Unsafe "Little Kingdom"

Between the spells of violence, there always comes a time when everything stops for the Congo's slow-motion politics. It is a painful process, and excruciatingly complicated, almost as if each side hoped to crush the other through sheer exasperation.

Last week another bout of politicking was under way. Into Leopoldville at last flew the first batch of President Moise Tshombe's Katanga Deputies to the central Congolese Parliament. Landing in a United Nations plane and guaranteed U.N. protection during their stay, they arrived ostensibly in fulfillment of Tshombe's pledge made fortnight ago in his meeting at Kitona with the central government's Premier Cyrille Adoula. The pledge: to integrate secessionist Katanga province with the rest of the Congo. But it was clear from the moment the delegates left Elisabethville's airport that they were not ready to keep Tshombe's promise. As the Deputies departed, a spokesman said: "We are going to Leopoldville to have that ridiculous Fundamental Law changed."

Inside Pressure. The Loi Fondamentale is the provisional constitution left behind by the Belgians when they pulled out of the Congo in June 1960. Because the draft looked toward a federal Congo with a strong central government, Tshombe was against it from the start; at his meeting with Adoula, he reluctantly agreed to accept its provisions, but now (on the ground that his own provincial Parliament in Katanga had still to ratify his agreement) he insisted that the delegates would try again to get the provisional constitution changed. Said he: "We still insist on a confederation."

Tshombe was speaking not only for himself. A powerful faction inside his Cabinet, led by tough Godefroid Munongo, Katanga's Minister of the Interior, refused any compromise whatever with the central Congolese regime. On the other side were Katanga's Baluba tribesmen--many of them displaced by the war and living precariously in U.N. refugee camps--whose leaders hate Tshombe and demand not secession but union with the Congo; the Baluba represent half of all Katanga's people.

The U.N. insisted that the Katangese at least make a stab at settling their differences with Adoula. The threatened alternative: a new military crackdown by the U.N.'s Swedish, Irish, Indian and Ethiopian troops, now holding Elisabethville and other towns in a firm grip. An even more humiliating prospect for Tshombe lay in the U.N.'s announcement that a thousand troops from Adoula's central Congolese army soon could don blue helmets and join the U.N. force as "guards" in Katanga. Using these undisciplined, ill-trained troops was a considerable risk, but the U.N. decided on the move to enhance Adoula's prestige and underline his authority against Tshombe.

String of Myths? From the U.S. State Department came more slaps at Katanga --poorly timed in view of the delicate negotiations just beginning in Leopoldville. Two top officials flatly accused Tshombe's regime of tailoring propaganda to Katanga's own set of questionable facts. G. Mennen Williams, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, in a Detroit speech accused the Katanga regime of fabricating "horrendous tales of indiscriminate mayhem by the United Nations troops.'' In a Philadelphia speech the same evening, Carl T. Rowan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, added the accusation that Katanga was waging a "clever big-money campaign" through a Manhattan-based Belgian public relations man named Michel Struelens, had spent $140,000 in 15 months "dispensing a string of myths" designed to make Tshombe look good in American eyes. (The accusation seemed to overlook the fact that the sum in question is hardly big money in Manhattan's public relations world, and that a great many Americans are pro-Katanga without any help from political pressagents.) Chief culprits in the whole mess, said Rowan, were the big Belgian-run mining complex, Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga, and "financial interests" bent on maintaining Katanga as their "safe little kingdom."

The U.N. was determined to prove that the money behind Tshombe's "kingdom" was not the only support provided by Union Miniere. A U.N. report accused "hard core" whites of firing on the U.N. forces with mortars and machine guns from several places within Union Miniere's big administrative compound during the recent Elisabethville fighting.

"Spare Parts." The U.N. also insisted that a regular flow of arms and supplies was moving north to Katanga from Northern Rhodesia, the British-backed territory run by Tshombe's white friend, Rhodesian Federal Prime Minister Sir Roy Welensky. Purpose: a new buildup of Katanga army units now making their headquarters at Kipushi, a mining town smack on the Katanga-Rhodesian frontier. Sir Roy denied all, and boarded a plane for a personal inspection on the Katanga frontier to make certain that no war contraband was getting through.

No one could say how long the precarious truce in Katanga would last. The U.N.'s allegations already had prompted Tshombe to retaliate with angry charges of his own. Ominously, he announced that the central Congolese soldiers brought in by the U.N. were attacking villages in Katanga's north; if true, Katanga's own soldiers might soon start shooting again.

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