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'Make the Congo a nation, happy
and free'
Twenty days
before the Inter-Congolese Dialogue (ICD) resumed at Sun City on February
25, 2002, the Belgian Government acted honourably and apologised to the
Lumumba family and the Congolese people for the role of the Belgian state
in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in January 1961.
In its apology, delivered by Deputy Prime Minister and
Foreign Minister, Louis Michel, the Belgian government said it "deplores
the fact that the treatment of this question by the Government of the
day revealed lack of consideration for the physical integrity of Patrice
Lumumba.
"This general attitude of neutrality and apathy
of the kind reserved for Patrice Lumumba perhaps qualifies as a grave
lack of good management and respect for the rule of law.
"In the light of criteria applied today, certain
members of the then government and certain Belgian actors of the time
bear an irrefutable part of the responsibility for the events that led
to the death of Patrice Lumumba. The Government accordingly considers
that it is appropriate to convey to the family of Patrice Lumumba and
the Congolese people its profound and sincere regrets and its apologies
for the pain inflicted on them by this apathy and cold neutrality."
Of course, others charge that the Belgian Government
of the day did more to secure the illegal removal of Patrice Lumumba as
the elected Prime Minister of the Congo and ensure his assassination,
than merely adopt an attitude of apathy and cold neutrality.
The Belgian historian, Ludo de Witte, quotes a telegram
sent three months before Lumumba's death by Harold d'Aspremont Lynden,
then Minister heading the Belgian Department of African Affairs, which
said: "The principal purpose, which is to be pursued in the interest
of the Congo, Katanga and Belgium is undoubtedly the final elimination
of Lumumba."
In an article published on July 24, 2000, the newspaper
"U.S. News and World Report" said that "Lumumba was killed
by a firing squad commanded by a Belgian officer.
"The next step was to destroy the evidence. Four
days later, Belgian Police Commissioner Gerard Soete and his brother cut
up the body with a hacksaw and dissolved it in sulphuric acid."
According to the British newspaper "The Independent"
of August 14, 2000, a Robert Johnson who worked in the Eisenhower White
House has also said that the US National Security Council decided in August
1960 that Patrice Lumumba, whom CIA Director, Allen Dulles, called a "rabid
dog", should be eliminated.
All this reflected the politics and the practices of
the period of the Cold War, as a result of which the Western powers saw
Patrice Lumumba and his colleagues as communists and agents of the Soviet
Union, who had to be destroyed.
Patrice Lumumba was installed as the democratically
elected Prime Minister of the Congo on Independence Day, June 30, 1960.
He was removed from power by then President Kasavubu on September 5, just
over two months after taking power, with Colonel Joseph Mobutu becoming
the real ruler of the Congo. Significantly, a UN General Assembly resolution
demanding the restoration of Patrice Lumumba to his democratically elected
position was defeated on November 22 by a vote of 53 to 24.
He was assassinated, with two of his colleagues, on
January 17, 1961 in the province of Katanga, then under the control of
the secessionist Moise Tshombe. The latter was described by the then U.N.
Special Assistant for the Congo, Ralph Bunche, as "a puppet manoeuvred
by the Belgians".
After these events, all attempts by the Congolese "political
class", and their external supporters, to form stable alliances among
the contending and self-serving political factions, to establish a façade
of democratic rule and build a national state system, failed. In 1965,
Mobutu, supported by external forces, was emboldened to seize power, which
he held for decades, with disastrous consequences for the Congolese people,
until he was removed by force of arms in 1997.
The delegates at the ICD in Sun City repeatedly made
the point that for four decades, to date, since the 1960 overthrow of
the only democratically elected government the DRC has ever known, the
country has never had legitimate state institutions.
Accordingly, they saw the ICD as a critically important
step in a process that would lead to the emergence of legitimate state
institutions, born of democratic elections that would be held at the end
of a short transitional period. They were determined, once and for all,
to confront and deal with what they called "the crisis of legitimacy"
in their country.
When they adjourned after 52 days, they had adopted
40 resolutions that define the kind of truly independent, united, peaceful,
democratic and prosperous Congo they and their people want to see. These
resolutions ranged from the political and legal, peace and national reconciliation,
the economy and finance, the humanitarian, social and cultural, and defence
and security. By any standards, this was a wonderful, historic and extraordinary
achievement, especially as it was expressive of the sovereign will of
a very representative convention of the leaders of the people of the DRC.
This left the ICD with one outstanding task specified
in the 1999 Lusaka Agreement that gave birth to the ICD. This is agreement
on the political institutions of the transition to democratic government.
This is the next urgent and decisive task that confronts the Congolose
political and social leadership that met at Sun City.
The illegal removal of the Lumumba government in 1960
destroyed the brand new legitimate political institutions of the DRC.
The ICD has an historic obligation to begin the process leading to the
birth of new and stable political institutions that derive their legitimacy
from the will of the people, as did the institutions led by the government
of Patrice Lumumba.
For the ICD to succeed in its task, it will have to
draw the necessary lessons from the disastrous period from and since the
overthrow and assassination of Patrice Lumumba, as must all genuine friends
of the DRC. These include the following absolutes. The Congolose people
must:
- determine their destiny without foreign interference or patrons;
- defeat those within the Congolese political
class who put personal power and benefit above the interests of the
people;
- fight for the unity of their country against ethnic and regional divisions;
- insist on an inclusive process as a necessary condition to unite the
country and the people, to destroy the mistrust and build the mutual
confidence among all stakeholders without which the new and stable Congo
will not be born;
- oppose the use of force as a means to acquire and legitimise political
power; and,
- insist that all agreements are honoured, including the Lusaka Agreement,
as a critical first step towards the entrenchment of the rule of law.
Those who would be leaders of the people of
the Congo would do well to recall the poem by Patrice Lumumba entitled:
WEEP, BELOVED BLACK BROTHER
"O black man, beast of burden through
the centuries,
Your ashes scattered to the winds of heaven,
There was a time when you built burial temples
In which your murderers sleep their final sleep.
Hunted down and tracked, driven from your homes,
Beaten in battles where brute force prevailed,
Barbaric centuries of rape and carnage,
That offered you the choice of death or slavery.
You went for refuge to the forest depths,
And other deaths waylaid you, burning fevers,
Jaws of wild beasts, the cold, unholy coils
Of snakes who crushed you gradually to death.
Then came the white man, more clever, tricky,
cruel,
He took your gold in trade for shoddy stuff,
He raped your women, made your warriors drunk,
Penned up you sons and daughters on his ships.
The tom-toms hummed through all the villages,
Spreading afar the mourning, the wild grief
At news of exile to a distant land
Where cotton is God and the dollar King.
Condemned to enforced labour, beasts of burden,
Under a burning sun from dawn to dusk,
So that you might forget you are a man,
They taught you to sing the praises of their God,
And these hosannas, tuned in to your sorrows,
Gave you the hope of a better world to come.
But in your human heart you only asked
The right to live, your share of happiness.
Beside your fire, your eyes reflect your dreams and suffering,
You sang the chants that gave voice to your blues.
And sometimes to your joys, when sap rose in
the trees
And you danced wildly in the damp of evening.
And out of this sprang forth, magnificent,
Alive and virile, like a bell of brass
Sounding your sorrow, that powerful music,
Jazz, now loved, admired throughout the world,
Compelling the white man to respect,
Announcing in clear loud tones from this time on
This country no longer belongs to him.
And thus you made the brothers of your race
Lift up their heads to see clear, straight ahead
The happy future bearing deliverance.
The banks of a great river in flower with hope
Are yours from this time onward.
The earth and all its riches
Are yours from this time onward.
The blazing sun in the colourless sky
Dissolves our sorrow in a wave of warmth.
Its burning rays will help to dry forever
The flood of tears shed by our ancestors,
Martyrs of the tyranny of the masters.
And on this earth which you will always love
You will make the Congo a nation, happy and free,
In the very heart of vast Black Africa."
In his 1960 Independence Day Address, Patrice
Lumumba said: "We are proud of (our) struggle, of tears, of fire
and of blood, to the depths of our being, for it was a noble and just
struggle, and indispensable to put an end to the humiliating slavery which
was imposed on us by force."
To end rule by force, so many years after the Congo
of Patrice Lumumba achieved its independence, today's leaders of the people
of the DRC have a responsibility together to wage a struggle of which
they will be proud, to ensure that, in opposition to the deification of
violence, the people shall govern!
As Patrice Lumumba wrote, these leaders, the Congolese
people, and all of us, have a responsibility today and not tomorrow, to
respond to the call: "You will make the Congo a nation, happy and
free, In the very heart of vast Black Africa."
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