History repeats itself! After Patrice Lumumba’s 30 June 1960 Independence speech, the Congo Crisis started. The Belgians were not happy to leave their colony and thus funded Moïse Tshombe in the Katanga for the secession of Congo. This was at the height of the Cold War, and served as a proxy conflict between the East and the West or the Soviet Union and the United States and cronies. A little over a week later, on 9 July, Belgium deployed paratroopers, without the Congolese state’s permission, in Kabalo and elsewhere to protect fleeing white civilians. As the conflict persisted, Lumumba appealed to the United Nations, but he was told that all aid to the Congolese government would be going through the UN. Finding this out, his Deputy Prime Minister Antoine Gizenga declared:

“The people of the Congo do not understand why we, the victims of aggression, we who are in our own land . . . are systematically and methodically disarmed while the aggressors, the Belgians, who are in our conquered country, still have their arms and and all their firepower. . . . The UN forces allow Katanga to consolidate secession and let the Belgians behave as if they were in an occupied country under the smokescreen of a phoney Katanga provincial government that we, the legitimate government of the Congo, have declared illegal.” Antoine Gizenga, in CRISP, Congo 1960, p. 615

As you read these words uttered by Deputy Prime Minister Gizenga over 66 years, does it not read like the aggression that the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been going through at the hands of the M23, proxy troops of Rwanda used to loot the Congolese resources? These words remind us of the conflict in Cote d’Ivoire with the Marcory treaties where the victims were disarmed while the aggressors were armed… and so many other conflicts in Africa: the victim wishing for his dependence is disarmed pushed into a corner, while the aggressor is funded by the West. All of this, under the watchful eyes of the UN, just as in 1960!