La Nuit Infernale

The Belgian paratroopers had gone back home to a triumphant welcome, but they had probably left too soon. Behind them, the Congo kept sliding back into Stone Age savagery.

A pair of rescue columns of the Congolese government army led by white officers pushed deep into rebel territory. Their aim: to save as many as possible of the 1,100 white hostages still held by the savage rebel fighters known as Simbas (lions). By week's end they had rescued 600 whites--Belgian nuns and priests, Greek shopkeepers and restaurateurs, British and American missionaries. From nearly every man, woman and child saved came another numbing tale of terror, torture or death. Each could recall his own particular nuit infernale, but the most hellish of nights was that recounted by the 76 whites held captive by the rebels in the eastern Congo tin-mining town of Bunia.

Furious on Hemp. Imprisoned for five weeks in the local hotel, the hostages included 21 Catholic priests and brothers, 17 nuns, and a British accountant who was considered an American spy because he owned a pair of binoculars. On the night of Nov. 16, more than a week before the joint U.S.-Belgian rescue mission began, the Simbas puffed themselves into a fury on bamboo pipeloads of Indian hemp. Then they dragged the nuns out of the hotel, forced them to strip, and made them "dance" by shooting at their feet. Then the Simbas took their pleasure.

Some nuns were merely beaten up with bottles or gun butts, and one was slugged with a telephone, which the Simbas apparently considered bad dawa (magic). Three were raped. One nun, Sister Maria Therese, 36, resisted, and a Simba shattered both her kneecaps with a precisely aimed rifle shot. "It was night," recalled a surviving nun. "She was losing much blood, and the Simbas wouldn't let us near her. She died early in the morning after lying alone on the street for many hours." The Simbas then locked their prisoners back in the hotel, where most were ultimately rescued.

Back to the Cadavers. Before they fled, the Simbas took revenge on four priests who had tried to protect the nuns and incurred further rebel wrath by continuing to celebrate Mass and singing hymns--more bad dawa as far as the Simbas were concerned. When the priests tried to escape from a rebel truck, three were killed on the spot. The fourth survived by playing dead, but was driven mad by the experience. Carried into Leopoldville last week in a planeload of survivors, he kept muttering: "I must go back to join the cadavers."

And indeed there were plenty left behind. In Stanleyville, where the Congolese government army was barely holding on in the face of rebel snipers and raiding parties, only the road to the airport had been cleared of corpses. In the city, dogs were seen feeding on rotting bodies. A typhoid epidemic erupted among the city's 220,000 Congolese, with only one doctor left. Snipers kept up sporadic fire against all planes landing or taking off from Stanleyville's jungle-encircled jet strip, and after a Belgian International Air Service DC-4 crashed on takeoff, killing seven, civilian aircraft were banned from landing. At the same time, help for the rebels, according to some reports, was filtering in from the Sudan, where "President" Christophe Gbenye and his wild-eyed defense minister, Gaston Soumialot, were holed up in Khartoum.

With Stanleyville in tenuous government control and 500 hostages still scattered throughout a rebel-held reach of bush almost as large as France, Premier Moise Tshombe clearly needed more help. Major Mike Hoare, commander of the mercenaries fighting for the Congo government, sent his adjutant winging to Johannesburg to hire 150 more white soldiers. Tshombe himself flew off to Paris, where he pleaded unsuccessfully for assistance from Charles de Gaulle. Said Tshombe: "We are lost children struggling through the dark."

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