Hammarskjöld: A Life

17. Far Away a Heart Stops

17 Far Away a Heart Stops “T his is excellent, if it’s true; but is it not too simple?”1 The speaker was a participant in the advisory committee working through the long crisis with Hammarskjöld. In mid-August Hammarskjöld endorsed his colleague’s skeptical wit, but he also had new hope that the crisis might wind down. Operation Rumpunch made sense to him as a step in that direction. By design it was forceful but nonviolent. Not a shot was fired; the show of force was enough. Somehow kept secret in a city and province where everyone had sources, it expressed in utterly concrete terms the Security Council’s resolution in February to expel the mercenaries from Katanga. They had done great harm by strengthening Tshombe’s resolve, helping local white “ultras” organize into armed militias, and contributing to an exterminatory war against Baluba tribal villages in northern Katanga that had remained loyal to the central government. By mid-September, some thirty-five thousand or more Baluba refugees had gathered in protective camps under UN care. O’Brien recalled that this huge population included not only villagers but also good citizens of Elisabethville who had been persecuted by Munongo’s forces. “They now came to squat on the ground around our camps in conditions of the greatest misery and squalor.”2 The burden of responsibility carried by the UN was nearly overwhelming. Rumpunch was planned by O’Brien with the top UN military leader in Katanga, brigadier K. A. S. Raja. It focused on key places and people. Before dawn on August 28th, UN forces in Elisabethville surrounded or occupied the radio station, post office, telephone center, and gendarmerie headquarters. In a surprise maneuver, they also surrounded the residence of the interior minister, Munongo, the most aggressive of Tshombe’s ministers, to cut him off from command. Tshombe remained at liberty: once the UN had demonstrated its ability to arrest and expel his mercenaries, he would be the crucial negotiating partner. In the course of the day, eighty-one European officers were arrested without struggle in Elisabethville and elsewhere in Katanga and sent off to the vast military base at Kamina for return to their home countries. Far Away a Heart Stops 539 The 28th was also a day for diplomacy. O’Brien and Raja met with Tshombe that morning and secured his agreement, long sought, to dismiss all foreign officers—an agreement he announced rather docilely by radio later in the day. His quid pro quo was the release of Munongo and the withdrawal of UN forces from the sites they had occupied. Meanwhile the Western consular corps, Belgian, British, and French, requested a meeting with O’Brien and Raja. It was ill-starred. Owing to a naïve concession by O’Brien at the meeting, the coherence of the welllaunched operation began to fall apart. In an interview for the United Nations Oral History Project, Urquhart comments that O’Brien “had no idea of military affairs at all” and relied on “a very inefficient military opposite number.”3 Perhaps that is enough to explain the error he fell into. When the Belgian consul offered to take over the assembling and repatriation of mercenary officers, most of whom were Belgian, O’Brien relinquished control to him. The consul explained that “the arrests were an unnecessary humiliation imposed on officers who had orders from their own government never to fire on UN troops. These officers were willing, indeed anxious, to leave Katanga. . . .”4 Brigadier Raja didn’t like the offer one bit, but O’Brien accepted because, as he later explained, it ensured that the operation would remain nonviolent from start to finish. It must also have been in his interest to maintain give-and-take with the consulates. Later he acknowledged that it had been a “sottise,” a stupidity. He borrowed his French from a report on Operation Rumpunch in a Belgian newspaper.5 Unsurprisingly, from one day to the next the repatriation process broke down. While the more cooperative mercenaries headed for home, the ruthless core—les affreux—went into hiding, regrouped, and revised its strategy. At UN headquarters, Hammarskjöld had mixed feelings. He sent O’Brien a witty, jubilant congratulatory cable. “Congo Club in congress assembled passed unanimous vote of congratulations gratification and sincere respect for an exceedingly sensitive operation carried through with skill and courage. . . .”6 Notwithstanding, he worried that the operation had ended too soon.7 The days following in...