The fight led by Patrice Lumumba, who in June 1960 became the first prime minister of the newly formed Republic of the Congo, was for more than just political independence from Belgium--the occupying colonial power for the previous 80 years. It was a struggle for the dignity of the Congolese people, whose lands and wealth had been savagely plundered by the imperialist powers.

The film clearly shows the role of U.S. and Belgian imperialism in organizing to overthrow and assassinate Lumumba.

"The major motivation for me is that the film is talking about the world now," stated film director Raoul Peck in an interview with the New York Daily News. "For me, this film is in the middle of our reality today."

Indeed, the events depicted in the movie are not just a question of the historical past. Today, as Washington seeks to assert itself as the dominant power in Africa and worldwide--and as workers and farmers put up resistance to U.S. imperialist rule, from south Korea to the Western Sahara to Puerto Rico--the lessons of the anti-imperialist struggle in the Congo need to be known by working people everywhere.

The Congo, later renamed Zaire and now called the Democratic Republic of Congo, is endowed with immense mineral wealth in a land the size of western Europe. At the time of the rise of the independence movement in 1958, Congo was among the world's largest producer of copper, uranium, cobalt, industrial diamonds, and rubber.

At the 1885 Berlin Conference, where the European powers carved up most of Africa among themselves, they sanctioned the claim of Belgian King Leopold II to sole authority over the Congo, a land mass 75 times the area of Belgium.

In his book King Leopold's Ghosts: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Adam Hochschild describes how the peoples living in the Congo River Basin suffered "a death toll of Holocaust dimensions" as Belgian colonial rulers plundered the land and conducted a war of enslavement against the indigenous population. According to the estimate of a Belgian government commission, between the late 1870s and 1919 some 10 million people in the Congo died as a result of colonial policies.

"Villages were dragooned into tapping rubber, and if they refused to comply, or complied but failed to meet European quotas, they were punished," noted Jeremy Harding in a September 1998 New York Times article. Countless numbers of working people died from starvation and sickness as communities were driven away from their food supplies.

In October 1958 Lumumba, a former postal employee, helped to found the Congolese National Movement (MNC), the first nationwide Congolese political party, which rapidly developed a mass base. It sought to appeal to the Congolese people across the divisions among language groups and cultures that were reinforced and played on by the imperialist rulers.

The Belgian colonial masters sought to derail this movement by framing up and imprisoning Lumumba. In January 1959, he was arrested on charges of "inciting a riot" in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), the country's capital. Belgian authorities refused an MNC request to hold a mass meeting and brutally suppressed those protesting this violation of their rights. Over two days, colonial security forces fatally shot 76 Congolese and wounded more than 300.

The film shows scenes of Lumumba in prison being brutalized and taunted by prison guards, who insisted he would not get out of prison anytime soon. Then came the call from Belgian authorities that Lumumba was to be immediately released and flown to Brussels to participate in a January 1960 conference of leading political parties in the country to discuss the Congo's political future.

Under mounting mass pressure, Belgian authorities agreed to set independence day for June 30 and to schedule elections in May of that year. The MNC won more seats than any other party. Lumumba was named the country's first prime minister, with Joseph Kasavubu of the ABAKO party named president.  
 
'Independence won by struggle'
One of the film's highlights is Lumumba's speech on June 30, 1960, at the ceremony in Leopoldville where independence was officially proclaimed. At the event, Belgium's monarch at the time, King Baudouin, arrogantly declared that the independence of the Congo was "the crowning of the work conceived by the genius of King Leopold II." He was followed by Kasavubu, who offered obsequious words of praise for the colonial power.

Then Lumumba, who was not officially scheduled to speak, took the podium. Lumumba's speech, broadcast on radio, electrified the population as he spoke the unvarnished truth.

"No Congolese worthy of the name will ever be able to forget that independence has only been won by struggle," Lumumba said. "The struggle, involving tears, fire, and blood, is something of which we are proud in our deepest hearts, for it was a noble and just struggle, which was needed to bring to an end the humiliating slavery imposed on us by force."

He added, "We have experienced painful labor demanded of us in return for wages that were not enough to enable us to eat properly nor to be decently dressed or sheltered, nor to bring up our children.... We have seen our lands despoiled in the name of so-called legal documents which were no more than a recognition of superior force."

Speaking in 1964, three years after the murder of the Congolese leader, revolutionary leader Malcolm X hailed Lumumba. "He didn't fear anybody," Malcolm said. "They couldn't buy him, they couldn't frighten him, they couldn't reach him. Why, he told the king of Belgium, 'Man, you may let us free, you may have given us our independence, but we can never forget these scars.' The greatest speech--you should take that speech and tack it up over your door."

The imperialist powers, led by Washington together with Brussels, undertook a series of operations designed to undermine the new Lumumba-led government.

Less than two weeks after Congo's independence, the former Belgian rulers succeeded in organizing a seccessionist movement in the province of Katanga, where U.S. and European companies had vast mineral holdings. On July 11, 1960, Moise Tshombe, a wealthy businessman and leader of the Conakat party who bitterly opposed Lumumba, declared Katanga's separation from the Congo. Brussels sent 10,000 troops to Katanga to protect the pro-imperialist secessionists.

In response to the secession, and faced with a government and army plagued by divisions and concilatory to imperialism, Lumumba made the fatal error of requesting that the United Nations--which claimed to support the Congo's independence--send a military force to help defend the newly independent government. Seeing an opportunity to intervene, Washington voted in the Security Council for this request. By the end of July, a UN force of more than 8,000 troops was stationed in the Congo.

But the United Nations was not a "neutral" body. It was--and remains today--an institution dominated by Washington and other imperialist governments. In the Congo, UN military intervention helped pave the way for deeper U.S. counterrevolutionary activities.

In fact, over the years the U.S. rulers have repeatedly carried out military aggression under the UN flag. They did so in Korea during their murderous war of 1950–53, unsuccessfully attempting to roll back the socialist revolution in northern Korea. In 1990–91 Washington carried out its murderous military assault on Iraq under cover of UN Security Council resolutions.

Imperialist forces also used UN cover in their military intervention against Yugoslavia. In 1992 UN troops were deployed in Croatia and Bosnia. Then, in the name of enforcing UN sanctions on Serbia, U.S.-led NATO forces began their military intervention in Bosnia.  
 
Washington's intervention
In the Congo, the Washhington-orchestrated UN troops proceeded to occupy the very provinces controlled by the Lumumba government, allowing Belgian forces to back the secessionist operation in Katanga. At the same time, as acknowledged in a 1975 U.S. Senate report, the CIA was plotting Lumumba's assassination as "an urgent and prime objective," in the words of then CIA director Allen Dulles.

The Senate report accepted as a "reasonable inference" that the CIA order to kill the Congolese leader came directly from President Dwight Eisenhower.

At a National Security Council meeting on July 21, 1960, according to Evan Thomas in a book about the CIA titled The Very Best Men, Dulles described Lumumba as "a Castro or worse." The comment revealed Washington's hatred both for the Congolese freedom struggle and for the "bad example" being set by the revolutionary leadership of Cuba's workers and farmers and their socialist revolution.

The following month Dulles sent a cable to the CIA station chief in Leopoldville insisting that Lumumba's "removal must be an urgent and prime objective and that under existing conditions this should be a high priority of our covert action."

According to the 1975 U.S. Senate report, the CIA in September 1960 sent one of its scientists to the Congo carrying by diplomatic pouch a "lethal biological material" (a virus) specifically intended for use in Lumumba's assassination.

Meanwhile, CIA operatives encouraged President Kasavubu to dismiss Lumumba, a move he took on September 5 along with dissolving parliament. Nine days later the army chief of staff, Col. Joseph Mobutu, whom the CIA had recruited to its efforts, seized political power in a coup.

The film pointedly shows CIA agent Frank Carlucci meeting with several Congolese political leaders discussing steps to get rid of Lumumba. (Carlucci later became defense secretary in the Reagan administration.) The film also depicts Carlucci's meetings with Mobutu prior to the coup, where he promises Mobutu "a bright future" if he'll cooperate in carrying out the U.S. rulers' prerogatives in the Congo. For almost four decades afterward, Mobutu would rule the country with an iron fist, backed with U.S. financial and military aid.

The UN troops stood aside as pro-U.S. forces ousted Lumumba from the government. When Mobutu placed Lumumba under house arrest, UN soldiers along with Congolese army troops were stationed outside the revolutionary leader's home to implement this decision. The UN occupying force closed down government radio stations supportive of Lumumba and disarmed forces loyal to him.

At the end of November, Lumumba succeeded in escaping from Leopoldville. His aim was to get to Stanleyville (now Kisangani), where his supporters were in control of the city. With assistance from the CIA, which helped get roads blocked and troops stationed to close off escape routes, Lumumba was captured on December 1 by troops loyal to Mobutu. He was imprisoned and--together with Maurice Mpolo, a minister in his government, and Senate Deputy President Joseph Okito--turned over to Tshombe in Katanga province. Tshombe's forces executed Lumumba and the other two by firing squad on Jan. 17, 1961.

In a December 1964 address to the United Nations General Assembly, Ernesto Che Guevara, speaking on behalf of the delegation from revolutionary Cuba, condemned the UN role in this counterrevolutionary operation in the Congo. "How can we forget the betrayal of the hope that Patrice Lumumba placed in the United Nations?" Guevara asked. "How can we forget the machination and maneuvers that followed in the wake of the occupation of that country by United Nations troops, under whose auspices the assassins of this great African patriot acted with impunity?"  
 
Belgian government inquiry
Following the publication in 1999 of a new book, The Murder of Lumumba by Ludo de Witte, which documented the role of Belgian government officials in the murder of the Congolese leader, the ensuing public controversy compelled the Belgian parliament to establish an official commission of inquiry to review the issue. The commission's final report is expected to be issued in October 2001.

One of the government papers that have come to light is a document signed in October 1960 by the Belgian minister for Africa, Harold Aspremont Lynden, who states, "The main objective to pursue, in the interests of the Congo, Katanga, and Belgium, is clearly the final elimination of Lumumba."

The film shows the Congolese leader being assaulted in the presence of Belgian officers and tortured in a villa guarded by Belgian troops, before he and two companions are shot by the execution squad, supervised by a Belgian captain.

Fearing the impact of Congolese fighters locating Lumumba's grave, a Belgian police commissioner had his body exhumed and then dismembered and dissolved in sulphuric acid--the opening scene in the fast-paced film. Forty years later, however, Lumumba's example has not been erased. It remains a link in the living legacy of revolutionary and working-class struggles in the more-than-century-long imperialist epoch.

The lessons of working-class program and strategy learned and relearned through these struggles, often in blood, remain matters of life and death for workers, farmers, and youth seeking to chart a road forward against capitalist exploitation and oppression--in the United States and other imperialist countries, just as much as anywhere else in the world.

In his final letter to his wife, written just days before his death, Lumumba pointed to his confidence in the future. "Without dignity there is no liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men," he wrote.

"History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that is taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington, or the United Nations, but the history which will be taught in the countries freed from imperialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and to the north and to the south of the Sahara, it will be a glorious and dignified history."
 

Now playing
NEW YORK
Manhattan: Film Forum, 209 West Houston St. Daily: 1:00, 3:15, 5:30, 7:45, 10:00
Brooklyn: BAM Rose Cinemans
30 Lafayette Avenue777-FILM #545
 
Coming soon to
CALIFORNIA
Berkeley: Shattuck Theater, August 10–16
Los Angeles: Music Hall 3, 9036 Wilshire Blvd Beverly Hills, starts July 20 (310) 274-6869
Pasadena: Playhouse 7, 673 E Colorado Blvd. Starts July 20, (626) 844-6500
Sacramento: The Crest, Sept. 7–13
ILLINOIS
Chicago: Music Box Theater, 3733 N. Southport Avenue July 27–August 2. (773) 871-6604
NEW JERSEY
Montclair: Claridge Cinema, 486 Bloomfield Avenue. Starts July 20. (973) 746-5564
NEW YORK
Queens: Kew Gardens
81-05 Lefferts Blvd. Starts July 20 (718) 441-9835
Malverne: Malverne Cinema, 350 Hempstead Avenue. Starts July 20. (516) 599-5564
OHIO
Cleveland: Cedar Lee Theater, starts Sept. 7
PENNSYLVANIA
Philadelphia: Roxy Theater, starts July 27
WASHINGTON
Seattle: Varsity Theater, August 17–23
WASHINGTON D.C.
Visions Cinema: 1927 Florida Avenue, July 13–26, (202) 667-0090
 
 
Related articles:
Thirst for revolutionary books
Patrice Lumumba and revolution in the Congo
 
 
 
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