The Cold War comes to Africa: Cordier and the 1960 Congo crisis.

• Author: Collins, Carole J.L.
• Position: UN diplomat Andrew Wellington Cordier - Power of the Media in the Global System

The spectacle is of the working of the political fate of human beings: the veiled logic which requires from political men actions which are the function of what they represent -- and to a lesser extent of what they are -- in circumstances which they cannot ever have wholly foreseen.

The movement of this logic, toward the mutual destruction of Dag Hammarskjold and of Patrice Lumumba, is the movement of Murderous Angels. The angels are the great and noble abstractions represented by the protagonists: Peace in the case of Hammarskjold, Freedom in the case of Lumumba. That the idea of Freedom can be murderous is obvious.... To connect Peace with murder seems ... shocking, yet the reality of the connection can be demonstrated.

-- Conor Cruise O'Brien, former representative

of the U.N. Secretary-General to Katanga, in

the preface to his 1968 play Murderous Angels.(2)

Since its founding, the United Nations has sought to defuse tensions between member states that have threatened international peace and security. In the past five years, however, the U.N. Security Council has increasingly authorized intervention in civil conflicts including those in Angola, Bosnia and Croatia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Somalia and Western Sahara. U.N. operations in Cambodia and the Balkans are reported to be the largest such operations since the United Nations' 1960 intervention in the former Belgian Congo (now Zaire). A measure of this growing interventionist role in civil conflicts has been the price tag: Such U.N. operations cost member states a mere $200 million in 1987, but close to $3 billion by 1992.

U.N. members have increasingly supported intervention in civil conflicts for humanitarian reasons -- to assist famine victims and halt widespread violence against civilians -- as well as to forestall wider regional strife and to monitor democratic elections aimed at restoring peace. While the United Nations has been reluctant to become too deeply involved in these complex local conflicts, the mounting human toll from inter-ethnic and sectarian violence has multiplied demands for U.N. action. The central dilemma of such intervention, however, lies in the risk that the United Nations itself may become a player in the local conflict, sacrificing its ostensible role as a nonpartisan mediator. The neutrality and impartiality of a U.N. intervention has been challenged, fairly or not, as far back as the 1960 Congo crisis and as recently as its current interventions in Angola, Bosnia, Cambodia and Somalia.

Indeed the 1960 United Nations Operation in the Congo (UNOC) presents a classic example of the risks of U.N. crisis intervention and attempted mediation in a civil conflict. UNOC looms large in U.N. institutional memory because, until recently, it was the largest U.N. peacekeeping operation ever, involving over 20,000 troops and logistical support from 30 countries;(3) it marked one of the first U.N. attempts to intervene in a civil conflict, albeit one involving many external powers, and set major precedents for future interventions; it further polarized already acute East-West tensions and paralyzed U.N. decision-making for years afterward; it served as an unconscious midwife to the arrival of the Cold War in Africa; and it inadvertently aborted the Congo's transition from colonial to democratic rule.

In analyzing the U.N. intervention in the Congo, this paper focuses on a pivotal man, a pivotal period and a pivotal decision. While most studies of the Congo crisis concentrate on Dag Hammarskjold -- the charismatic U.N. Secretary-General who directed the overall intervention in the Congo until his death in a suspicious 1961 plane crash(4) -- this study focuses on Andrew W. Cordier, who worked for the United Nations from its inception in 1946 until 1961, and later went on to a distinguished career at Columbia University. As Hammarskjold's executive assistant from 1952 until soon after the Secretary-General's death, Cordier became a pivotal diplomatic player early in the Congo crisis.(5)

Although UNOC lasted nearly four years, from July 1960 to June 1964, this paper focuses on the operation's first eight months. This pivotal period began with an international agreement on the need to intervene in the Congo to maintain the peace. By the end of the period, in February 1961, that consensus had shattered, and East and West were locked in a diplomatic confrontation that effectively paralyzed the United Nations' capacity to maintain international peace and security. During the pivotal period, the United Nations was transformed from a would-be mediator to a defacto player in the political dynamics of both the Congo and the Cold War, seriously compromising its efforts to restore peace. Alienated by U.N. leaders' actions, many African and other non-aligned members gradually withdrew their political support -- and troops -- from UNOC.

The resulting discord was heightened as a result of pivotal decisions taken by Cordier in early September 1960, while filling in as the Secretary-General's interim special representative to the Congo after the departure of the African-American diplomat Ralph Bunche and before the arrival of Bunche's successor, Indian General Rajeshwar Dayal. Cordier's barely three week stay in the Congolese capital of Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) coincided with a constitutional crisis: the reciprocal efforts of the Congo's President Joseph Kasavubu and its Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba to dismiss each other from office. Cordier's decisions effectively threw U.N. support behind Kasavubu and reinforced U.S. and Belgian efforts to oust Lumumba -- seriously compromising the United Nations' impartiality. Some scholars argue that Cordier's actions ultimately served to help abort the Congo's transition to democracy, set in motion a series of events culminating in the murder of Lumumba -- the Congo's first democratically elected prime minister -- and facilitated the rise to power of a young Congolese army officer, Joseph Desire Mobutu, whose more than a quarter century of rule has been marked by widespread human rights abuses and kleptocratic government.(6)

The Zairian people are still grappling to this day with the tragic legacy of these decisions. Likewise the United Nations has continued to struggle, both during the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the more recent U.N. interventions -- such as in Somalia -- undertaken in the unipolar post-Cold War era, with a central dilemma of the Congo crisis: how to maintain its credibility as a mediator when its acts, ostensibly based on multilateral consensus, appear to serve the unilateral policy objectives of one or a few U.N. member-states.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE CRISIS

The origins of the crisis can be found in the Congo's history as a Belgian colony, a history of exploitation of African labor and extraction of wealth by Belgian and other foreign economic interests. This history began with the European slave trade, in which perhaps 30 million people were killed or abducted, and which depopulated large tracts of Zaire, decimating the indigenous societies. In the late nineteenth century, Belgium's King Leopold II imposed the first central administrative authority to tax the Congolese people, as well as a forced labor system for collecting rubber and ivory that proved to be even more brutal than slavery.(7) Such harsh practices sparked one of the first international human rights campaigns, in which Mark Twain played a prominent role. Although blood flowed less freely when the Belgian government took over administration of the Congo after 1908, the Belgian colonial state did little more than modernize Leopold's system. It retained Leopold's coercive tax structure and used the First World War as a pretext to reimpose forced cash cropping and conscription, practices which lasted well into the 1950s.(8) It also imposed a system of rigid repression, racial segregation and white privilege -- modelled after South Africa's apartheid system -- that aroused intense resentment among virtually all Congolese and helped ignite the mutiny of Congolese soldiers against Belgian officers that broke out only days after independence in 1960.

The Belgians did virtually nothing to prepare the Congolese for self-rule.(9) Compared to other colonial powers, Belgium went to extremes in barring Africans from most educational opportunities and from all but the most menial positions in the colonial government. The Congolese were also prohibited from voting or forming political parties until 1957, barely three years before independence and, even then, such activities were largely restricted to urban areas.(10) Colonial prohibitions on free speech, assembly and travel -- maintained until the eve of independence made political discussion and coalition-building beyond local levels all but impossible.

In addition, Belgian mining, agricultural and commercial interests fostered extremely uneven economic development, creating regional antagonisms and political fragmentation along ethnic lines. Recruitment of workers on a tribal basis sowed further social tensions, as did the colony's systematic deployment of Congolese soldiers to areas outside their home regions, where they could not speak any of the local languages. These factors led to horrendous fragmentation when Belgium legalized political activity in the late 1950s. Belgian suppression of trade unions deprived the Congolese of an important institution that nurtured multi-ethnic independence movements elsewhere in Africa.(11) Whereas years of anti-colonial agitation in other African countries often led to unified independence movements -- or at most the establishment of only two or three major parties -- in the Congo over 100 political ethnic, geographic or personality-based micro-parties rapidly formed in the year preceding independence. United only in their demand for immediate independence, they quickly became mired in political infighting once Belgium...