, still less to bow to them, is difficult to explain except in the light of special interests, which so far the Government has never admitted in public...

...whether without them he would come to terms with the Central Government is equally uncertain...

...Sir Roy has throughout been the most violent critic of the whole UN operation in the Congo and has done everything possible to strengthen secessionist tendencies in Katanga...

...I fear that we may find the United Nations slipping into a war of conquest and then having to set up an administration...

...Tshombe's troops violated the September armistice agreements again and again...

...The world body can only justify its refusal to allow Communist "volunteers" into other parts of the Congo if the European mercenaries are removed from Katanga...

...This episode simply confirmed the impression already created by the Government's behavior earlier in the week...

...The Government's vote might have been still smaller had Macmillan not pulled one of the most dishonest stunts in Parliamentary history at the close of the debate...

...their lawlessness culminated in the savage attacks on UN officials George Ivan Smith and Brian Urquhart in Elisabethville...

...In Katanga, as to a lesser extent at Suez, the familiar struggle between European and African has been complicated by the intervention of the UN, with an Afro-Asian majority that consistently overrules the European states and with America on the Afro-Asian side...

...After the Congo crisis began, these corporations gave their propaganda account to a public-relations firm headed by the former chief of the propaganda department of the Conservative Central Office, who also handles Portugese propaganda on Angola...

...Linner had already denied these reports, and they are now known to have been due to a faulty teleprinter...

...Whether Tshombe could survive even in Katanga without his white mercenaries is an open question...

...In the one relevant part of his speech, Macmillan described a real anxiety which has been partly responsible for Britain's Congo policy ever since the first trouble in Katanga 18 months ago: If the Tshombe regime in Elisabethville should collapse, "the United Nations will find itself with a province as large as France on its hands and no means at all of governing it...

...This has transformed the chronic Conservative neurosis into an uncontrollable psychosis, with the most dangerous consequences for the stability of the present Government...

...But Tshombe's writ has never run outside his own tribal area...

...The real difficulties have come where large minorities of white settlers are directly threatened by colored majorities, as in Kenya and Central Africa...

...Macmillan represented this as a friendly response to the British demand for an immediate cease-fire...

...Moreover, the readiness and ability of the Congolese Central government to maintain its neutrality in the cold war depends on the UN's success in preventing European intervention from keeping Katanga an independent state...

...It is at this point that suspicion about the underlying motives of Macmillan's policy begins...

...It is impossible to guess to what extent British financial interests in Katanga have directly influenced Government policy on the Congo...

...Sture Linner, to justify withholding from the UN forces bombs which it had just undertaken to deliver...

...Yet Dr...

...But beneath the oscillating equivocations in the Government's Congo policy over the last few weeks there lies some genuine differences of judgment and interest between Conservatives and Laborites, as well as between the Foreign Office and...

...It has always feared that if they were expelled the Katanga Army and gendarmerie would immediately degenerate into a barbaric rabble...

...But it has been demonstrated this week that they can exercise an indirect influence on Government policy through Conservative back-benchers...

...Peace and order in Katanga have been restricted to the mining belt close to the Rhodesian frontier, where the European owned and operated Union Minière has continued functioning almost as if the Belgian government were still master of the Congo...

...Denis Healey was recently appointed Labor party Spokesman for Commonwealth and Colonial Affairs...

...It has become quite evident, too, that Tshombe has no control whatever over his own armed forces...

...When the full-scale debate took place on Thursday, the Government completely dropped its previous excuse and maintained that delay in supplying the bombs was caused by disagreement about the targets on which they would be dropped...