Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was assassinated 50+ years ago on 17 January, 1961.
This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.
The assassination's historical importance lies in a multitude of factors, the most pertinent being the global context in which it took place, its impact on Congolese politics since then and Lumumba's overall legacy as a nationalist leader.
For 126 years, the US and Belgium played key roles in shaping Congo's destiny. In April 1884, seven months before the Berlin Congress, the US became the first country in the world to recognise the claims of King Leopold II of the Belgians to the territories of the Congo Basin.
When the atrocities related to brutal economic exploitation in Leopold's Congo Free State resulted in millions of fatalities, the US joined other world powers to force Belgium to take over the country as a regular colony.
And it was during the colonial period that the US acquired a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, following its use of the uranium from Congolese mines to manufacture the first atomic weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
With the outbreak of the cold war, it was inevitable that the US and its western allies would not be prepared to let Africans have effective control over strategic raw materials, lest these fall in the hands of their enemies in the Soviet camp.
It is in this regard that Patrice Lumumba's determination to achieve genuine independence and to have full control over Congo's resources in order to utilise them to improve the living conditions of his people was perceived as a threat to western interests.
To fight him, the US and Belgium used all the tools and resources at their disposal, including the United Nations secretariat, under Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche, to buy the support of Lumumba's Congolese rivals , and hired killers.
In Congo, Lumumba's assassination is rightly viewed as the country's original sin up to today.Congo has and will never recover from his assassination.
It came less than 7 months after independence.It was a stumbling block to the ideals of national unity,economic independence and pan-African solidarity that Lumumba championed,as well as a blow to the hopes of millions of Congolese for freedom and material prosperity.
The assassination took place at a time when the country had fallen under 4 separate governments:the central government in Kinshasa; a rival central government by Lumumba's followers in Kisangani;and the secessionist regimes in the mineral-rich provinces of Katanga and South Kasai
Since Lumumba's physical elimination had removed what the west saw as the major threat to their interests in the Congo, internationally-led efforts were undertaken to restore the authority of the moderate and pro-western regime in Kinshasa over the entire country.
These resulted in ending the Lumumbist regime in Kisangani in August 1961, the secession of South Kasai in September 1962, and the Katanga secession in January 1963.
Lumumba made a fateful step - he turned to the Soviet Union for help. This set off panic in London and Washington, who feared the Soviets would get a foothold in Africa much as they had done in Cuba.
In the White House, President Eisenhower held a National Security Council meeting in the summer of 1960 in which at one point he turned to his CIA director and used the word "eliminated" in terms of what he wanted done with Lumumba.
The CIA got to work. It came up with a series of plans - including snipers and poisoned toothpaste - to get rid of the Congolese leader. They were not carried out because the CIA man on the ground, Larry Devlin, said he was reluctant to see them through.
Murder was also on the mind of some in London. A Foreign Office official called Howard Smith wrote a memo outlining a number of options. "The first is the simple one of removing him from the scene by killing him," the civil servant (and later head of MI5) wrote of Lumumba.
It happened that Shortly after Congolese independence in 1960, a mutiny broke out in the army, marking the beginning of the Congo Crisis.
Lumumba appealed to the US and the UN for help to suppress the Belgian-supported Katangan secessionists. Both refused, so Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for support. This led to growing differences with President Joseph Kasa-Vubuand chief-of-staff Joseph-Désiré Mobutu,
Lumumba was the first Congolese to articulate a narrative of the Congo that contradicted traditional Belgian views of colonisation, and he highlighted the suffering of the indigenous population under European rule.
He offered a basis for national identity,having survived colonial victimisation, as well as the people's innate dignity, humanity and unity.This ideal of humanism included the values of egalitarianism, social justice, liberty, and the recognition of fundamental rights.
President Kasa-Vubu began fearing a Lumumbist coup d'état would take place.On the evening of 5 September,he announced over radio that he had dismissed Lumumba and six of his ministers from the government for the massacres in South Kasai and for involving the Soviets in the Congo.
On 14 September Mobutu announced over the radio that he was launching a 'peaceful revolution' to break the political impasse and therefore neutralising the President, Lumumba's and Iléo's respective governments, and Parliament until 31 December.
With support from the US and Belgium, Mobutu's troops captured Lumumba in Lodi on 1 Dec.He was moved to Port Francqui the next day and flown back to Léopoldville.UN forces did not interfere.Mobutu claimed Lumumba would be tried for inciting the army to rebellion and other crimes.
At night of Jan.17 1961,Lumumba was driven to an isolated spot where three firing squads had been assembled. A Belgian commission of inquiry found that the execution was carried out by Katanga's authorities.
The Belgians and their counterparts later wished to get rid of the bodies, and did so by digging up and dismembering the corpses, then dissolving them in sulfuric acid while the bones were ground and scattered
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