Bedlam in Brussels

For the orderly Belgians, the Congo conference in Brussels had been a three-week nightmare. Even as they were preparing to announce the Congo's imminent independence, Joseph Kasavubu, 42, the top Congolese leader, stomped out of the conference and disappeared for two weeks. Another delegate, for obscure reasons, packed up and vanished in the direction of Communist East Berlin. New delegations arrived almost daily from the Congo and demanded places at the talks; by last week nearly 100 were seated around the table, and, transporting them by limousines having proved impossible, they moved from hotels to sessions in chartered streetcars. Meetings were a mad melange of inflammatory speeches, door-slamming walkouts, rival press conferences and angry communiques as 60 Congolese parties and innumerable tribal chiefs jockeyed for position in the race to lead the vast new nation-to-be. One delegate tried to restrain the others by quoting an old tribal saying: "He who tries to eat before the others burns himself." Chief rival for the power of the mercurial Kasavubu is Patrice Lumumba, 33, onetime postal clerk in Stanleyville who served six months in jail in 1958 for embezzling $2,400 in postal money. He was arrested again after nationalist riots last November in which more than 20 were killed. Released from a Congo jail three weeks ago to lead his Congolese National Movement delegation at Brussels, he arrived proudly showing wrists bandaged from wearing tight handcuffs.

Kasavubu's Abako group campaigned for a loose federal system in the new Congo, since its strength is mostly confined to the Leopoldville province. Lumumba, whose party group has wider geographical sup port, felt he would do better with a centralized regime. In the end the Belgians worked out a compromise modeled on the U.S. system with elaborate assurances of local and provincial authority.

The Belgians agreed to practically all the Congolese political demands in the hope that independence will result in happy economic cooperation. But in the absence of full assurance that a Congolese government would guarantee Belgian property, shares in colonial corporations have dropped 50% to 60% in the Brussels stock market during the past year.

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