In June 1967, several hundred European and South African mercenaries joined by former Katangese rebel soldiers revolted against Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Their original plans to back a return of former Congolese prime minister Moïse Tshombe failed to unseat Mobutu. US officials, terrified by the idea that Mobutu would fall and leave the Congo ripe for new leftist revolts that had nearly gained power in 1964, committed logistical support to defeat the mutineers. Jean Schramme and Laurent Monga, the heads of the revolt, became besieged in the Congolese city of Bukavu by August 1967. For four months, the rebels held out against Congolese forces before fleeing on 5 November 1967 into neighboring Rwanda.
Their exodus led to diplomatic negotiations that dragged on for months, particularly after the Portuguese government permitted a second mercenary force to launch a bungled raid into Katanga province. This clumsy move appeared to make the mercenaries a pawn in the Portuguese-Rhodesian-South African alliance, infuriating OAU member states and annoying Western diplomats for undermining their plans for a speedy solution to the crisis. Grégoire Kayibanda, the leader of Rwanda, rebuffed Mobutu's demands to send the European mercenaries back to the Congo to be tried for treason. Kayibanda's regime murdered opponents with impunity, particularly Tutsi suspected of sympathizing with dissidents in exile. Yet on the subject of white mercenaries, Kayibanda presented himself as a defender of humanitarian conventions and refugee rights. Ultimately, Mobutu relented, and the mercenaries left Rwanda for Europe on 23 April 1968.
Contemporaries and scholars alike have considered the mercenary revolt to be a farcical epilogue to the civil wars that devastated the Congo in the country's first seven years after independence in 1960.Footnote 1 Schramme and European journalists glorified the mercenary's last stand.Footnote 2 US officials thought Mobutu's survival was a victory. Walter Rostow, a key foreign policy advisor to US President Lyndon Johnson, wrote:
Our people stayed strictly out of the way while the Africans bargained with the Red Cross…. Everybody concerned, including Mobutu, was tired of haggling… No one is betting… that Mobutu will have an easy time holding the country together… . But at least we've bought some more time; for the Congo, that's worth celebrating.Footnote 3
Certainly, Rostow's words express the misplaced American optimism about Mobutu, a position all too familiar to historians. Yet this quote also offers insights into the previously neglected role of humanitarianism and diplomacy in resolving the crisis. American officials had indeed meddled in the mercenary crisis. US and Belgian officials persuaded the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to negotiate the peaceful retreat of the mercenaries and Katangese. ICRC officials agreed to intervene, hopeful that they could disprove African fears that the Red Cross ultimately sided with Western countries in political disputes. The ICRC had bitter experience in the independent DRC from 1960 to 1966, but had consented to try once again.Footnote 4 Mobutu did not simply tire from the ‘haggling’. He and foreign minister Justin-Maurice Bomboko masterfully extended the crisis to extort support from the anxious Americans, intimidate the hostile Belgian government, and cultivate the DRC's reputation among other African states as a defender of African sovereignty. Mobutu also succeeded in finishing off Katangese opposition to his authority. The mercenaries had mutinied after one of Mobutu's greatest and most mysterious international victories: the kidnapping and subsequent imprisonment in Algeria of Moïse Tshombe in June 1967. Yet the rebels proved no match for Mobutu's diplomatic skill.
This article is a significant departure from other studies of the mercenary revolt because it places international diplomatic understandings of African sovereignty at the center. The mercenaries and Katangese themselves had little ability to shape these negotiations. Instead, Mobutu and Kayibanda took advantage of the solidifying nature of African political sovereignty in international diplomacy in the late 1960s, exploiting Western cynicism regarding the merits of the end of colonial rule and the OAU's calls for Panafrican collaboration. Paul Bjerk has shown how Tanzanian leaders establishing their country as ‘a credible sovereign nation both externally and internally’ and by building legitimacy through manipulating and suppressing discourses related to sovereignty and nationhood. The two different approaches to establishing sovereignty worked hand in hand in Congolese and Rwandan diplomacy.Footnote 5 Kayibanda and Mobutu's diplomacy played on the racialized fears of Western diplomats of endangered whiteness, the ICRC's patronizing claims of political neutrality, African fears of the machinations of Portugal and South Africa, and hopes that African countries could settle their own conflicts. Promoting sovereignty was a politics of affirmation of dignity and value, as V.Y. Mudimbe has noted.Footnote 6 African authoritarian regimes skillfully employed this need in the 1960s through celebrating sovereignty in cultural performances.Footnote 7 Kayibanda and Mobutu cleverly controlled discursive understandings of national identity at home, whether by endorsing ideals of ethnic liberation in Rwanda or cultural authenticity in the Congo. Yet they also harnessed diplomacy to posit Congolese and Rwandan sovereignty as preferential to the alternatives of continued anarchic violence. The US government, in turn, frantically tried to present Mobutu as an autonomous actor and a guardian of African independence.
This reaffirming of African national sovereignty fit the interests of US politicians and African leaders. Ryan Irwin points out how the South African government took advantage of the growing unwillingness of the US and international organization to violate sovereignty in African nations in the late 1960s.Footnote 8 The failures of Western involvement in the DRC to shore up a stable government contributed greatly to this increased cynicism.Footnote 9 US Ambassador to the Congo Robert McBride concurred with ICRC staff that Congolese and Rwandan sovereignty needed to be safeguarded, no matter how unpalatable their leaders might be. This refusal to try to impose international agreements such as the UN Refugee Convention of 1951 allowed diplomats and ICRC staff free rein to invent their own standards for defining refugee status.
The OAU endorsed African sovereignty against foreign interventions as well. The mercenary crisis allowed the OAU to test its collective power to use sovereignty against the mercenaries.Footnote 10 By blocking an evacuation, the OAU claimed it was protecting African rights against the mercenaries. Instead of confronting the OAU directly, Western diplomats and the ICRC tried to influence individual member states. ICRC and US diplomatic correspondence exposes numerous rifts within the OAU. Mobutu and Kayibanda vied for support within the OAU.
This notion of a sovereign African territory too wild to be tamed by international agreements, mutually constructed by African and Western stakeholders, resulted in a racialized bifurcation of individual rights. European and US diplomats used the ICRC to transform the mercenaries into political refugees protected by humanitarian conventions. African sovereignty could exclude mercenaries as foreign threats. The Katangese, by contrast, were not allowed to break away from Congolese sovereignty as represented by Mobutu's government. Congolese state authority ensured that they had no recourse to universal protections of individual rights.Footnote 11 Once in Rwanda, the Katangese discovered that the OAU had no intention of allowing them to move to other countries. African states controlled black people and denied white mercenaries a place in Africa; Western backers protected whites in the name of human rights.
This essay offers a significant contribution to the historiography of the DRC and sovereignty in Africa during the 1960s. The diplomatic maneuverings of Mobutu and Kayibanda have yet to be analyzed at length.Footnote 12 Diplomacy constituted a valuable tool during the mercenary revolt. Furthermore, the mercenary crisis was a notable example of the solidification of a form of African national sovereignty in the late 1960s that favored authoritarian regimes. This particular brand of sovereignty insulated African states from following international human rights conventions. Like the Katangese in 1967, Biafrans ultimately were on the losing end of the international defense of African national sovereignty. Biafran president Emeka Ojukwu declared in 1969 that the only reason Western countries did not stop the Nigerian onslaught was clear: ‘The root cause of the problem lies in the fact we are black.’Footnote 13 So were political dissidents and others who sought international protection from African state repression in the name of human rights in the late 1960s, more than a decade before the increasing endorsement of human rights as justification for foreign intervention.Footnote 14 Other conceptions of sovereignty based on more egalitarian and democratic ideals also emerged, but in the Congo, the twinning of authoritarian rule and African sovereignty held sway for decades to come.
A case study of diplomacy in the mercenary revolts also offers insights to the growing literature on the history of humanitarianism in Cold War Africa. The emphasis on decolonization contrasts with the relative paucity of work in the early independence period.Footnote 15 The big exceptions lie in the cases of Biafra and southern Africa.Footnote 16 The mercenary/Katangese example shows a case where African authoritarian regimes ensured sovereignty won out over human rights concerns that were more typical of African regimes than Nigeria's civil war or white supremacist states. Shobana Shankar's recent survey of humanitarian interventions in Africa also does not consider how authoritarian regimes could domesticate humanitarianism in their diplomatic efforts.Footnote 17 The overwhelming emphasis on Cold War politics and the early 1960s in the literature of the DRC has neglected the uses of African sovereignty and humanitarianism under Mobutu's rule as well.
This essay is also innovative in its use of previously unused sources. Historians have spent far more time on the 1960–65 period than Mobutu's early years in power, but US diplomatic materials from the late 1960s remain underutilized, save for Götz Bechtolsheimer's 2012 dissertation.Footnote 18 Furthermore, this study is the first to ever draw from ICRC's correspondence on the mercenary crisis. The ICRC's unique position as an impartial mediator offers a critical counter to the self-serving narratives of US State Department officials.Footnote 19 Further research in other European and African diplomatic materials would add valuable nuances to the mercenary crisis. Archives currently closed to researchers, such as Belgian and Congolese diplomatic correspondence, could shed much more light on diplomacy in the mercenary revolt. Even so, US and ICRC correspondence offers a very large amount of evidence by themselves.
FEIGNING HUMANITARIANISM, FUMBLING TOWARDS SOVEREIGNTY: DIPLOMACY AND THE MERCENARY CRISIS, JUNE – SEPTEMBER 1967
The initial revolt set off panic in Western embassies about white vulnerability. Congolese troops executed some mercenaries in Kinshasa and the eastern DRC in July and August 1967.Footnote 20 Leftist rebels had killed hundreds of missionaries and other expatriates in 1964 and some US officials — particularly Walt Rostow — became convinced a pogrom against all whites might begin anew.Footnote 21 On 11 July 1967, the US and Belgian governments solicited Swiss ambassador Theodor Curchod to convince the ICRC to intervene to rescue expatriates in Kisangani.Footnote 22 US ambassador Robert McBride ordered a C-130 to Kisangani without the authorization of the Congolese army, since ‘it was in consideration of saving lives.’Footnote 23 However, the ANC (Armée National Congolais) proved capable of maintaining enough discipline to evacuate civilians and wounded government soldiers to Kinshasa.Footnote 24
Mobutu's administration tried multiple maneuvers in their dealings with the US and Belgian governments. In July and August 1967, Mobutu and foreign minister Bomboko demanded US military aid. Victor Nendaka, a longtime lieutenant of Mobutu, suggested that Mobutu could always turn to the Soviet Union for arms.Footnote 25 Veiled threats against whites also could be used as leverage. Although anti-foreign propaganda was meant to rouse Congolese patriotic sentiments, the messages made diplomats uneasy. Robert McBride, US ambassador in Kinshasa, credited Mobutu for ‘orchestrating with skill’ fears of foreign aggression to silence internal critics.Footnote 26 However, McBride also wondered how well the Congolese leader could protect European expatriates. Protestors in Kinshasa attacked the Belgian embassy in August 1967 and 25 Belgians died in attacks around the country.Footnote 27 Besides believing the Belgians wanted the mercenaries to seize power, Mobutu was determined to wrest control of the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga’s massive mining operations from Belgian hands.Footnote 28 This Belgian firm controlled the copper mines that constituted the most lucrative sector of the Congolese economy.
Mobutu's gamesmanship had adversaries. US Congressional leaders balked at the use of US C-130 aircraft in the DRC in July 1967, fearful this intervention could be the first step towards an increased US military presence in the Congolese morass.Footnote 29 With the escalation of the Vietnam war, Dean Rusk and McBride wanted to prop up Mobutu as a strong leader without having to commit US troops. Rusk also wanted to keep the Belgians from launching a military operation to save the mercenaries.Footnote 30 The US government wanted the entire revolt to be settled peacefully, while Mobutu and Bomboko wanted to crush opposition as a warning to other potential rivals.
The rebel commanders secretly proffered a deal to the Congolese leader in August 1967 that gained Western approval, though it needed Congolese and Rwandan consent to work. Schramme sent Walter Schyns, a doctor working in Bukavu, as his emissary to Western governments to try to open the door to leaving the Congo.Footnote 31 Belgian ambassador to Kinshasa Paul Bihin asked his US colleagues to present a joint proposal to the Congolese government to permit the rebels to permanently leave Congolese soil.Footnote 32 Yet the plan threatened African sovereignty in two possible ways. If Mobutu publicly dealt with Schramme as an equal, it would prevent the Congolese leader from having a decisive military victory and could weaken his prestige at home and abroad. The more aggressive US support might be, the more Mobutu might look like a mere pawn of Washington.
Hosting mercenaries and Katangese also unnerved Grégoire Kayibanda's concerns about security in Rwanda. He considered Tutsi rebels in exile to be his greatest threat. Rwandan forces killed several thousand Tutsi suspected of being rebel sympathizers over the course of the mid-1960s.Footnote 33 During the Simba revolts of 1964, some Rwandan exiles joined the Congolese revolutionaries.Footnote 34 A Congolese rebel group on Rwandan territory could destabilize Kayibanda's grip on the country and open the possibility of the return of Tutsi exiles. Despite a letter from US President Lyndon Johnson asking the Rwandan leader to approve briefly hosting the Katangese and mercenaries.Footnote 35 ‘Kayibanda reverted [sic] to fact that mercenaries were in the Congo and the problem should be handled through the Congo’, US ambassador to Rwanda Leo Cyr stated on 25 August.Footnote 36
Belgian and US diplomats turned to international mediators, unwilling to flout Congolese and Rwandese sovereignty publicly. Brussels and Washington considered a new partner: the ICRC. Evacuating rebels and their family members were not normally part of the Red Cross humanitarian mandate. However, Schramme gave an ultimatum that the safety of his Katangese soldiers would have to be respected if his forces were to leave. The rebels and Congolese foreign minister Bomboko agreed that the ICRC could handle the logistics of transporting the rebels first to Rwanda and then to other countries.Footnote 37 On 20 August 1967, the State Department agreed to push for ICRC involvement ‘to provide international flavor’, a perfect cover for obscuring the Belgian and US role in concocting the plan.Footnote 38
Belgian and US officials finally presented their proposal to the ICRC on 7 September 1967.Footnote 39 By this point, they had decided to mask further their involvement by having U Thant ask Mobutu to agree to invite the ICRC at the annual OAU meeting to be held in Kinshasa a week later.Footnote 40 U Thant himself balked at the idea unless it was approved by the UN General Assembly — an impossibility given the hostility of the entire Soviet bloc and many African and Asian governments to mercenaries.Footnote 41 Mobutu then agreed to propose to the OAU that the ICRC should supervise an evacuation. ICRC delegate René-Jean Wilhelm pointed out how this maneuver ‘would allow Mobutu to save face.’Footnote 42 Instead of following the orders of Belgium and the US, the Congolese leader thus presented himself as a strong leader defending Africans from white mercenaries, using the OAU to solve African problems rather than depending on Western countries. Bill Close, Mobutu's personal physician, agreed to convince Mobutu of the value of this idea.Footnote 43 In keeping with the shadowy Belgian and US plans of hiding their involvement in the mercenary evacuation, the US government most likely used Close — a trusted confident of the Congolese leader — as a means of assuring Mobutu would follow the plan.
THE OAU, THE ICRC, AND THE CONGOLESE PLAN FOR SOLVING THE MERCENARY CRISIS, SEPTEMBER – NOVEMBER 1967
Questions of African sovereignty as well as Congolese diplomacy took center stage at the OAU meeting. First, Mobutu and Bomboko used the OAU meeting as a showcase of their government and to strengthen their diplomatic ties with other African countries.Footnote 44 OAU representatives sought to defend African national sovereignty in a series of decisions. For example, the OAU announced it would send a mission to consider the Nigerian civil war, but only to reaffirm the ‘territorial integrity, unity, and peace of Nigeria.’Footnote 45 The mercenary crisis also fit into this broad theme of upholding African control over African diplomacy. Robert McBride felt that an OAU-approved program for ICRC negotiation in the mercenary crisis would boost Mobutu's credibility as an African leader. In an especially ironic remark, the US ambassador informed the Department of State that ‘any excess of zeal’ by Western countries (namely Belgium) could wreck the mediation and ‘the time had come, we feel, for Western countries to back off and let the Africans build up their own head of steam.’Footnote 46 The meeting paid off handsomely for Mobutu and Bomboko. The Rwandan government still wanted nothing to do with the mercenaries, but after Kayibanda met with African heads of state Ismail al-Azhari of Sudan and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, he reluctantly conceded to participate.Footnote 47 The ICRC had asked for Mobutu and/or the OAU to sanction Red Cross involvement, which officially came on 14 September 1967.Footnote 48
The ICRC itself participated ostensibly to avoid bloodshed, but the Red Cross also had a chance to restore some of the prestige it had lost in Africa during the Simba revolts. The ICRC's failed bid to convince leftist leaders to release white and South Asian hostages in 1964 had led the ICRC to withdraw its permanent representatives in the Congo in the following year.Footnote 49 The ICRC sought to improve its image to Africans who might believe it favored whites. Even an article in the Kenyan newspaper Daily Nation favorable to the OCRC asked, ‘Thus the inevitable if unfair cries here and there: “The Red Cross cares so much about the human rights of the mercenaries now. Where was it when the same mercenaries were slaughtering Congolese?’”Footnote 50
Having the OAU ask the ICRC to participate in the mercenary evacuation thus was a temptation that ICRC headquarters could not resist. One member of the governing council remarked with some apprehension, ‘The ICRC is being asked to do what the Belgian government, the Congolese government, the Congolese army, and so on are incapable of doing.’Footnote 51 René Gallopin, an influential ICRC delegate who had led Red Cross work during the Algerian war for independence, responded that the ICRC would act as a buffer between the different stakeholders.Footnote 52 On 21 September 1967, an ICRC executive committee member declared that the risk of a tragic ending for the operation was outweighed by the fact African countries had called on the Red Cross to find a peaceful end to the mercenary revolt.Footnote 53 As Swiss Ambassador Curchod reminded his ICRC readers, an intervention for the mercenaries ‘would provide an inestimable service for the African cause’, while a refusal to take part would ruin African confidence in the Red Cross.Footnote 54 Mobutu also played on ICRC anxieties about its African standing. He met with delegate René-Jean Wilhelm on 24 September 1967 and assured the ICRC official that Africans held the Red Cross in high esteem.Footnote 55 The ICRC agreed to follow the direction of a committee formed by the OAU and chaired by Sudanese ambassador Fadl Obeid, further demonstrating the Red Cross’ commitment to collaborating with African partners.
Between 14 September and 2 November 1967, a series of convoluted negotiations took place to finalize the withdrawal of Schramme's forces. One sticking point was the Katangese soldiers. Schramme agreed to an evacuation as long as Katangese forces could relocate to another African country.Footnote 56 The Zambian government consented to host the Congolese mutineers after Mobutu agreed not to extradite the Katangese who wanted to stay out of the Congo.Footnote 57 The legal status of the Katangese as refugees remained murky. Prince Saddrudin Khan, head of the UN High Commission for Refugees, made it clear that he did not consider the Katangese met UN definitions of refugees and had little confidence the Katangese in Zambia could be trusted to become ‘peaceful farmers’.Footnote 58 In keeping with the improvised nature of the entire withdrawal, the ICRC and all interested African and Western states treated the Katangese as refugees without any reference to UN conventions.
Just as a busy group of ICRC delegates had arranged for the Katangese and mercenaries to leave Bukavu at the beginning of November 1967, the plan collapsed thanks to an egregious violation of African sovereignty. The Portuguese government allowed a second mercenary force commanded by notorious French mercenary Bob Denard to attack the province of Katanga from Angola on 2 November. The Congolese government quickly routed Denard's troops, who received no reinforcements from the Portuguese military.Footnote 59 The Portuguese administration despised Mobutu for hosting the FNLA Angolan rebel organization and had close ties to Tshombe. However, neither the mercenaries nor the Portuguese apparently realized how the brief attack would be seen as a collective affront to African security. US ambassador to Portugal William Bennett Jr. bemoaned the raid as either a ‘colossally bad estimate’ of the situation, or worse, part of a Portuguese-Rhodesian-South African strategy aimed at dominating central Africa.Footnote 60 The futile attack from Angola had worsened the dismal position of Schramme and Monga's forces. They took matters in their own hands by crossing into Rwanda and surrendering to Kayibanda's government on 5 November 1967. The ICRC along with the US, Belgian, and French ambassadors begged Kayibanda to ‘avoid a general massacre’ and not expel the ex-rebels.Footnote 61 The Rwandan president grudgingly consented, setting off a new round of conflicts.
FROM REFUGE TO REMOVAL: THE DEPORTATION OF THE KATANGESE REBELS FROM RWANDA
Mobutu immediately set about using diplomacy to neutralize the mercenaries, even as Western governments and the ICRC tried to keep the ex-rebels in Rwanda. On 6 November 1967, the Congolese president annulled his offer of amnesty to the Katangese and the entire ICRC intervention in light of the attack from Angola.Footnote 62 ICRC president Samuel Gonard asked US Secretary of State Dean Rusk to negotiate with Mobutu so that the evacuation still could go forward.Footnote 63 DRC ambassador to Rwanda Vincent Futu, by contrast, asserted on the same day that there was no longer any role for the ICRC and that Rwanda needed to extradite Congolese and European rebels to the DRC.Footnote 64 The Zambian government concurred with Mobutu and denied the Katangese asylum.Footnote 65 To add to the chaotic responses to Mobutu's demand, the Belgian embassy in Rwanda asked the ICRC to ‘really kidnap’ the mercenaries by a clandestine operation out of the country.Footnote 66 ICRC delegate Marti recommended the Red Cross desist from any direct involvement on the grounds ‘[it] could be interpreted as a defense of the mercenaries and damage future humanitarian actions in the Congo and its allies.’Footnote 67
The Rwandan government pressured the Red Cross to get the unwelcome ex-rebels to leave. US officials wrote Washington that Kayibanda had threatened to send the mercenaries back to Mobutu, demanded the ICRC get the Katangese and mercenaries out of his country with no delay, and possibly feared a Congolese-sponsored invasion by Tutsi against this country.Footnote 68 Kayibanda took advantage of the ICRC's fears of losing respect from Africans to enlist their help to quickly evacuate the mercenaries and Katangese. He told one delegate,
The reputation of international organizations one after another has collapsed and it is necessary to save at any price the reputation of the Red Cross. [Kayibanda] is sure that extradition would be tantamount to a massacre pure and simple…. It is certain that the responsibility of this massacre would lie not on Rwanda, but the Red Cross.Footnote 69
The ICRC was encouraged that Kayibanda on 13 November 1967 asserted his government would provide shelter to the Katangese and the refugees on ‘humanitarian grounds’ and would not repatriate them, although he did not refer to them as refugees.Footnote 70
The OAU and the ICRC both found themselves in difficult positions. OAU officials declared on 12 November that the mercenary attack from Angola constituted a violation of African and Congolese sovereignty, but held out the possibility the European mercenaries could be eventually sent to their home countries if they were barred from returning to Africa.Footnote 71 To hold off Mobutu's demand for extradition, the ICRC took a novel position by arguing the OAU's September 1967 request for ICRC mediation still was in effect, even though Mobutu and the OAU itself contended this was no longer the case. ICRC's instructions for its representative to the UN included explaining to the UN General Assembly that the ICRC ‘had not intervened for the mercenaries themselves, but in the interest to avoid bloodshed in Africa’ and that the mission could only end once the mercenaries and Katangese left Rwanda.Footnote 72
Since the OAU had not yet created a legal definition of refugee status and the UN 1951 convention was ignored, the ICRC simply could remake the mercenaries into refugees to bolster the Red Cross intervention. ICRC president Samuel Gonard wrote OAU Secretary General Diallo Telli, ‘ICRC considers [it] would be failing duty if [the ICRC] left these defenseless refugees to their fate.’Footnote 73 The OAU responded to the ICRC and Western governments that carefully balanced concerns with African sovereignty with renewing the evacuation plan. On 15 November 1967, Telli declared that the mercenaries would be allowed to go to their countries of origin as long as they never returned to Africa and that Mobutu granted amnesty for the Katangese.Footnote 74
While the OAU announcement contradicted the Congolese demand for extradition of all the rebels, the Congolese government adjusted accordingly. First, the US intervened to pressure the Congolese government to back away from extradition. Initially, Secretary of State Rusk told his reluctant US ambassador to the DRC to threaten to cut US aid if Mobutu violated his own pardon to the Katangese.Footnote 75 McBride raised the issue with the Congolese leader: ‘Mobutu said he was profoundly hurt Dept doubted his word as to [Katangese] safety. He said amnesty decree was a law of the nation and must be observed.’Footnote 76 Yet Mobutu craftily overcame this barrier by making common cause with the OAU to convince — or rather, coerce — the Katangese to end their exile. The motivations for why OAU secretary general Diallo Telli decided to help force the Katangese out of Rwanda are unclear, but given that the OAU officially viewed the mercenary revolt to be an act of neo-colonial aggression, one cannot imagine he had any sympathy for the Katangese.
Foreign minister Bomboko and Diallo Telli joined the small ICRC delegation in Kigali to the internment camp where the Katangese soldiers and their families were being held on 16 November 1967. On a mound of dirt, the delegation addressed the crowd.Footnote 77 Contrary to Mobutu's promises to the US, the OAU delegates warned the Katangese that ‘they would have no refuge in any OAU member country and that the Congo reserved the right to demand their extradition.’Footnote 78 When the OAU ad hoc commission Fadl Obeid asked those willing to go to the DRC to sit at the left and those unwilling to return on the right, roughly 40 per cent of the Katangese rejected the idea of being repatriated. Most of the individuals who agreed to return were women and children. ICRC delegate Philippe Cretegny complained, ‘The dissidents were subjected to the pressure of women crying and begging them to return to the Congo with them.’Footnote 79
Telli and Bomboko appealed to those still not accepting the OAU repatriation offer entirely in Lingala, which meant the ICRC staff had no idea what was being said.Footnote 80 Rwandan troops then forced those unwilling to accept repatriation into a long line, forced them to crouch down, and then informed the Katangese they now were under arrest. Trucks from the Rwandan military then arrived to pick up the remaining Katangese who refused repatriation.Footnote 81 Only 47 men ended up on the trucks. When ICRC delegates asked to visit them to ensure their safety, the Rwandan government did not permit any delegates to see the prisoners.Footnote 82 Rwandan troops briefly took these dissenters to another location unknown to the DRC delegation. Within a day, they had changed their decision and all volunteered to return to the DRC.Footnote 83 The fact that the OAU delegation had used the presence of the ICRC delegates to lend legitimacy to this pretense of free choice was not lost on the delegates or, apparently, some of the Katangese themselves. One Katangese soldier grabbed the microphone from Telli and spoke in Lingala to the crowd. Based on the hostile looks aimed at the ICRC delegates as the soldier talked, one delegate assumed the (untranslated) comments were hostile to the Red Cross.Footnote 84
The ICRC delegation at Kigali refused to support the OAU decision without openly criticizing what had transpired. Wilhelm declared the treatment of the Katangese ‘no longer follows the spirit of humanitarian norms’ and that the ICRC no longer took any responsibility for them.Footnote 85 However, the ICRC also kept their opposition private. One Red Cross delegate warned: ‘The ICRC should avoid a total and public rupture with the OAU, as it would have very negative consequences for Red Cross actions in Congo and Africa.’Footnote 86 ICRC headquarters agreed to stay quiet and to not cut its relationship with the OAU completely.Footnote 87
The US government acquiesced to Mobutu, even as the Congolese government depended on American funding and military equipment. On 18 November 1967, McBride raised doubts about the safety of the Katangese to the Congolese president. Mobutu claimed this was a personal insult to him, denied the Katangese had faced any coercion, and blamed any doubts on enemies in the State Department, such as former US ambassador to the Congo G. McMutrie Godley. ‘Unless [the State Department] wished to provoke a clear rupture with Mobutu, for reasons unknown to me, I believe we should never repeat [and] never discuss [the] subject of Katangese resettlement with him again.’Footnote 88 Since the ICRC sent all its cables from Africa through US embassies, there is no doubt US officials knew full well Mobutu was lying. Yet the alliance with the Congolese dictator came first. No other available State Department correspondence ever again referenced the Katangese ex-rebels taken back to the DRC.
The false story of the happy Katangese homecoming served the interests of the US, the OAU, and the Congolese government. Diallo Telli claimed on 19 November in a press conference that the Katangese had returned home willingly.Footnote 89 Naturally, this placed the OAU in the best light as a mediator bringing an end to divisions between Africans. Kayibanda told an ICRC delegate that the Red Cross had three choices: to ‘close their eyes’ to what happened to the Katangese, to monitor the Katangese sent back to the DRC, or to transport the mercenaries and the Katangese on its own.Footnote 90 The ICRC, caught walking a delicate balance between abandoning the mercenaries or being complicit in the fate of the Katangese, chose the latter course.
The OAU and the Congolese government demonstrated their control over the Katangese. By removing the Katangese majority of Schramme's forces, the remaining mercenaries no longer had any ability to resist the Rwandan government. Neither the OAU nor the ICRC placed Katangese in the protected category of refugees. The OAU, the Congolese government, and Kayibanda treated the Katangese as Congolese subjects rather than as individuals under the protection of human rights conventions. The Katangese ultimately lost their lives as a result. The white mercenaries, however, ended up surviving. The Rwandan government's own need to protect its sovereignty as well as the stronger commitment of Western governments and the ICRC ensured the white mercenaries did not return to the Congo.
FROM MERCENARIES TO REFUGEES: AFRICAN SOVEREIGNTY AND THE RESOLUTION OF THE MERCENARY CRISIS, NOVEMBER 1967 – APRIL 1968
Mobutu's alliance with the OAU had neutralized the Katangese rebels. The white mercenaries were another matter entirely. Without the Katangese, Jean Schramme's remaining frustrated, unarmed, and bored men hardly constituted a threat. Though powerless as a military force, the mercenaries held great value for the Congolese state as defenders of African sovereignty. The Congolese press presented Rwanda as a traitor to continental security. One headline asked, ‘Will Kayibanda betray Africa?’Footnote 91 Mobutu tested his influence in the OAU by urging other countries to refuse overflight status to any planes assigned to evacuate the mercenaries. Until April 1968, no OAU member agreed to allow permission for the mercenaries to enter their airspace, thus trapping the mercenaries in their camp not far from the Congolese border.
Pitted against Mobutu was Grégoire Kayibanda. Why the Rwandan leader protected the mercenaries he so disliked has several possible explanations. Rwanda's allies Belgium and France demanded Kayibanda stand firm.Footnote 92 The Belgians and French also vainly pushed the Rwandans to approve a clandestine operation to sneak the mercenaries to Europe.Footnote 93 While Western countries had strong influence in Kigali, Kayibanda also wanted to use international organizations to protect his country. The Rwandan leader blocked a planned mercenary evacuation on 6 December 1967 on the grounds he needed the OAU to agree to the departure.Footnote 94 After several weeks, the OAU decided it agreed with Mobutu's demand to have the mercenaries tried by a Congolese court.Footnote 95
Kayibanda argued his allegiance to universal humanitarian norms prevented him from complying with the OAU. On 3 January 1968, Mobutu broke diplomatic ties with Rwanda and commanded Kigali to turn in the mercenaries to the Congolese government.Footnote 96 Kayibanda promptly defied the Congolese edict. According to Kayibanda, the Congolese state should take responsibility for recruiting these ‘assassins’ and that the DRC now was infringing on Rwandan sovereignty.Footnote 97 The Rwandan leader used his defense of the mercenaries as a sign of his country's respectability. ‘We are a small country, [but] we are big because we respect the [Geneva] conventions’, announced Kayibanda.Footnote 98 Privately, Kayibanda cajoled the ICRC to mediate the crisis. ‘I took my risks. Now, you take your risks’, he advised.Footnote 99 Such a position impressed ICRC delegates, even though they attributed the Rwandan leader's rejection of Mobutu's demand for extradition to ‘fear of these dangerous whites.’Footnote 100 However, ICRC officials initially denied Rwandan requests that the ICRC convince Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania to allow overflight authorization for an evacuation. To do so would violate ICRC neutrality.Footnote 101
Meanwhile, Mobutu and Bomboko revealed again their diplomatic acumen. One approach was to argue that the DRC government could earn international credibility by showing its commitment to the rule of law. Such discussions recognized the racial dimensions of Western views about the Congo. Bomboko promised to treat mercenaries ‘in [the] best traditions of European justice’ that would be ‘worthy of a great African state’, since simply bringing the mercenaries back ‘to cut their throats’ would mean the world would consider ‘the [Congolese] to be savages and criminals.’Footnote 102 While this approach did not change the US position that the mercenaries should be allowed to escape Africa, Mobutu tried a new tactic. Mobutu assured visiting US Vice President Hubert Humphrey on 5 January 1968 that he actually did not want the mercenaries.Footnote 103 He offered his own services to calm the OAU if the US told the Belgian government to curb criticism against Mobutu in the Belgian press.Footnote 104 On 15 January 1968, DRC Bomboko assured the US that the mercenary issue was ‘no longer in Congolese hands and as far as [his government] was concerned…[The] problem is now in the hands of the OAU.’Footnote 105 Just as the State Department wanted to make European countries and the ICRC handle the mercenary problem instead of the US, so too had the Congolese government passed the mercenary evacuation onto the OAU.
The OAU's support for extradition slowly crumbled, particularly with the intervention of pro-Western francophone countries. Abdou Sidikou, the Nigerien foreign minister, spearheaded this effort. He participated in the annual 1968 meeting of the Organisation Commune Africaine et Malgache (OCAM), an organization with representatives from almost all former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. Kayibanda, again turning to another international organization to protect Rwanda from Congolese pressure, convinced OCAM to help work for a peaceful resolution.Footnote 106 OCAM assigned Sidikou the delicate task of ending the divide between Rwanda and the DRC. ICRC staff considered France to be behind Sidikou's intervention in the mercenary affair. However, French diplomatic correspondence suggests that Sidikou's moderate political position also led him to support the Rwandan government. Sidikou informed the French ambassador to Burundi:
General Mobutu … ought to understand that the relations between states in Africa should be, as elsewhere, not settled by their respective might. In this case [of the mercenaries], Kayibanda, for whom [Sidikou] has not hidden from me total admiration for his personality and force of spirit, is incontestably in the right.Footnote 107
While the Nigerien's initiatives certainly had the backing of France, Sidikou also considered Mobutu's actions to be a threat to African stability.
On 19 February 1968, Sidikou telephoned ICRC headquarters, determined that the ICRC join him by launching negotiations with individual African countries to settle the mercenary issue ‘for peace in Africa.’Footnote 108 Unlike the ICRC, Sidikou had the ability to actually make Mobutu listen to him. He went to Kinshasa in February 1968 and told Mobutu that extradition would set off very bad consequences: ‘a parody of a trial would insult international opinion’, Bob Denard would launch a new attack, and that Congolese army troops would probably kill the mercenaries even before they were to reach Kinshasa.Footnote 109 Mobutu softened his position by claiming he broke off diplomatic ties because of Kayibanda's allegedly insulting behavior and now he had ‘lost interest’ in extradition.Footnote 110 Sidikou's worked pleased the US State Department, since it kept the US out of direct negotiations.Footnote 111
Sidikou's diplomacy worked hand-in-hand with Kayibanda's frustration that the mercenaries were still in his country. To try force the hand of the Red Cross, Kayibanda briefly threatened to expel the ICRC delegation unless the ICRC broke the OAU logjam that continued to block the final removal of the mercenaries.Footnote 112 The Rwandan government also tried to kickstart the Red Cross back into action by painting African leaders as incapable of valuing humanitarianism (except Kayibanda, of course).
What resounds through Kayibanda's propositions is that … legally impeccable reasonings, nuanced understandings, or honorable sentiments do not hold the same weight as elsewhere. African leaders are not inclined to accept other criteria for their actions other than their personal and immediate interests
reported a Swiss diplomat in Kigali in February 1968.Footnote 113 Heartened by Sidikou's success, the ICRC commenced a new mission by delegate Georg Hoffmann to obtain overflight rights. Kayibanda insisted to Hoffmann that the mercenaries had to leave immediately.Footnote 114 The Rwandan leader struggled to read in French a letter from Julius Nyerere condemning how the hated mercenaries had divided African nations.Footnote 115 Kayibanda warned that ICRC prestige would suffer much more ‘if the mercenaries ended up being liquidated’ than ‘by a negative reaction of African countries against evacuation.’Footnote 116
The combined efforts of OCAM, Belgian, US, and ICRC negotiations finally bore fruit. On 20 March 1968, Julius Nyerere met with Hoffmann. Though the Tanzanian president declared ‘all mercenaries have deserved death’, he informed the ICRC that he would not interfere if planes carrying the mercenaries flew through Tanzanian airspace.Footnote 117 Five days later, Sudanese president Azhari agreed to permit overflight. Azhari told Hoffmann that Bomboko had given up on repatriation.Footnote 118 Although Azhari officially informed Hoffmann that all representatives on the ad hoc commission agreed finally to let the mercenaries leave on 8 April, delays by certain OAU members on granting overflight rights and Belgian problems scheduling airplanes slowed the operation down several weeks.Footnote 119
The Rwandan government asserted its sovereignty to finish the job. Foreign minister Thadée Bagaragaza gave ICRC delegate Jeanne Egger an ultimatum that the mercenaries had to get out of Rwanda on 23 April.Footnote 120 Rwandan soldiers roughly searched the mercenaries as they boarded the plane at the Kigali airport and confiscated personal papers and other belongings.Footnote 121 Yet in the end, Kayibanda's firmness had paid off: the mercenaries had escaped and the Katangese were imprisoned far from Rwanda. The arrival of the white mercenaries garnered wide coverage in the Western press and the grateful thanks of the US, Belgium, and other governments to the Red Cross.
As for the forgotten Katangese, their fate was sealed. ICRC delegate Georg Hoffmann returned to Kinshasa in June 1968 to check on the Katangese.Footnote 122 The Congolese government denied Hoffmann access to the prisoners. Though the auspices of the Vatican, Hoffmann learned from a priest at Irebu that the Katangese were still alive, although the army no longer provided any rations, leaving the internees no choice but to rob neighbors for food. The ICRC delegate speculated, ‘It is possible the Congolese army stopped feeding the Katangese soldiers to create a situation which would permit them to liquidate their old enemies for theft.’Footnote 123 Hoffmann's worries were sound. In April 1969, the Congolese army announced it had executed the top Katangese rebel commanders. The widow of Katangese officer Léonard Monga declared Mobutu had the rest of the Katangese executed.Footnote 124 Jonas Mukamba, the governor of Équateur province in 1968, declared to historian Erik Kennes in 2018 that the Katangese had been massacred as ‘traitors’.Footnote 125
The exact details behind the Congolese government's decisions are murky at best. Why wait a year to dispose of the Katangese, already considered as inherently disloyal? One reason may have simply been to wait until Western governments had clearly forgotten about them. Another factor was the possibility that Schramme might persuade his unreliable Portuguese allies to start a new Congo adventure. US diplomats reported that Congolese officials believed a new mercenary army was forming in Angola.Footnote 126 Though the US embassy considered the rumors to be just typical examples of the paranoia so prevalent in Congolese officialdom, the stories might have been the final spark to liquidate the Katangese. Regardless, the deafening silence of the OAU and Western countries about the prisoners was a final piece of grim evidence that Congolese sovereignty had trumped human rights.
CONCLUSION
The resolution of the Congolese mercenary crisis illustrates how Western governments, the OAU, and African regimes enforced a particular brand of national sovereignty that served as a tool for the consolidation of authoritarian regimes in the late 1960s. Mobutu and Kayibanda profited from Western diplomats and NGO representatives’ view of Africa as a region where human rights and humanitarian conventions would never be followed. While Western governments and their African counterparts had no qualms instrumentalizing the rhetoric of humanitarianism, Red Cross staff knew full well they could not rely on any of the stakeholders to consistently follow humanitarian conventions. Without any deference to international conventions and laws defining the status and rights of refugees, stakeholders could loosely apply the label of humanitarianism to justify their own policies. For example, the ICRC reluctantly collaborated with the US and Belgian governments, even though these Western governments clearly were using humanitarian justifications to promote their own foreign policy goals. Grégoire Kayibanda cynically presented himself as a believer in humanitarian ideals while he sent the Katangese back to the DRC.
The Congolese and Rwandan governments held opposing opinions about the status of the mercenaries, yet their diplomatic efforts shared a great deal. Kayibanda and Mobutu utilized the OAU for their own interests. Each leader claimed to be the protector of their national sovereignty, whether from Portuguese attacks or from Congolese threats to its smaller neighbor. Both governments recognized quite well Western anxieties about the vulnerability of white expatriates. Mobutu and Kayibanda also had learned to manipulate the concerns of their US, Belgian, and Red Cross partners in maintaining Western prestige and avoiding the taint of colonialism. Schramme's forces made a perfect foil for both brutal dictatorships and Western governments. Mercenaries and Katangese lionized in 1964 by the Western press as the tough saviors of civilization against the allegedly Communist-inspired Simba rebels became seen as an anachronistic obstacle to African stability three years later, much as French officials turned on the pied noirs of Algeria as a dangerous and outdated menace to Algerian independence in 1962.Footnote 127
This conflagration of authoritarianism and African sovereignty extended well beyond the late 1960s in dampening the potential threat of interventions founded on the rhetoric of human rights. One need only look at tepid Western acceptance of elections marred by fraud in the DRC in 2006, 2011, and 2018 as extended branches of the genealogy of the integrity of African nations that had emerged in the wake of decolonization. Even so, the particular historical moment of the end of the 1960s deserves attention, especially as it took place before the erosion of African sovereignty with the onset of neoliberal economics and the end of the Cold War. If one considers Mobutu's successes in defeating his enemies from 1965 until 1970, diplomacy highlighting sovereignty was a crucial weapon in his arsenal, particularly in convincing other governments to see him as indispensable for maintaining order. African sovereignty managed to take center stage despite the polarizing framework of Cold War politics, especially by 1967. And, as the Katangese and Biafrans learned, losers of these conflicts could pay the ultimate price for blocking this authoritarian model of the African nation-state.
