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This man deep in Africa had his loyal list of partisans, and it was growing. Their bitterness focused on the U.S. for its support of the U.N. action against Katanga. Two hundred Katangese youths demonstrated at the U.S. consulate in Elisabethville, some of them breaking into the building before the police finally arrived. In Brussels, university students threw stones and hunks of metal at the windows of the U.S. embassy, shouting "Down with the United Nations!" A deputy in parliament declared hotly that the U.S.-backed Congo operation was "savagery worthy of Mussolini in Ethiopia," and another Belgian likened the U.N.'s U Thant to Goebbels.
Tshombe had his friends in the U.S. Congress as well. One vocal group of U.S. supporters formed a Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters; its roster ranged from respectable conservatives to right-wing ultras and included such Southern states' righters as Racist Senator James Eastland of Mississippi. They reasoned that Tshombe is one of the few African leaders who are proven anti-Communists and friendly to the white man. Katanga, continued the argument, has a right to self-determination if it prefers independence from the central government, particularly since it is by far the stablest of all Congolese provinces.
The U.S. Position. Throughout the uproar, and despite grave misgiving (see PRESS), the U.S. Government held to its policy: Tshombe must end his secession and recognize the central government for the greater good of the Congo as a whole, not to mention the peace of Africa.
To the "self-determination" argument, the U.S. replied that Tshombe does not speak for all of Katanga, and that, at any rate, the principle of self-determination cannot be indiscriminately invoked by any territory or province. Neither the Congo nor Katanga is a nation in anything like the modern sense, but, as the U.S. sees it, the Congo as a whole, with its continuous 75-year history as a Belgian colony, has a more sensible claim to nationhood than one of its parts.
As for the anti-Communist argument, the Washington reply went as follows: the central Congo government of Premier Cyrille Adoula, already shaky enough, cannot survive much longer if Tshombe's defiance of its authority continues indefinitely. And without Adoula, whom Washington regards as the Congo's ablest, most reliable leader, the way would be wide open to the Reds. In that event, Tshombe's anti-Communism would be of little help, even if his opposition to the Reds were as solid as advertised (which the U.S. doubts).
History of Failure. U.N.—and American—involvement in the Congo was all but inevitable the moment, in 1959, when Belgium hastily and irresponsibly agreed to withdraw from a colony it had never prepared for independence. Into the resultant vacuum were swept a bewildering array of 65 political parties. One dominant—but erratic and unstable—figure emerged: Patrice Lumumba. Head of a shaky coalition regime that took control of the Congo, after free elections, in June 1960, Lumumba favored strong central government. This was anathema to Tshombe. who had no intention of sharing the wealth of his mineral-rich province with the central government and the Congo's poorer provinces. "The Katanga cow." his followers said, "will not be milked by Lumumba's serpents."