G. Edward Griffin - The Fearful Master - PDF Archive

slick and decided to check further. As a result, it was revealed that the whole story was
completely fabricated by the United Nations. After giving assurances that the letter was
authentic and promising to provide the press with photostatic copies, UN press officers
later backed down and admitted that they did not have the letter but that it had been seen.
Finally, when word reached Katanga all but one of the chiefs who supposedly signed the
letter telegraphed angry denials saying, "Everything the UN published was a campaign of
lies." One chief, Kasengo Nyembo, stated that he had been recently approached by the
UN to make an anti-Tshombe statement but had refused. The United Nations quietly
dropped the issue. 21
Finally, on December 29, 1962, the United Nations delivered its second annual Christmas
present to Katanga. As Time magazine described it:
The sound of Christmas in Katanga Province was the thunk of mortar
shells and the rattle of machine-guns. . . . Blue-helmeted UN soldiers
swarmed through Elisabethville, seized roadblocks on the highways.
Swedish UN Saab jets swooped low over Katanga's airfield at Kolwezi,
destroying four planes on the ground and setting oil tanks ablaze. . . .
From Manhattan UN headquarters, orders were flashed to the 12,000
man UN force in Katanga: "Take all necessary action in self-defense
and to restore order." . . . Secretary-General U Thant says he is
convinced that unless Tshombe is subdued soon, Premier Cyrille
Adoula's Central Government in Leopoldville will collapse. 22
With a fresh supply of American money and military support Robert Gardner, the new UN
chief officer in the Congo, confidently declared: "We are not going to make the mistake
this time of stopping short. . . . This is going to be as decisive as we can make it." 23
One month later, after having captured control of Elisabethville, Kamina and Kipushi, the
United Nations finally seized Kolwezi--a city of seventy thousand and Tshombe's last
stronghold. An hour before UN troops entered the center of the city, Tshombe made a
dramatic farewell speech to his soldiers. About two thousand of them gathered in the
market square. Standing in a drizzling rain, Tshombe told his men: "You have fought
bravely against the enemy three times in the past two and one-half years. The odds have
become overwhelming against you." 24
A few minutes later Katanga's independence was ground into the mud by United Nations
boots. The last flame of freedom in the Congo flickered and died.
NOTES
1. "Moscow Scores Capitulation," New York Times (September 21, 1961). Entered in the
Congressional Record by Senator Thomas Dodd (September 22, 1961).
2. Hempstone, p. 182.
3. Ibid., p. 188.
4. Ibid., p. 149.
5. Katanga Information Service news bulletin (New York, March 22, 1963).