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<font size=4><b>War-crimes charges to be filed 50 years after Lumumba's
assassination <br>
</font><font size=4 color="#FF0000">(Today marks the day - 2 articles
Follow)<br><br>
</b></font><font size=3>By Slobodan Lekic (CP) – 1 hour ago<br>
<a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5hn0EN_X4MvLPcrP3waKo9amJzm2w?docId=5674221" eudora="autourl">
http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5hn0EN_X4MvLPcrP3waKo9amJzm2w?docId=5674221<br>
<br>
</a>BRUSSELS Activists plan to file a civil suit alleging war crimes by
a dozen former Belgian officials they say participated in the
assassination of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba 50 years ago, a
Brussels lawyer who heads the legal team said Monday.<br><br>
Lumumba headed Congo's largest political party and was elected prime
minister when Belgium granted independence to the country on June 30,
1960, after almost a century of colonial rule. Many in the West viewed
the charismatic prime minister as a dangerous radical because he wanted
to nationalize the new country's lucrative, Belgian-owned gold, copper
and uranium mining industry.<br><br>
The killing made Lumumba an anti-colonial martyr and a liberation symbol
to many Africans and Asians. It inspired revolutionaries from South
Africa and Cuba to Vietnam and Algeria.<br><br>
"We want the case against the officials implicated in the murder to
be airtight," said historian Ludo De Witte, who blamed the Belgian
government for the killing in a 1999 book and is part of the group of
activists.<br><br>
A Belgian parliamentary probe determined in 2002 that the government was
"morally responsible" for Lumumba's death. Brussels officially
apologized for its role in his death but refused to pay compensation to
his family or to prosecute those involved.<br><br>
A U.S. Senate committee found in 1975 that the U.S. administration had
also hatched a separate plan to kill the Congolese leader because
Washington viewed the leftist leader as a potential threat.<br><br>
Congo's production of weapons-grade uranium vastly raised the stakes for
the United States, which had used Congolese uranium to build the two
atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.<br><br>
Christophe Marchand, who heads the legal team, said the suit, which was
originally supposed to have been submitted to the court in June, was
delayed due to volume of archives that had to be studied.<br><br>
"There was an enormous mass of documents we needed to consult,
including reports of commissions of inquiry both in Belgium and the
United States, in order to establish the facts," he said.<br><br>
Marchand said the complaint will be refiled "in coming weeks."
He refused to name any of the officials they planned to
implicate.<br><br>
On Sunday, several hundred demonstrators rallied around the statue of
King Leopold II, who colonized Congo in the mid-19th century. Belgium's
harsh rule caused the deaths of between four million and eight million
Congolese.<br><br>
"We want the truth about the assassination, we want justice done
after 50 years, and we want Belgium to pay reparations for the
consequences the assassination caused," said Jean Marie Luhahi
Mongo, one of the organizers of the rally.<br><br>
Historians agree that top Belgian officials and officers conspired to
overthrow Lumumba and organized his execution Jan. 17, 1961. The death
ushered in the long, corrupt dictatorship of Congo's western-backed
leader Mobutu Sese Seko, who was finally overthrown in 1997.<br><br>
The Belgian army captain who commanded the firing squad, was given a new
name and secretly transferred to the Belgian brigade in West Germany to
avoid public exposure.<br><br>
Lumumba was hastily buried after the execution. But Belgian policemen
later dug up the corpse, dissolved it in acid and crushed the remaining
bones to avoid turning the grave into a pilgrimage site.<br><br>
Copyright © 2011 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved. <br>
*************************************************************<br>
</font><h1><b>An Assassination’s Long
Shadow</b></h1><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/opinion/17hochschild.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print" eudora="autourl">
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/opinion/17hochschild.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print<br>
</a></font><h6><b>By ADAM HOCHSCHILD</b></h6><font size=3>San Francisco
<br><br>
TODAY, millions of people on another continent are observing the 50th
anniversary of an event few Americans remember, the assassination of
Patrice Lumumba. A slight, goateed man with black, half-framed glasses,
the 35-year-old Lumumba was the first democratically chosen leader of the
vast country, nearly as large as the United States east of the
Mississippi, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo. <br><br>
This treasure house of natural resources had been a colony of Belgium,
which for decades had made no plans for independence. But after clashes
with Congolese nationalists, the Belgians hastily arranged the first
national election in 1960, and in June of that year King Baudouin arrived
to formally give the territory its freedom. <br><br>
“It is now up to you, gentlemen,” he arrogantly told Congolese
dignitaries, “to show that you are worthy of our confidence.” <br><br>
The Belgians, and their European and American fellow investors, expected
to continue collecting profits from Congo’s factories, plantations and
lucrative mines, which produced diamonds, gold, uranium, copper and more.
But they had not planned on Lumumba. <br><br>
A dramatic, angry speech he gave in reply to Baudouin
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/zaka33#p/a/u/1/F1JzlUrEb4A">brought
Congolese legislators to their feet cheering,</a> left the king startled
and frowning and caught the world’s attention. Lumumba spoke forcefully
of the violence and humiliations of colonialism, from the ruthless theft
of African land to the way that French-speaking colonists talked to
Africans as adults do to children, using the familiar “tu” instead of the
formal “vous.” Political independence was not enough, he said; Africans
had to also benefit from the great wealth in their soil. <br><br>
With no experience of self-rule and an empty treasury, his huge country
was soon in turmoil. After failing to get aid from the United States,
Lumumba declared he would turn to the Soviet Union. Thousands of Belgian
officials who lingered on did their best to sabotage things: their code
word for Lumumba in military radio transmissions was “Satan.” Shortly
after he took office as prime minister, the C.I.A., with White House
approval, ordered his assassination and dispatched an undercover agent
with poison. <br><br>
The would-be poisoners could not get close enough to Lumumba to do the
job, so instead the United States and Belgium covertly funneled cash and
aid to rival politicians who seized power and arrested the prime
minister. Fearful of revolt by Lumumba’s supporters if he died in their
hands, the new Congolese leaders ordered him flown to the copper-rich
Katanga region in the country’s south, whose secession Belgium had just
helped orchestrate. There, on Jan. 17, 1961, after being beaten and
tortured, he was shot. It was a chilling moment that set off street
demonstrations in many countries. <br><br>
As a college student traveling through Africa on summer break, I was in
Léopoldville (today’s Kinshasa), Congo’s capital, for a few days some six
months after Lumumba’s murder. There was an air of tension and gloom in
the city, jeeps full of soldiers were on patrol, and the streets quickly
emptied at night. Above all, I remember the triumphant, macho
satisfaction with which two young American Embassy officials much later
identified as C.I.A. men talked with me over drinks about the death of
someone they regarded not as an elected leader but as an upstart enemy of
the United States. <br><br>
Some weeks before his death, Lumumba had briefly escaped from house
arrest and, with a small group of supporters, tried to flee to the
eastern Congo, where a counter-government of his sympathizers had formed.
The travelers had to traverse the Sankuru River, after which friendly
territory began. Lumumba and several companions crossed the river in a
dugout canoe to commandeer a ferry to go back and fetch the rest of the
group, including his wife and son. <br><br>
But by the time they returned to the other bank, government troops
pursuing them had arrived. According to one survivor, Lumumba’s famous
eloquence almost persuaded the soldiers to let them go. Events like this
are often burnished in retrospect, but however the encounter happened,
Lumumba seems to have risked his life to try to rescue the others, and
the episode has found its way into film and fiction. <br><br>
His legend has only become deeper because there is painful newsreel
footage of him in captivity, soon after this moment, bound tightly with
rope and trying to retain his dignity while being roughed up by his
guards. <br><br>
Patrice Lumumba had only a few short months in office and we have no way
of knowing what would have happened had he lived. Would he have stuck to
his ideals or, like too many African independence leaders, abandoned them
for the temptations of wealth and power? In any event, leading his nation
to the full economic autonomy he dreamed of would have been an almost
impossible task. The Western governments and corporations arrayed against
him were too powerful, and the resources in his control too weak: at
independence his new country had fewer than three dozen university
graduates among a black population of more than 15 million, and only
three of some 5,000 senior positions in the civil service were filled by
Congolese. <br><br>
A half-century later, we should surely look back on the death of Lumumba
with shame, for we helped install the men who deposed and killed him. In
the scholarly journal Intelligence and National Security, Stephen R.
Weissman, a former staff director of the House Subcommittee on Africa,
<a href="http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content%7Edb=all%7Econtent=a923574698%7Efrm=abslink">
recently pointed out</a> that Lumumba’s violent end foreshadowed today’s
American practice of “extraordinary rendition.” The Congolese politicians
who planned Lumumba’s murder checked all their major moves with their
Belgian and American backers, and the local C.I.A. station chief made no
objection when they told him they were going to turn Lumumba over
render him, in today’s parlance to the breakaway government of Katanga,
which, everyone knew, could be counted on to kill him. <br><br>
Still more fateful was what was to come. Four years later, one of
Lumumba’s captors, an army officer named Joseph Mobutu, again with
enthusiastic American support, staged a coup and began a disastrous,
32-year dictatorship. Just as geopolitics and a thirst for oil have today
brought us unsavory allies like Saudi Arabia, so the cold war and a
similar lust for natural resources did then. Mobutu was showered with
more than $1 billion in American aid and enthusiastically welcomed to the
White House by a succession of presidents; George H. W. Bush called him
“one of our most valued friends.” <br><br>
This valued friend bled his country dry, amassed a fortune estimated at
$4 billion, jetted the world by rented Concorde and bought himself an
array of grand villas in Europe and multiple palaces and a yacht at home.
He let public services shrivel to nothing and roads and railways be
swallowed by the rain forest. By 1997, when he was overthrown and died,
his country was in a state of wreckage from which it has not yet
recovered. <br><br>
Since that time the fatal combination of enormous natural riches and the
dysfunctional government Mobutu left has ignited a long, multisided war
that has killed huge numbers of Congolese or forced them from their
homes. Many factors cause a war, of course, especially one as
bewilderingly complex as this one. But when visiting eastern Congo some
months ago, I could not help but think that one thread leading to the
human suffering I saw begins with the assassination of Lumumba. <br><br>
We will never know the full death toll of the current conflict, but many
believe it to be in the millions. Some of that blood is on our hands.
Both ordering the murders of apparent enemies and then embracing their
enemies as “valued friends” come with profound, long-term consequences
a lesson worth pondering on this anniversary. <br><br>
Adam Hochschild is the author of “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed,
Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa” and the forthcoming “To End All
Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.”<br><br>
<br><br>
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