<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type> <META content="MSHTML 5.00.2614.3500" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Stage managers By Michela Wrong On the night of January 17 1961 a convoy set off across the savannah of Congo's southern Katanga region. Drawing up inwoodland, soldiers led out threepassengers, their faces puffy from recent beatings. One by one, each was positioned against a tree, shot, then flung into a trench. When a clean-up squad was later dispatched to destroy the evidence, it came upon an unnerving spectacle: from the shallow grave pointed the hand of the most high-profile victim, as though attempting to draw the world's attention to these clandestine killings. The dead hand belonged to Patrice Lumumba, the turbulent, charismatic, elected prime minister of post-independence Congo. In this book, the work of a Belgian sociologist, his accusatory finger appears finally to have triumphed over four decades of obfuscation. Now translated into English, De Witte's book has already prompted Belgium's parliament to establish a commission of inquiry into Lumumba's death, which will deliver its findings later this year. It has played a key role in bringing about a long-overdue reassessment of the role Belgium played in the disastrous history of what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo. Barring the shootings of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the death of Patrice Lumumba was probably the most high-profile assassination of the decade, a moment when a generation lost its virginity. Demonstrators stormed Belgian embassies around the world. A politically active friend of mine remembers protesting alongside the young Kofi Annan. Local offices of the United Nations, which Lumumba had made the mistake of inviting to the Congo, were trashed. Confidence in the UN's neutrality was shattered - some might argue that it has never since recovered - and the world woke up to the superpower manipulations that were to be the stuff of cold war politics for decades to come. The thesis that the assassinations were not the sole work of Moise Tshombe, president of the rebel copper province of Katanga, will surprise no one. Africans have long attributed the deaths to shadowy white advisers, puppet-masters with their eye on what one American ambassador of the day described as the "Congo caviar" - its vast mineral resources. But commonly, responsibility has been laid at the door of the CIA, which regarded the Soviet-leaning Lumumba as another Castro and admitted at one point, ludicrously, to drawing up plans to poison the prime minister's toothpaste. De Witte clears the CIA of the ultimate act. Yes, Washington (like London) wanted Lumumba dead and helped to create a consensus for a killing. But final responsibility for Lumumba's actual elimination, De Witte says, lies not with the Americans but with government ministers in Brussels and the security experts Belgium had dispatched to Katanga. Nominally mere "advisers" to the inexperienced leaders of a break-away province, these men in fact held all real power in Katanga. Lumumba had insulted King Baudoin by denouncing Belgium's colonial record in an impassioned independence ceremony speech. Wincing at his acid rhetoric, Brussels decided he represented a threat to its hopes of retaining long-distance economic control of Congo once autonomy had formally been granted. Piecing together cable exchanges and establishing chronology with the meticulousness of a detective, De Witte concludes that while the bullets were fired by Congolese soldiers, allowing the assassinations to be conveniently dismissed as "a Bantu affair", the Belgians set the stage, prepared the scenery and fed the actors their lines. At best, he convincingly argues, they stand guilty of "non-assistance" to a person in danger. At worst, they were accomplices to murder. De Witte's book, which co-incides with a film about Lumumba by Haitian director Raoul Peck, is more than just an electric jolt to Belgian complacency. It raises questions about western policy in Africa that are certain to reverberate for decades to come. It also has its flaws. The author's anger over his own country's behaviour runs so deep that he fails to explain convincingly why quite so many governments and organisations decided that central Africa would be a better place without Patrice Lumumba, opting instead for Joseph Mobutu, the prime minister's former private secretary and friend. For De Witte, who pins his philosophical colours to the mast in a final chapter peppered with talk of "mobilisation of the masses" and "bourgeois revolution", Lumumba died because he was a "radical nationalist", and as such unacceptable to a generation of neo-colonialists. The notion that western governments were genuinely alarmed by Lumumba's flirtation with Khrushchev is briefly considered, only to be brushed aside. Many former players, including Larry Devlin, CIA station chief, would reject this assessment. Devlin remembers thousands of Soviet "advisers" flying in to Leopoldville, convinced that Congo would be the ideal jumping-off point for a communist takeover of central Africa. Whether valid or not, the view that Lumumba was a dangerous naif, playing with forces he barely understood, must hold the key to his eventual fate. "It was never my intention to paint a black and white picture," De Witte tells us at the start. "Lumumba was not a saint, but a human being." Unfortunately, sanctify him he does, thereby weakening the impact of the book. It should not be necessary to portray a leader as a hero to conclude that his extra-judiciary execution is unacceptable. Just 36 when he boarded the fatal flight to Katanga, Lumumba was eliminated too soon for any definitive assessment of his legacy. In reality, he might well have followed a similar course to Ghanaian contemporary Kwame Nkrumah: the early brilliance engulfed in sleaze, idealism forgotten in the struggle for survival. Dead, Lumumba has been transformed into one of Africa's great might-have-beens. The point, surely, is not that Lumumba was a Mandela-like figure, the one man who could have saved the country. It is that the west simply had no right to make that decision on behalf of the Congolese people. THE ASSASSINATION OF LUMUMBA by Ludo de Witte, translated by Ann Wright and Renee Fenby, Verso Ł17/$29, 235 pages <A href="http://www.ftbookshop.com/">FT Bookshop</A> Ł15 </DIV></BODY></HTML>