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Carlson was arrested two weeks later because he owned a radio, because he was an American, and because the hard-pressed rebel regime wanted hos tages. Along with the other American prisoners, Carlson became a pawn in the rebels' game to buy victory that did not end until the joint U.S.-Belgium paratroop action.
Remember Pearl Harbor. That ac tion was completely understood in the West as humanitarian and, if anything, more cautiously carried out than nec essary. The NATO Council formally backed it. In the "nonaligned" and Communist worlds, though, a well-organized propaganda effort made it sound as if the Americans and Belgians, not the savage Simbas, had committed the atrocities of Stanleyville. Whatever Belgium's guilt in the past, whatever the U.S.'s mistakes, it was a dizzying and infuriating perversion of the reality.
Moscow, obviously eager to show that it is just as anticolonialist as Peking, mouthed the usual phrases about "imperialist intervention" and permitted African students to riot at the U.S. embassy. But the Russian response was mild compared to the Khrushchevian blasts of 1960 (when Lumumba was deposed) and 1962 (when the U.N. went into Katanga). For all their relative softening toward the West, the satellites kept pace, with embassy riots in Prague and Sofia.
Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, who has more than passing acquaintance with African savagery from his country's
Mau Man days, may have felt somewhat embarrassed at his failure to bring about a "peaceful" solution to the hostage problem; though he condemned foreign intervention, he also called for continued "efforts at reconciliation" between the rebels and the Tshombe government. Tanzania's Julius Nyerere, a moderate who hifbself called for white help earlier this year when his army mutinied, ludicrously deplored the paratroop drop as "reminiscent of Pearl Harbor"—but then, he has Communist problems of his own at home.
In Cairo, some 200 African and Egyptian students descended on the U.S. embassy and burned down the adjacent, $250,000 John F. Kennedy Memorial Library. Ahmed ben Bella, shaky ruler of a bankrupt Algeria, many of whose people survive only because of U.S. food gifts, pledged "arms and volunteers" to the Congo rebels. So did Red China.
No Can Do. Despite the fact that Rebel Boss Gbenye and his henchmen have been driven from their capital, the fight will go on for some time. In their rapid push to save white lives, the Congolese army left big rebel pockets behind. Many pessimists talk of a "Hundred Years War." How can the rebellion be crushed? The remedy, as Tshombe sees it, is a patient formula—denounced as neo-colonial by his enemies—in which white men will hold as many key jobs as possible for as long as it takes to mold an effective army and an efficient administration. His refusal to "Africanize" at all cost is part of the reason why he is beyond the pale of his peers in other African nations. And yet a sizable number of whites have stayed on in such places as Nigeria and Ghana, where they are welcomed but not overly publicized.