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Returning to Léopoldville, Prime Minister Lumumba gratuitously added new fuel to the flames. He blamed the mutiny on Lieut. General Janssens, who, he said, had refused to accept proposals for the Africanization of the army; he blamed the scare about Soviet "invaders" on Belgian agents, and summoned the Belgian ambassador to make the fantastic charge that he had uncovered a Belgian plot to murder him. "The assassins were discovered and arrested in my residence," cried Lumumba. "They were armed to the teeth." Everything that was happening, Lumumba insisted, was a Belgian plot to discredit the Congolese government.
Canceled Flights. As news of mutiny, rape and chaos in the Congo poured into Brussels, Belgium's dapper Premier Gaston Eyskens at first shrugged it off with the remark: "These are the minor growing convulsions of a young nation." But as the first planeloads of refugees arrived from Brazzaville, thousands of former Belgian settlers demonstrated at the airport and nearly mobbed a Congolese politician who was on one of the planes. Shouting "A has les macaques! [Down with the apes!]," the settlers demanded army intervention in the Congo. So did Belgian newspapers, and La Libre Belgique cried: "It would be madness to worry now about legal scruples." More details came in: two Europeans had been killed at Kongolo; hundreds were isolated and under attack at the river ports of Boma and Matadi; 1,200 Belgians were trapped in an office building in Luluabourg and appealing desperately for helicopters, guns and paratroopers. Abruptly, Premier Eyskens' government reversed itself. Some hundred Belgian paratroopers were bundled aboard planes for Léopoldville; Sabena, the Belgian airline, canceled all commercial flights to rush its planes to Africa to evacuate Belgian refugees.
Whimpering Children. As the week wore on, the situation grew worse instead of better. Violence exploded in mineral-rich Katanga province, whose political leader, Moise Tshombe, has been advocating secession from the Congo. During a night of terror, mutinous Congolese troops roamed the streets of Elisabethville, the provincial capital, screaming war cries and firing machine guns and rifles. Four automobiles returning to the city after evacuating women and children to Rhodesia were stopped at a railroad crossing. Six of the ten European occupants, including Italian Vice Consul Tito Spoglia, were shot dead, and the others seriously wounded. Cavalcades of cars bearing panicky Europeans streamed eastward to the North Rhodesian border; 3,000 crossed in a single night, and Salisbury hotel lobbies were packed with women comforting whimpering children. The U.S., British and French consuls in Elisabethville called for help. Three hundred paratroopers were rushed by air from the Belgian airbase at Kamina, and for the first time the Congolese mutineers were engaged in battle by white troops. The paratroopers stormed the Elisabethville barracks and routed the mutinous Congolese troops, with some 100 dead.