Empty Campus

The long, electrified fence around Leopoldville's Lovanium University was in place and ready for Parliament to begin. United Nations troops waited to take up their posts as guards to ensure that no liquor, women or bribe money was smuggled in to addle the judgment of the Deputies. Only thing missing was the legislators themselves. Just at the moment when it seemed that the Congo's Parliament would reconvene to reunite the divided Congo nation, the whole project collapsed.

Atop the wreckage stood grinning, pop-eyed Moise Tshombe of separatist Katanga province. Fortnight earlier, Tshombe had talked his way out of his confinement in a Leopoldville villa with solemn pledges to merge Katanga with the rest of the Congo; as Moise left for home, he embraced his old enemies, showered them with compliments. But once he was back in the safety of Katanga, crafty Tshombe changed his tune. The agreement signed in Leopoldville was forced from him under duress, he sneered. Last week Tshombe's regime declared that Katanga would not give up its own separate currency or its army, nor would it join a customs union with the rest of the Congo. Above all, Katanga's Moise Tshombe would not be sending any delegates to sit in Leopoldville's Parliament.

Problem of Arithmetic. With this news, the politicians in Leopoldville abruptly lost interest in the democratic processes they had so fervently advocated. Army Commander General Joseph Mobutu openly opposed Parliament's return. So did Foreign Minister Justin Bomboko. Kasavubu himself stalled off the U.N. officials who urged him to go ahead and formally declare the opening of Parliament, with or without the delegates. His reason: without Katanga's votes, control of the legislature just might swing to the Communist-backed regime of that other prominent Congolese secessionist, Stanleyville's Antoine Gizenga, who runs Eastern province.

Huddling grimly with his close aides, General Mobutu seemed determined to prevent Gizenga's return to national influence at any cost, and suspicion rose that the 30-year-old army chief might try to grab control of the central government with a military coup d'etat to make sure his views prevailed.

Same Old Mess. A year after independence, the Congo's economy was a national mess. Katanga, whose copper mines have missed hardly a day's work through all the troubles, was booming. But in the rest of the Congo, 70% of the labor force was unemployed. Exports, which before independence averaged $20 million a month, had dropped to $6.5 million. Inflation had pushed food prices up 20%, and building construction was at a complete standstill. Yet, by African standards, the Congo is a rich country, and somehow things faltered on, thanks mainly to the U.N., which had poured in tens of millions of dollars for famine relief and civil servants' salaries, helped run the government as best it could with its small staff of specialists. The U.N.'s 20,460 troops had slowly but surely brought an end to bloodshed in a land whose quarreling tribes had been slaughtering one another by the hundreds.

All that was needed was to get the politicians to shake hands and forget the past. Simple as it sounded, this seemed to be more than the Congo's quarreling politicians could manage.

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