The Heavy Burden

The most frustrated man in Manhattan last week was the U.N.'s Dag Hammarskjold. His Congo command, having backed all the main antagonists into corners, now seemed to be in full charge in Leopoldville, yet was powerless to create the solution it wanted. To bring back Parliament would probably be tantamount to re-electing the erratically irresponsible Patrice Lumumba; it might also send Colonel Joseph Mobutu's ragtag army up in flames. Besides, President Joseph Kassvubu was dead against it. To prop up Mobutu would incur the wrath of many of the U.N.'s African member nations, for they insist that Lumumba is the only--or at least the legally proper--man for the job. And just as Hammarskjold was preparing to dispatch a 15-man African and Asian conciliation commission to seek a fresh approach to the whole mess, the U.N. Congo chief, India's Rajeshwar Dayal, sent back urgent word: Don't let them come yet; it would only create more chaos.

Groping for a solution, Hammarskjold recalled Dayal to New York for consultation, simultaneously releasing Dayal's angry official report, which described Mobutu's regime as a "usurpation of political powers" and blamed much of the Congo's current troubles on Belgium, whose agents, said the report, were flocking back in to "exclude or obstruct" the U.N. itself. Promptly, the Belgians screamed "foul," hinted that Foreign Minister Pierre Wigny himself would fly over from Brussels to reply during this week's General Assembly debate. Then Hammarskjold got word that even the U.S. was upset at the report. "We have every confidence in the good faith of Belgium and its desire to be of assistance in the Congo," huffed a State Department spokesman in Washington. "We therefore are unable to accept the implications to the contrary contained in various parts of the report." This week, when the General Assembly debated the resolution to decide which Congo faction should be seated in the U.N., other guns would open fire at the stolid Swede. Not the least of them would probably be the Soviet Union, which still longs to squeeze Hammarskjold out of his job entirely. And then there was the irate Joseph Kasavubu to be dealt with. Without warning, the Congolese President, who for weeks has sat sphinxlike in his official mansion, suddenly announced he would fly to New York to make a bid for the Congo's U.N. seat at this week's debate. While he was there, he too, no doubt, would register his own protests with Dag Hammarskjold.

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