Journey's End?

Another pause has come to Katanga, one of those ephemeral moments in which the nations of the West may examine their souls and reflect on how Mr. Tshombe's fall affects their plans for the Congo. There is no longer any doubt that Mr. Tshombe has fallen: beyond the gift of a week in which he must decide to yield his Kolwezi headquarters to U.N. troops or, by his refusal, consent to his political burial, the Katangan leader who juggled the world's anxieties for a year and a half has been left with nothing.

His decline, in fact, has been the principal justification for the U.N.'s military action, as well as for the increasingly warm acceptance of that action in Europe. Last year at this time it was frequently argued that the U.N.'s use of force not only set a dangerous precedent for its conduct in future squabbles among and within new nations, but also imperiled its own future effectiveness. The strength of this argument depended heavily on the supposition that a concert of Western allies could bring Mr. Tshombe to terms within a unified Congo. Since then the alternative has disappeared: Mr. Tshombe has made false promises to the central government in Leopoldville too often to clear himself of the charge of dangerous opportunism.

U Thant, furthermore, a much shrewder fellow than anyone ever expected, has met other and less academic objections to his Congo mission by clothing it in highly ambiguous language. He has insisted throughout that U.N. troops are there only to guarantee Katanga's isolation, to freeze a murderously explosive military situation (in which Mr. Tshombe has spoken of poisoned arrows and "scorched earth") so that negotiations to subsume Katanga may continue. His casques bleus, he has innocently announced, are not at all intended to force any particular political objectives.

Naturally U Thant is hardly so innocent; the plan for Congolese federation, which includes guaranteeing Leopoldville 30 per cent of the foreign exchange earned by the Union Miniere and abolishing the Kantangan army, and which Mr. Tshombe will be virtually compelled to accept, is the Secretary-General's own invention. Yet his wording has successfully invited Belgian and British sympathy by clouding over the issue of colonialism which delights African nationalists but infuriates European conservative parliamentarians. In short, the Thant strategy has finally won over all the Western allies save France, who sticks proudly to her defiance of anti-colonialist ideology and her refusal to believe that any good can come from U.N. military coercion.

But although de Gaulle is silent, Belgium, in the person of Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak, has run out of patience with Mr. Tshombe. In September, 1961, M. Spaak (then not in office) had hoped for the classic alternative of subduing the breezy Katangan chief by private means; now he grasps faintly at U Thant's tactful straws. The Belgian government's resolution must have been considerably fortified by Mr. Tshombe's talk of "scorched earth" and his attempts to blow up several key Union Miniere installations. Even what M. Spaak describes as his "preoccupation," meaning alarm, with the more confusing aspects of the U.N. expedition (such as the presumed communications failure which led the casques bleus to take the city of Jadotville after U Thant's order not to, and Dr. Bunche's subsequent implied endorsement of that victory) cannot really deflect the growing tide of Belgian consent.

The British have all along played a deeper and trickier game, and its is only recently that they have begun to lend more than equivocal support to U Thant's campaign. Considered in any light, the U.N. mission was bound to raise welts on British backs, and so the Foreign Secretary also clung nervously to possible alternatives. In the shadow of Lord Home's strikingly Gaullist pronouncements on the proper function of the U.N. lay two profound fears: that the new federation would injure British financial interests in Katanga, and that the casques bleus would march firmly into any settlement of the touchy Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

As for the U.S., President Kennedy has been lucky. Despite all Allied protests he has been for the Congo expedition from the start, and his tenacity has finally begun to pay off. Although he has made dimly glimpsed alternatives absolutely impossible, he has put himself in a position to cash side bets on gaining pan-African esteem. But this week remains crucial. He and U Thant will have lost everything all over again unless they realize that the Thant plan can only be temporarily satisfactory. Having nearly washed Mr. Tshombe down the drain, they must now help see to it that the problem of federating the Congo finds an ingenious and lasting solution.