Katanga: Neutralism in Arms

By DAVID REES EVENTS in the Caribbean and on the Indo- Chinese border during the last few weeks have focused our interest as never before in the cold war on the relationship between idealism and realpolitik, right and might, in the defence of our society. The virtual exclusion of the United Nations from the calculations of Messrs. Kennedy and Khrushchev at the height of the Cuban crisis only confirms what has been realised by all serious observers for some time, that in a direct power confrontation between the two blocs the activities of the world organisa- tion were and are necessarily peripheral. There are many activities of the UN in many parts of the world where an immense amount of good has been done. Yet the basic problem remains. Was Mr. HarnmarskjOld right in believing, as the editor of ' a new collection of his speeches puts it, that `the United Nations could serve increasingly for . . . executive action in pre- venting the Cold War from spreading and in gradually narrowing the margins of this con- flict?'

To Mr. Andrew Boyd, the author of a new Penguin study on the United Nations, the answer to the question posed above is an unequivocal Yes, an affirmative which at times possesses the force of almost mystical assertion. But there is a useful survey here of the origins of the UN which brings out the very real differ- ences between it and the League of Nations. We also glance at the process of how, with the paralysis of the Security Council by the veto and the emergence of the tiers monde of `un- committed' nations, the Secretariat has accumu- lated a great deal of the residual power in the Charter. But, unfortunately Mr. Boyd is too busy, obsessed by the Hammarskjoldian concept of the UN as 'a dynamic instrument,' a concept he fails to realise died with the late Secretary- General, to examine convincingly the relations between the organisation and what he pejora- tively refers to as `Metternichian' concepts of power. His method is therefore seen at its worst in his discussion of the Katanga problem, propagandist and, unwittingly, quite false in its interpretation of the crucial operations of Sep- tember, 1961 (and Monday's UN attack on Dr. O'Brien by no means establishes the reliability of the official version).

Fortunately for those interested in the Katanga problem we also have two excellent new books on the subject which will continue to be read for some time. Mr. Smith Hempstone's report on Katanga is by an American newsman who has spent some time in the Congo, and who witnessed the fighting in Elisabethville last year.' He shows how tribal, racial, geo- graphical and historical factors all combined with the post-independence chaos in the Congo to effectively separate Katanga - (minus the Baluba areas) from the Leopoldville regime. The role of the Union Miniere in Katanga is dis- cussed in some detail; Mr. Hempstone is com- pletely realistic about some of the motives of Tshombe and his supporters, but he also comes to the conclusion that the attempt by the UN to impose a settlement in Katanga was legally and morally wrong. If all attempts to reconcile Tshombe with I.eopoldville fail, he suggests UN-supervised elections, with the proviso that every effort should still subsequently be made .to associate an autonomous Katanga with the Congo. Out of the suffering, blood and passion of the last two years, says Mr. Hempstone, 'has been born a Katangan nation. It is ironic to think that if Tshombe is the father of Katanga, Conor O'Brien, Ivan Smith and U Thant have been its midwives.'

Now no man has the right to stop the march of a nation, as Collor Cruise O'Brien would readily admit, and his apologia' for his conduct of UN operations last year is fascinating not only for his account of his peculiar role in con- solidating Tshombe's government, but for his total identification with the Hammarskjoldian concept of the UN as an honest broker in the cold war, ultimately controlled by the `un- committed' nations. The book, moreover, despite its Manichean assumptions, is almost a tragic story, a tragedy of innocence, a quality which often confuses the world as it (perhaps) should be with the world as it is. Thus at the beginning of this cautionary tale for all neutralists the writer presents his credentials: a former mem- ber of the Irish diplomatic service and of the Republic's UN delegation, one who believed, unlike his other senior colleague, - Famonn Kennedy, that Ireland should align itself when- ever possible with the neutrals as an honorary Afro-Asian country.

One feels that it is only with some effort that Dr. O'Brien refrains from placing his favourite ironic description of the NATO countries, the free world, in inverted commas, for as he em- phasises, 1 was conscious that NATO, which m■.• colleagues saw exclusively as a system for defending freedom, appeared in a quite differ- ent light to many millions of people.. ..' Indeed, so little had the facts of international life pen- etrated to his office in Iveagh House that four whole pages of this book are devoted to in- dignantly lecturing the Americans for attempting, in 1957, to pressure the Irish delegation out of supporting the annual UN motion demanding a discussion of Communist China's entry.

It hardly comes as a surprise, therefore, that when the author reported for duty in the Sec- retariat's office in May, 1961, prior to departure to the Congo, he eagerly discovered that for him Hammarskjold personified neutralism in arms: `Through ambiguities resolved, through margins skilfully used, the office of Secretary- General had grown in stature and authority far beyond what the framers of the Charter seem to have envisaged at San Francisco. . . . To most "United Nations people," like myself, this growth seemed entirely healthy. The strengthen- ing of the office was also the strengthening of the international community, the strengthening of the defences of peace. . . .- We even, I think, found something slightly intoxicating in the paradox of equivocation being used in the ser- vice of virtue, the thought of a disinterested Talleyrand, a Machiavelli of peace. . .

Even so, the walls of Tshombe's Elisabeth- ville had obstinately refused to fall down at the blast of the ONUC trumpet when O'Brien arrived in Katanga, determined to implement the Bandung version of contemporary history. Yet the entire basis of UN operations in Katanga was the result of an unspoken bargain between the US and the Afro-Asians, a bargain deeply rooted in realpolitik, which yet would . have 'genuinely shocked' Hammarskjtild and his senior advisers of the 'Congo Club' if it had ever been openly mentioned. For as O'Brien sees, the Americans, without whose confidence Hamrnar-

skjold could not remain in office, wished ta eliminate Tshombe's regime out of fear of $ precedent for a possible Communist secessionist

State based on the Gizengist forces at Stanley' ville; the cold war had to be kept out of the

Congo. On the other hand, the Afro-Asians werc equally determined to end Katangan separatisln because it manifestly represented another deadlY precedent, that of disintegration, to many nevi and far less viable and coherent States than Katanga. Opposed to this strange alliance on the world stage were British, Belgian and French forces, no doubt interested in maintaining some in: fluence in Katanga, but themselves fearful of Ye' another precedent, that of unleashing organised war against Katanga without gener,a, agreement. The tension between these two sine' was faithfully reflected in Security Council resct;

lutions. The first, in August, 1960, reaffirrno, that ONUC forces would not be used in internsii,

Congo politics; the second, in February, 196,,, authorised `the use of force, if necessary, in rr last resort' to prevent civil war, and this' rather ditbiously, was assumed to give authoritY to the ONUC to end Katangan secession. For as O'Brien makes quite clear, this via! the objective of the UN Operation Mortb°1 '(Hindi for 'Smash), which he directed, on SeP' tember 13; 1961. Equally clear is it that O'Brie,lb convinced that Tshombe was sustained sole) by mercenaries and lacked any popular sUP port, believed that independent Katanga vanthe collapse under a UN attack. Caught in ts, trap of his own doctrinaire personality, he .r„, fused to recognise that Katangan nationalls't, was not a front for the copper companies. Wrir. after all, is a mercenary? In Katanga, says s Hempstone, `the majority of them fought for, variety of reasons only one of which was moneA as no doubt did those Americans in the }Oro Eagle Squadron. And what could be rn°„ varied than the motives which sent Frenchroe„" to fight in the armies of George Washingt°111,41 No one objects to the gallant Gurkhas in ,ite British Army—and no defender of the ON1 u;er in Katanga sneered at those Gurkhas unis O'Brien's orders who fought so ferociousat the streets of Elisabethville. To assume t`1„5 Tshombe was upheld by mercenaries makes,n'i much sense as the Unionist argument in llY,be that the IRA was a murder gang backed bY Pope. In this sense, indeed, Katanga has as 111,litsdin right to secede from the Congo as Pak's _a, from India, or Senegal from the Mali Federof tion. There may be good reasons in terms so. politics and economics for continuing the jasthe ciation of the Congo and Katanga—an" federation which is emerging in the Congo P:„.

ably represents a true balance of the force eiPes ,

rr volved—but there is no argument at all for resenting Operation Morthor, as O'Brien se to do, in terms of liberal idealism. Congrno politics, in fact, just do not lend themselve

a crusading interpretation.•not

,the

According to O'Brien, Hammarskjold di

know of the plans for Morthor in advance'00 operation was undertaken on Dr. Linner's no, responsibility,' and Linner himself, aPPare,yea was not aware that Khiary and Fabry had gLaa warrants for the arrests of the senior g-a_taj_.!-- ----„oj bY 1 THE SERVANT OF PEACE. Edited and intro- Wilder Foote. (Bodley Head, 30s.)BY 2 UNITED NATIONS: PIETY, MYTH AND u

Andrew Boyd. (Penguin, 3s. 6d.) ir."

r■ATANGA REPORT. By Smith Hempstone. 25s.) Crkli" 4 To KATANGA AND BACK. By Conor

O'Brien. (Hutchinson, 35s.)

ministers to O'Brien. In any case, O'Brien was so confident that Morthor was bound to suc- ceed that he did not bother to obtain written orders. Arriving in Leopoldville on September 13 as operations got under way in Elisabethville, Hammarskjold was appalled at the reports of the heavy fighting. Next day a UN communiqué (S/4940) from the Congolese capital falsely announced that during operations to round up mercenaries in Elisabethville, Katangan forces had opened fire from a garage. Morthor had thus been scaled down from an offensive to eliminate Tshombe's regime to a defensive opera- tion triggered by a Katangan ambush. The Machiavelli of peace, caught in the age-old dilemma of ends and means, had sanctioned, or fabricated, his own Big Lie, complete with a Congolese version of the Reichstag fire—the ambush in the garage.

O'Brien is quite frank about these prevarica- tions, arising of course from HammarskjOld being trapped amidst pressures he could not control or resist (a UK demarche had been made to the Secretary-General on the evening of the 13). Hence the fake communiqué, the Canossa- flight to see Tshombe at Ndola, and Hammar- skjOld's death in the blazing wreckage of his DC6, the beginning of the end, which the Chinese invasion of India has completed, of the neutralist grand design. Yet for all his anguished honesty, O'Brien still fails to see why the Katangan secession remains unended and his UN career was destroyed : The policy which Hammarskjiild was pledged to apply—and which, knowing what he was doing, he picked me to apply—implied revolu- tionary change. . . . But when it came to the point Hammarskjold shrank back. . .

6 THE SOVIET UNION AT THE UNITED NATIONS.

By Alexander Dallin. (Methuen, 30s.)

Fortunate, indeed, that this St Just manqué of neutralism was prevented from turning Elisa- bethville into another Budapest.

However, assuming that the UN was wrong in its Katanga policy, disastrously miscalculating the forces involved, this failure should by no means be invoked to dismiss the organisation which, after all, as an idea and an institution is an extension of Western idealism. But unlike the period of the Korean War the West cannot now expect the UN always to defend liberty, and, like NATO, any new institutions in the North Atlantic area must be evolved outside the structure of the organisation. Most of the 'un- committed' nations may eventually realise, like India, that what preserves their independence is not their own self-regarding slogans, but the reality of American power.

One may also express a pious hope that the less fanatic of our British neutralists may see that what prevents the UN from working as it was meant to is not 'the Katanga lobby,' Lord Home, the reports by British newsmen of what they actually saw in the streets of Elisabethville, or even the regrettable Anglo-American differ- ences over the Congo, but the foreign policy of the Sino-Soviet bloc in waging political war- fare against the rest of the world, as Mr Alexander Dallin brings out in his excellent study of the USSR in the UN.5 The cold war, alas, will not be ended by U Thant any more than it was by Hammarskjold. Perhaps the most sensible comment on the future of the organisa- tion has been made by that most intelligent of diplomatists, George Kennan No international organisation can be stronger than the structure of relationships among the Great Powers that underlies it; and to look to such an organisation to resolve deep-seated con- flicts of interest among the Great Powers is to ignore its limitations and to jeopardise its use- fulness in other fields.

A text which might well serve to stimulate a personal seminar between Chancellor Nkrumah and Dr. O'Brien.