"This operation bears no comparison to anything else in United Nations history," said the U.N.'s senior officer in Katanga. Conor Cruise O'Brien was vastly understating the case. In recalcitrant Katanga last week, scattered bands of blue-hel-meted troops—Indian, Swedish, Irish—were engaged in a battle to the death with a weird and formidable foe: the troops of Katanga President Moise Tshombe, some of them Baluba warriors smeared with warpaint, led by Europeans and backed by jet fighters.
It was a war that the U.N.'s O'Brien, presumably with the full approval of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, had started in an attempt to bring Tshombe back under the authority of the Congo central government and thus head off a possible civil war. As the fighting raged on, it carried the United Nations into the new, uncomfortable—and, to some critics, indefensible—position of active aggressor on a large scale.
Ultimatum. Since February, United Nations forces in the Congo had been armed with a Security Council resolution calling upon Tshombe to dismiss the 500 European officers leading his null army—and actively working toward maintaining Katanga's secession from the central Congo government, even at the cost of civil war. Last month, the Congo's moderate Premier Cyrille Adoula asked the U.N. to enforce the resolution. O'Brien gave Tshombe until Sept. 9 to get rid of the Europeans.
When the deadline passed, U.N. Congo Chief Sture Linner reported: "At least 104 foreign personnel failed to give any account of themselves." O'Brien de manded compliance. In answer, Katanga's white-led political police arrested O'Brien's deputy, Michel Tombelaine. Reported Linner, with undisguised frustration: "This was the culmination of a long series of wrongful acts by these officers, including the organization of attacks on the United Nations, repeated threats, and incitements to violence." O'Brien issued an ultimatum: remove all remaining white officers, or else. When Tshombe flatly refused, U.N. troops went into action, while Hammarskjold, who had just arrived for a personal inspection, waited in Léopoldville.
Attack. Long before dawn one morning last week, a company of Indian troops backed by Irish armored cars surrounded the Elisabethville post office' held as a communications center by a Tshombe garrison. In French and Swahili, demands were megaphoned that the garrison yield the building. The answer was the rattle of machine guns. The U.N. returned fire, and for two hours streams of red tracer bullets crossed each other in the predawn darkness. An Indian soldier was hit in the face; he screamed. A Katanga gendarme, hit in the belly, fell from a second-story window, picked himself up, staggered away with his entrails hanging out. The driver of an armored car was decapitated, and his car lunged weirdly into a wall.