To Burn, to Bury or to Hang?

It was a performance worthy of Fidel Castro after the Bay of Pigs. The room in Brazzaville's presidential palace was crowded with reporters and armed militia youths. Handcuffed to a chair was a terrified prisoner of war. Behind a table piled high with machine guns, hand grenades, plastic bombs, pistols and ammunition, stood President Alphonse Massamba-Debat, the picture of triumphant rage. "A commando group of 32 men landed at Brazzaville on the night of July 14," he announced. "Their mission was to assassinate your government leaders."

Where had they come from? Leopoldville, that unfriendly capital across the Congo River. Who had sent them? "That dwarf abbe," Fulbert Youlou, the deposed President who had vowed to overthrow Massamba-Debat's regime. Furthermore, he charged, the commandos had been trained and equipped by the Congolese army with the aid of a foreign embassy that he refused to name. "It's curious," he said, "but it was not the United States embassy."

That was a letdown, but Massamba-Debat had other cheery news for his armed fanatics. Eighteen commandos had been taken prisoner, he announced, and their fate would be placed in the hands of the people. "If the people say we should burn them alive, then we shall burn them alive. If the people say they should be buried alive, then we will bury them alive. And if the people say hang them, then we will hang them."

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