The Case for Congo Unity

...And we must do it in competition with a powerful competitor, whose strategy depends upon sowing disorder, rather than order, and upon profiting from anarchy whenever anarchy reveals the lack of native capacities for order...

...This has enabled Tshombe to hire the white mercenaries who have been so prominent in the current news...

...it will undoubtedly make some more...

...The issue can be briefly stated...

...In our contest with a shrewd and unscrupulous Communist oligarchy we cannot afford simplistic solutions which play into the hands of the adversary...

...Unfortunately the Congo, with its primitive culture, has problems of language and kinship which we did not have...

...The right-wing opposition wants to reduce the conflicts to simple proportions...

...This hazardous policy was conceived by the late Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold and was the indirect cause of his tragic death...

...Our constitution solved the problem logically...

...While none of the problems are insoluble, the hazards are so great that we must expect the African continent to be in ferment throughout the 20th century—even as the Latin American Hemisphere was in the turmoil of its budding nations in the 19th century...

...It is too early to predict, however, whether or not federalism can solve the regional problem of such disparate cultures...

...But Washington's policy of supporting it is obviously right...

...The British have not been too enthusiastic about it...

...It could not have solved its problems without the principle of federation...

...Today Union Minière du Haut-Katanga pays the Provincial Government taxes which previously supported 50 per cent of the Congo budget...

...Four hundred different dialects and four main languages impede the communications which make for national cohesiveness...

...But it will thereby aggravate the situation...

...and Thomas J. Dodd (D.Conn...

...The UN policy is designed to avoid a conflict in the new African nation between Russia and West...

...We Americans, citizens of a nation which fought a bloody civil war to determine whether the states had a right to secede from a federal union, should have some sympathy for the problem of federal union that today's emerging nations face...

...The Northern region is at once more politically integrated and less economically developed than the other regions...

...Finally, we should be interested in the problems of Katanga and the Congo because they are typical of the grist with which the mills of policy of a nation with imperial power must deal for decades...

...We must do the best we can to guide the Congo to unity and democracy...

...As these lines are written it is not apparent that the Katanga delegation will accept a federal scheme enabling the Central Government to levy proportionate taxes on the copper-rich Province—the source of 50 per cent of the country's total budget under Belgian administration...

...In short, the economic, linguistic and cultural hazards of both democracy and integral community, which the whole of Africa now faces, are all apparent in the unhappy Congo nation that was prematurely launched upon the rough seas of autonomy...

...Some rigorous policies can be ordained from above which democracy finds difficult to ordain from below...

...These same Balubas were once a part of the political party that vaulted Tshombe to power...

...But military power cannot supply the cohesive force which the nascent Congo nation lacks...

...There can be no question about the relation of Katanga President Moise Tshombe to the copper interests of the Province...

...has been increasingly critical of United States support for United Nations' actions in the Congo designed to prevent the secession of Katanga Province from the Central Government...

...Nigeria, one of the most impressive nations in Africa, is a Federal Republic...

...The members of the Baluba Tribe who are now leading a resentful existence in a stockade guarded by UN troops at least have security against the vengeance of the Katanga government...

...If we support the Katanga secessionists because they are anti-Communist, we also support a movement which will symbolize the "imperialist" character of the Western cause in the eyes of the Communist and the "uncommitted" world...

...But federalism is clearly no patent cure-all for the problems of the new African nations...

...but only force and the cohesive powers of the new nation could solve the problem effectively...

...It offered indubitable proof that we were not covertly supporting the copper interests behind the Katanga secession...

...We didn't have direct taxation, in fact, until the income tax was enacted at the turn of the century...

...In that case the symbol of the Western cause will be an independent Katanga, tool of "imperialist" interests, which Russia will exploit to the full...

...But even so, our two Houses of Congress, the one with representation according to population and the other with equal representation for all states, stands as the artful compromise devised by our founding fathers for the conflicting interests of the powerful and the weak states which entered the union...

...Yet it was the only way of keeping the cold war out of the Congo, and of avoiding the taint of "imperialism" upon the West...

...SIMPLISTIC SOLUTIONS PLAY INTO HANDS OF COMMUNISTS' The Case for Congo Unity By Reinhold Niebuhr The American right wing, consisting not only of the "radical right," but of ordinary Senators such as Everett McKinley Dirksen (R.-I11...

...It did prompt the Katanga Government to send delegates to a new constitutional convention designed to amend the original character so that a loose federation of states rather than a unitary government would emerge...

...Could anything be more complicated...

...If Katanga is not brought into the national fold, the secession of the Stanleyville regime headed by Antoine Gizenga, who is heir to Patrice Lumumba and is touched with Communist influence, will be inevitable...

...And this opposition is one of the hazards which the nation faces in exercising its responsibilities of power as the hegemonic nation in the non-Communist world...

...It has three distinct regions, the Northern, Eastern and Western...

...Second, the Congo situation introduces the possible solution of federalism with which our own national history has made us familiar...

...On the other hand, the growing pains of Ghana might have been eased by the principle of federation...

...The peril of a too simple rightwing solution does not of course prove the correctness of the United Nations policy of using military force to coerce the recalcitrant Katanga...

...Most of the opposition leaders now languishing in jail under Kwame Nkrumah's increasingly tyrannical government are members of the proud Ashanti tribe...

...In addition, tribalism calls attention to the fact that a primitive culture may not be ripe for integral nationhood...

...The United Nations may have made some mistakes...

...The question is how loose or how tight...

...A study of Katanga and the Congo should thus be of special interest to the United States for three reasons: First, it gives us a vivid picture of the problems and hazards which both democracy and integral nationhood face in the primitive cultures of Africa...

...In 1958, when the white settlers there saw the inevitable growth of Congolese nationalism, they organized and began using his African party as a front for their interests...

...It is also obvious, though, that the UN is hardly the nascent world government that the Uberai imagination so blandly deems it to be...

...Nor was there one state among our original colonies which furnished half the revenue of the Federal government, and which needed the assistance of the former colonial master to extract this wealth from its mines...

...Federal autonomy might have prevented their disaffection or protected them from the humors of the young caesar of Africa...