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See No Evil. The U.N. forces on the spot seemed paralyzed, even speechless. There were 300 Ghanaian troops, 55 Austrian hospital specialists and a company of Pakistani transport men in Bakwanga the day Kalonji brought his victims to town for their public beating; apparently they stood by helplessly, did not even report the incident to Leopoldville headquarters of U.N. Congo Chief Rajeshwar Dayal until four days later. Eleven hundred U.N. Ethiopian soldiers were in the area when Gizenga executed his 15 enemies; either they knew nothing of the killings or did nothing to stop them.
Dayal's U.N. headquarters in fact seemed more concerned with the "menace" of Belgians than with the barbaric slaughter. After the first wave of violence last July, the Congo's Belgian population dropped from 80,000 to 20,000, but slowly rose back to its present 40,000 as farmers, shopkeepers, technicians and barbers returned to their Congolese homes. Most are perfectly harmless—and highly useful — private citizens owning private property and pursuing private lives. Under any rule of international law, there is no more reason for them to be forced to "get out" because the Congolese have taken over than there was for U.S. citizens to give up homes or businesses when Democrats replaced Republicans in Washington.
Then there are the civil servants. More than 2,000 Belgians are employed by provincial governments and by Premier Joseph Ileo's central Congolese regime to run waterworks, power plants, to collect taxes and keep account books. Without them, things would grind to a halt in many a Congo town. Not long ago, the lights went out and the water stopped running in Bukavu when the four Belgians who manned the Ruzuzi River dam took off in terror at the arrival of gun-toting Congolese soldiers.
What really upsets the U.N. is that many of these senior technicians ignore, others brush aside, Dayal's own U.N. specialists who want to take a hand in city or provincial administration. In the wake of last week's U.N. resolution banning "political advisers" from the Congo, some of Dayal's planners apparently hoped to stretch this definition to include the technicians too — although it was obvious that the U.N.'s small band of 200 technicians could never take over all the Belgians' jobs. At the very time the U.N. talks of kicking them out, African faction chiefs are in fact struggling to get more. Dozens of black delegations have shown up in Brussels, and recruiters are stationed there on behalf of the Leopoldville government of Joseph Ileo and the Katanga regime of Moise Tshombe.
Katanga and South Kasai, in fact, are the only places where Belgians are a serious threat to anybody's peace. There Moise Tshombe and Albert Kalonji employ "retired" Belgian officers to fly their planes, train their troops, plan their military attacks. In Katanga's government office, every Congolese minister has hired a Belgian as an "adviser." The Belgian government argues that the military men are there as private citizens and mercenaries, cannot be called back if they prefer to work for the Africans; it also insists it has no control over Union Minière, whose subsidies make Tshombe's government one of Africa's richest.