Fading Boss

In the Congo something always seems to turn the soberest occasion into a joke.

Last week it happened again in the arrival of a planeload of emergency supplies donated by the U.S. for flood-battered Stanleyville. It was quite a moment for the lazy little river capital of Eastern Prov ince, stronghold of Red-backed Antoine Gizenga, whose own rebellion against the central government had for a time seemed as serious as Moise Tshombe's in Katanga.

The town had been without water and light for weeks; now, everything had been arranged to unload the plane and greet the officials who came along with it from Leopoldville. But as the big U.N. Globemaster rolled to a stop with its cargo of electric generators, everything dissolved into typically Congolese chaos.

First, the two trucks waiting to transfer the equipment broke down and had to be pushed off the airstrip; then Simon Losala, Gizenga's provincial president, realizing that a dusty sport shirt was inappropriate for the occasion, rushed off to find a jacket and tie. When he returned, his tipsy words of welcome were: "I have been diddling around all day to ensure that these generators serve the population. In about three days or three weeks, I forget which, we shall have light again. It has meant a lot of work but, by God, I have to run the province!"

In the Villa. These were brave words, but as far as anyone could see last week, Eastern Province was in fact hardly running at all. Boat traffic along the Congo River was virtually at a standstill; in the towns, shops were closed and deserted; the battered government cars on the streets of Stanleyville, with their smashed fenders and broken windows, looked like stock-car racing relics. The once menacing empire of Antoine Gizenga, heir to Patrice Lumumba's mantle, was crumbling fast.

The boss himself had not been seen publicly for a month, preferring seclusion in his large riverside villa. From there, the stream of brusque orders still went out--to his troops, to his police, to his aides in the African Solidarity Party. But now many of Gizenga's decrees were being ignored. His army chief, General Victor Lundula, had declared his loyalty to the central government regime of Premier Cyrille Adoula in Leopoldville; when Gizenga angrily sent a platoon of Stanleyville police out to arrest Lundula, the cops began bickering among themselves, broke up and returned to their barracks without making the pinch.

A Second Thought. Obviously, this was the time for Adoula's central government to begin its crackdown, forcing Gizenga to drop his secession threats and rejoin the Congo. Out went an angry parliamentary demand for Gizenga to return to Leopoldville and take the Deputy Premier's seat he had abandoned last October. Some of Gizenga's own party followers in the Leopoldville Chamber of Deputies supported the resolution against him. Said one: "We have had enough of the anarchy and terror that reign in our province. If he does not return within 48 hours, we must take the governmental mandate away from him."

At first, Gizenga replied with a sneering refusal. On second thought he reversed himself and vaguely promised to come; but by then, the government was so angry that it sent orders to Lundula to "take all necessary steps to restore order" in Stanleyville. It might be a bloody task, for Gizenga still had a nucleus of determined soldiers behind him; sure enough, at the very first clash, a battle royal resulted. Gizenga's force lost eight men, but it also killed six of Lundula's troops before the shooting ended. The way things looked, many weeks of bitter struggle lay ahead before the central government could put down Gizenga's rebels completely and add Eastern Province as a solid member of the Congo as a whole.

Unexpected Visitors. Adoula still had stubborn Moise Tshombe of Katanga to deal with. Day after day, Tshombe weaved, dodged and ducked to escape implementation of the agreement he had signed with Adoula vowing an end to Katanga's secession. Katanga's provincial assembly ratified seven of the agreement's eight points, but still haggled over the crucial one, which would oust the white mercenaries in the army. At his Elisabethville headquarters, Tshombe was simply stalling for time while his Katanga army units were getting stronger by the day. He had worked hard to build a second bastion, the "rearguard capital" of Kipushi, a mining town 25 miles away on the Northern Rhodesian frontier, where machine-gun nests and slit trenches were manned day and night by Katanga's nervous, trigger-happy troops.

In addition, Tshombe was restocking the army's leadership by recruiting dozens of fresh mercenaries in Europe. One planeload of 32 white fighters already was flying south from Europe. When they got to Northern Rhodesia, Federal Premier Sir Roy Welensky nervously decided the visas of 26 Frenchmen and a Spaniard were not in order, turned them back. His border guards also confiscated 1,700 Ibs. of "clothing," which turned out to be military camouflage garb. But five tough-looking Belgian "mechanics" who had valid visas (and boasted openly to reporters that they were professional fighters) got on a train and went straight up to Moise.

The news did not sit well at U.N. head quarters in Manhattan. Warned Secretary General U Thant: "It is our hope that he will keep his promise. I must add, however, that our plans and preparations for further operations to achieve total elimination of mercenaries are going forward without delay."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.