One Nation Indivisible

The victory of the UN forces in Elisabethville is a victory for order, no matter what the critics of the UN effort may say. These critics--Senators Dodd and Dirksen, Her Majesty's Government, and the Union Miniere interests in Paris, London and Brussels--had seen Tshombe as the "man of order," and the UN venture as disruptive. The cease-fire declaration has cut their position out from under them.

The task now facing the UN and the United States government is to follow up their success by staying at the conference table as long as it takes to merge Katanga into a workable Congo Union.

No one can reasonably expect that the negotiations between Tshombe and Adoula will be smooth sailing in any respect. The reduced status that Adoula envisions for Tshombe is a long way from the power he has had as an autonomous "national" leader; and it is even further from the conception--which he himself may have begun to believe--of Tshombe as the Congo's White Hope.

But there can be no excuse for any settlement which stops short of a redistribution of power. Katangan independence is unacceptable--not simply because Tshombe is the tool of the imperialist Union Miniere, or because of the rightism which characterizes his regime.

Katanga must be effectively integrated into a Congo Union because the sole alternative is chaos. Order in the Congo is still--as it was on the day its independence was proclaimed, a year and a half ago--dependent on the existence of a strong central government. And that government must be able to claim the loyalty and respect of the hostile tribes and language groups in its population.

This central government must have at least the resources that the Belgian administrators had available to them --the resources of Katanga. Perhaps additional capital will come to a new Congo state from private investors and organizations such as the World Bank. But domestic order--which presupposes the subduing of secessionist revolt, and control of the national wealth--must come first.

The UN is to be congratulated for its tenacity in the Congo crisis. For, underlying all the opposition to its Congo venture was opposition to the UN itself, or at least to a UN capable of so effective and forceful an operation.

By capturing and subduing Elisabethville, the UN has won a dangerous gamble. But if it is to maintain the position it has won, it must continue to work in the Congo for a government which has an institutional and economic framework capable of surviving and flourishing.