Talk:United Nations Operation in the Congo
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[edit] Serious content issues
As this article stands (October 07) it is a serious distortion of what actually went on, and needs to be seriously re-written!! Buckshot06 02:37, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Hey, didn't they actually invade Katanga?
TIME article at the time:
"Reported Linner, with undisguised frustration: "This was the culmination of a long series of wrongful acts by these officers, including the organization of attacks on the United Nations, repeated threats, and incitements to violence." O'Brien issued an ultimatum: remove all remaining white officers, or else. When Tshombe flatly refused, U.N. troops went into action, while Hammarskjold, who had just arrived for a personal inspection, waited in Léopoldville.
Attack. Long before dawn one morning last week, a company of Indian troops backed by Irish armored cars surrounded the Elisabethville post office' held as a communications center by a Tshombe garrison. In French and Swahili, demands were megaphoned that the garrison yield the building. The answer was the rattle of machine guns. The U.N. returned fire, and for two hours streams of red tracer bullets crossed each other in the predawn darkness. An Indian soldier was hit in the face; he screamed. A Katanga gendarme, hit in the belly, fell from a second-story window, picked himself up, staggered away with his entrails hanging out. The driver of an armored car was decapitated, and his car lunged weirdly into a wall.
Other U.N. troops were deployed throughout the city. Indians took the state radio building after a charge with fixed bayonets. Swedish troops attacked the home of Tshombe's Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo (who had fled). Shortly after dawn, the U.N. forces gained their objectives, and O'Brien called a press conference to announce that "the Katanga secession is over. Katanga is now a Congolese province." The cease-fire announcement was vastly premature.
Siege. O'Brien, 43, an intense Irishman with literary leanings (he is noted for a study of Irish Insurrectionist Charles Stewart Parnell) had badly misjudged Moise Tshombe, the strength of his gendarmerie, and above all their determination to fight for Katanga's independence. After the announcement, the central government in Léopoldville named Egide Bocheley as Katanga's "High Commissioner" to replace Tshombe. Bocheley, a follower of far-left Vice Premier Antoine Gizenga, flew off for Elisabethville. When his plane landed, it was not safe for him to leave the airport, and he spent the night sitting up in a chair. Elisabethville was under siege. "
And so on.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,873396-1,00.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.234.60.154 (talk) 00:53, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
