adminmurdered just seven months after taking office on the direct orders of the US and Belgium. Britain, whose involvement had long been suspected, also had a hand in it.
The 35-year-old Lumumba and two associates were tied to trees and gunned down by a firing squad commanded by Belgian officers. Later, to avoid questions, the Belgians exhumed the bodies, hacked them up and dissolved them in acid, keeping Lumumba’s teeth and the bullets that killed him as souvenirs.
The killing demonstrated the fraud of independence for the former colonial countries in Africa. The Congo was and remains today a poor but vastly underdeveloped country, despite its enormous mineral resources, including uranium, copper, gold, tin, cobalt, diamonds, manganese and zinc.
When the million-strong Congolese working class, second only in size to that in South Africa, organised mass strikes and demonstrations in 1959, Belgium moved swiftly to grant the country independence in the hope that the national bourgeoisie would be more able to restore calm. It organized the transfer of power in such a way as to ensure that “independence” would be a formal fiction. The Western corporations’ ownership of the Congo’s vast mineral wealth meant that the imperialist powers were determined to keep control over the country after independence.
But the political situation spiralled out of control when Lumumba imposed import tariffs and forcibly broke up strikes by workers in Leopoldville (Kinshasa). Black troops mutinied against the Belgian officers Lumumba left in command of the army after independence. Moise Tshombe, acting to protect Western mining interests and the Belgian military, seized control of the resource-rich Katanga province and declared Katanga’s independence. Another secession movement developed in the mineral-rich province of Kasai. Belgium sent its army back into the former colony, supposedly to protect its nationals.
Lumumba threatened to appeal for Soviet aid as a means of freeing the country from domination by Belgian mining interests and Belgian troops. Washington used this as the pretext for allying with Belgium to seek his elimination. When Lumumba invited in United Nations peacekeeping forces, they too subordinated themselves to the machinations of Belgium and the US, refusing to take any action to prevent the murder of the new prime minister.
Lumumba was assassinated as the direct result of orders from the Belgian government and the Eisenhower administration, acting through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and local clients financed and “advised” by Brussels and Washington. In 2001, the US government released archive material related to the Kennedy assassination that included an interview with the White House minute-taker under the Eisenhower administration, Robert Johnson. According to Johnson’s account, in a meeting held with security advisers in August 1960, two months after Congo became independent, President Eisenhower ordered the CIA chief Allen Dulles to “eliminate” Lumumba so that the Congo did not become “another Cuba.”
“There was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued,” Johnson recalled.
Dulles referred to the Congolese leader as a “mad dog.” A week later, he cabled station chief Larry Devlin authorizing the “removal” of Lumumba, up to and including his assassination. A telegram sent three months before Lumumba’s death by Count Harold d’Aspremont Lynden, then minister for African affairs, to Belgian officials in the Congo stated, “The main aim to pursue in the interests of the Congo, Katanga and Belgium is clearly Lumumba’s definitive elimination.” Lumumba had already been deposed and placed under house arrest. The meaning of these words was absolutely clear—it was an order to assassinate him.
In November 2001, forty years after the event, an all-party commission of enquiry acknowledged Belgium’s role in Lumumba’s murder. Following Lumumba’s assassination and the war against secessionist Katanga, the Congo was ruled for decades by the reactionary dictator and kleptocrat, Joseph Sese Seko Mobuto, a US stooge, who systematically looted the country. —WSWS.
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