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A startling Belgian TV documentary, broadcast on 15 May, has unearthed more evidence about the Belgian involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first premier of DRCongo.
Lumumba was murdered on 17 January 1961 together with Joseph Okito, deputy president of the Senate, and Maurice Mpolo, minister of information. Their bodies were subsequently sawed into bits and doused in acid to obliterate the evidence.
Broadcast only two weeks after the commission of inquiry set up by the Belgian parliament into the death of Lumumba began its work, the documentary has added more juice to an already sordid story (see NA February).
When Lumumba and his two companions were sent to Katanga on 17 January 1961 by Mobutu's government in Kinshasa, the Belgians behind Moise Tshombe's secessionist government in Katanga were certain that Lumumba would not live much longer.
We were absolutely sure he would die and we kept as dumb as fishes", confesses Jacques Brassine, a former adviser to Tshombe's government, in the documentary broadcast by the Belgian TV channel, RTBF.
Ironically, with that sentence, Brassine destroyed his own arguments put forward in his political science doctorate thesis presented in 1990 when completing his degree at the Free University of Brussels. He claimed in the thesis that Lumumba's murder was only a "Congolese business".
But in 1960 and 1961, Tshombe's "government" was run by Belgians who exercised huge influence over him. Brassine now says that the Belgian advisers were the "brains" of Tshombe's "cabinet". They "wrote his speeches and structured the secessionist policy", he adds.
This startling admission, (because for years Brassine had denied any serious Belgian involvement in Lumumba's murder), becomes even more significant when viewed against the backdrop of remarks made in the same documentary by Jacques Bartelous, the Belgian who acted as Tshombe's chief of cabinet.
He confirms that Lumumba had received death threats as far back as the roundtable talks in Brussels in January 1960 that paved the way for Congolese independence.
Thus, the Belgians who ran Katanga knew that Lumumba would die if he were sent there. This is why, claims Brassine, Tshombe's Belgian advisers were opposed to Lumumba's transfer to Katanga. He says the Belgians feared a public outcry if Lumumba were to die in Katanga. But that...