The Congo Crisis
The Congo Crisis began within days of independence from Belgium on 30 June 1960 and ran for five years, drawing in the United Nations, the superpowers and the mining companies. Belgium had prepared the country for nothing. There were perhaps a dozen Congolese university graduates and no African officers in the 25,000-strong Force Publique, whose Belgian commander wrote on a blackboard after independence that before was equal to after. The army mutinied on 5 July over pay and promotion. Belgium sent troops without permission; the mineral-rich province of Katanga seceded on 11 July under Moïse Tshombe with Belgian military and corporate backing, and Kasai followed. Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba appealed to the UN, which sent a force but refused to use it against the secession. He then appealed to the Soviet Union, which supplied transport aircraft, and Washington concluded he was a communist. President Kasa-Vubu dismissed him in September; he dismissed Kasa-Vubu; Colonel Joseph Mobutu, backed by the CIA, seized power and placed Lumumba under arrest. Lumumba was flown to Katanga in January 1961 and murdered by Katangan and Belgian officers. A Belgian parliamentary inquiry in 2001 acknowledged moral responsibility. Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN Secretary-General, died in a plane crash at Ndola in September 1961 en route to ceasefire talks; the cause has never been settled. UN forces ended the secession in 1963. Mobutu took power outright in 1965 and held it for thirty-two years. Katanga's copper and cobalt were the reason the secession was backed and the reason it mattered. The country has never since had a peaceful transfer of power to an elected opponent, and the eastern provinces remain at war.
- Year: 1960 CE
- Category: Civil War
