UNITED NATIONS, DECOLONIZATION, AND SELF-DETERMINATION IN COLD WAR SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA, 1960-1994, THE

The UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo soon grew into a large multinational force of 20,000, but disagreement arose between Lumumba and Hammarskjold.11 Whereas the secretary General, seeking to remain within the mission's mandate, sought to focus on the maintenance of peace and avoid having the UN play an overtly partisan role, the Congolese Prime Minister, his leadership increasingly under duress, saw Hammarskjold as too responsive to western economic and Cold War objectives in the Congo and not sufficiently interested in the removal of the Belgians or stopping the secession of Katanga.12 Lumumba's position became increasingly difficult after he split with his erstwhile counterpart, President Joseph Kasavubu, and was placed under house arrest, under UN protection, by Army Chief of Staff Joseph Mobutu. In New York, Hammarskjold faced his own crisis, perhaps the greatest of his tenure. In the midst of the Congo crisis the USSR became increasingly contentious on the Security Council, resulting in the General Assembly holding an emergency session on the Congo and the Soviet Union subsequently withholding a portion of its UN dues and calling for the removal of the Secretary General and his replacement with a committee of three, or troika.13

Hammarskj old's problems mounted when Lumumba was subsequently assassinated and Hammarskjold, facing mounting criticism after Lumumba's murder, the further disintegration of state institutions, and the emergence of multiple factions laying claim to civil authority, responded by announcing that United Nations peacekeepers would seek to remove the Belgians by force. But the Secretary General, increasingly absorbed in the crisis in the Congo, lost his life in September 1961 when his plane crashed en route to a meeting with the Katangan secessionists.14

The United Nations peacekeepers departed the Congo in 1964, leaving behind a fractured nation increasingly dominated by the brutal kleptocratic regime of General Mobutu, who maintained the Belgian model of exploitation and repression and provided the West for the next three decades with the Congo's resources and an important Cold War ally in strategic central Africa. The Congo debacle demonstrated the ease with which UN operations could be hijacked by the politics of the Cold War and called into question the very efficacy of peacekeeping. It also demonstrated the complexity of the process of decolonization when multiple outside powers had interests in its outcome. For these reasons, and others, the Congo intervention would be the last large UN peacekeeping operation during the remaining decades of the Cold War.15

Four decades later the United Nations returned to the Congo. The end of the Cold War removed the West's remaining rationales for supporting Mobutu, who was subsequently overthrown in 1997 by a coalition of neighboring states utilizing forces led by the former Lumumba ally, Laurent Kabila, who proceeded to follow Mobutu's - and, reaching farther back, Leopold's - model of extraction and exploitation. But several of the neighboring states who had aided in "liberating" the Congolese from the grip of Mobutu had their own designs on the resource-rich region and, after falling out with Kabila, launched a coordinated attack on the Congo.