Missing in Action by Ralph Riegel Page B

him, and the protégé studied his former mentor. Mobutu is reported to have laughed, spat in Lumumba’s face and warned him: ‘You swore to have my skin – now it is I who have yours.’
    Further humiliation followed as Mobutu’s young officers punched, kicked and whipped the prime minister. The army revelled in Lumumba’s fall and the rise of their own leader. Unconfirmed reports indicate that some of the abuse was even filmed for sub-sequent viewing by army leaders. But the tragedy had not yet reached its climax. Mobutu was determined that, whatever about humiliating his rival, he did not want Lumumba’s blood on his hands. The Belgians wanted Lumumba dead, so an arrangement was secretly agreed whereby Lumumba would be delivered to Katanga and to those who hated him most.
    What happened next has largely emerged through the award-winning work of Flemish investigative journalist, Ludo de Witte, who tracked down many of those involved. His book – Die Moord Op Lumumba ( The Assassination of Lumumba ) – became a bestseller and prompted a formal inquiry into the events of 1961 by the Belgian parliament. De Witte argued that not only was Belgium complicit in Lumumba’s murder, but President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration and the CIA were also supportive of the assassination.
    On 15 January 1961, Belgium secretly instructed President Tshombe and Katanga to accept custody of Lumumba. Tshombe – who fully realised it was coded language for a death sentence – is said to have hesitated for only a moment before agreeing. One Belgian official later commented that Lumumba’s death was ‘a public health measure’. On 17 January, Lumumba was flown from Leopoldville to Elisabethville in the heart of Katanga. On the flight, he was savagely beaten again by Baluba soldiers who were specifically assigned to the mission because of their tribal hatred of Lumumba.
    The bloodied prime minister was taken from the military jail at Thysville and handed over to Katangan soldiers – commanded by a Belgian officer – who ushered the politician to the Villa Brouwe, a secure compound on the outskirts of the city. Katangan and Belgian soldiers took it in turns to beat Lumumba while Tshombe visited to view his deposed rival at first hand.
    Later, after some discussion between Tshombe and the Katangan cabinet, Lumumba and two of his staunchest supporters who had also been arrested, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, were taken to a remote location in the bush some fifty kilometres outside Elisabethville by an armed squad commanded by Belgian officers. A Belgian soldier, Captain Julien Gat, commanded the firing squad. In the presence of Tshombe and the Belgian police commissioner in Katanga, Franz Verscheure, the three prisoners were placed against a tree. Lumumba had been so badly beaten that, according to accounts, he was hardly able to stand. Lumumba spotted the graves, which had already been dug, and he turned to one of the Belgians and said, in French, ‘You’re going to shoot us?’ Lumumba was executed by firing squad and then shot at close range through the head. He was the last of the three friends to be executed. It was 9.40 p.m. on 17 January 1961 and Congo was about to enter another dark age.
    The bodies were dug up two days later amid mounting Belgian concerns about the political fall-out from the execution. The corpses were hacked to pieces before being dissolved in sulphuric acid obtained from local mining firms. Belgian policeman, Gerard Soerte, was ordered to take charge of the exhumation and to help cover up all traces of the killing. Later he admitted, ‘He [a Katangan Minister] said “You destroy them – you make them disappear. How you do it doesn’t interest me.” We were there for two whole days. We did things an animal would not do. That is why we were drunk – stone drunk.’
    The final earthly traces of Patrice Lumumba and his friends – anything the mining acid could not destroy – were then placed on a