THE ASSASSINATION OF PATRICE LUMUMBA WAS ORDERED BY U.S PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER.
On 17th January 1961, African martyr Patrice Emery Lumumba was secretely murdered in a remote forest location of the Katanga province, South Eastern Congo.
Just 7 months after his appointment as the first popularly elected prime minister of Congo upon his country’s independence from Belgium on 30th June 1960, he was forced out of office, mercilessly killed, and his remains buried in a mass grave with two other political followers who had been executed alongside him.
The execution is reported to have happened in the presence of the Belgian Counsel General in Congo.
His was there reportedly to personally ascertain the killing of Patrice Lumumba and report the accomplished task back to Belgium.
Today Congolese and foreign tourists flock the remote site to see for themselves the place where Patrice Lumumba was murdered.
A tree and a grave stone mark where he was shot and then buried. The tree is still marked with holes made by the bullets after going through his body.
It has long been known that Belgium actively participated in Lumumba’s death, and the European country’s role has been highlighted recently by a film, several documenntaries, and several books.
‘The Assassination of Lumumba’, by the Flemish expert on Africa Lugo De Witte, shows that the Congolese Prime Minister was assaulted in the presence of Belgian officers and tortured in a villa guarded by Belgian troops.
Claude Grandelet, one of the Belgian soldiers guarding the house, narrated recently those events saying: “We had been ordered to shoot at UN peacekeepers if they came to check on Lumumba”.
“And if we couldn’t prevent the UN troops from entering the premises, we were ordered to immediately kill Lumumba” he added.
It is also worth noting that when he was ultimately killed, the Congolese Prime Minister was shot by an execution squad supervised by a Belgian captain.
His body would be exhumed a few days later from the shallow grave where he and his two colleagues bodies had been summarily dumped.
The exhumation was conducted by Belgian police commissioner Gerard Soet. He hAS narrated in a 2000 documentary how he then chopped Patrice Lumumba’s body to pieces, burned them, and then dipped the remains in a tar-coated barrel of sulphuric acid before burning whatever was left.
More worryingly, Mr. Soete also admitted on Belgian television that he had even kept two of the victim’s teeth which he presented to the camera’s.
As he unfolded a handkerchief to present the two remains, he remarked that “Lumumba had very nice teeth.. One had been crowned with gold in the back”.
This revelation prompted loud calls for their return to Congo.
Today at the site of the execution, one Congolese eye witness Mr. Lwimba Mutifu Njiba narrates to visitors how he and his father were returning from hunting at about 8 O’clock on that fateful evening when they saw the lights of a vehicle driving into the bushes.
As they watched from a distance, he saw one person being taken by soldiers from the truck to a nearby tree and shot. Then a second person. Then a third and last individual.
At the time he did not know who the three people being executed were.
He and his father stayed out of sight during the entire ordeal and only returned to the location the next morning to find a shallow mass grave with the bare feet of all three victims sticking out from the earth.
He also says that some Belgians would return a few days later to unearth the remains, and dump them in a barrel of acid.
They reportedly did so in order to erase any physical trace of Patrice Lumumba.
However since his death, Patrice Lumumba has become an African martyr and a symbol of the continents independence struggle.
He remains revered across Africa and the Third World.
In February 2002, after reviewing the facts and following Mr. Gerard Soete’s public confession, the Belgian government finally admitted their role in the coordinated assassination plot.
They then apologized for their murderous actions.
Last year (2017), while possibly fearing for his own life following public confrontations with his own intelligence agencies, President Donald Trump signed an executive order releasing more classified documents regarding the 1963 assassination of US President John F. Kennedy.
Surprisingly, researchers found their-in some secret documents relating to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
The two deaths happened three years apart and had one thing in common: They were both widely attributed to United States intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).
The newly declassified House Intelligence Committee document that was found in the Kennedy files says: “According to Richard Bissell who was the CIA Deputy Director of Planning at the time, he was aware of the plot to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and “a case officer was directed to look into the possibilities.”
One could question if it is legal in U.S or international law for any government or any individual to look into assassinating anyone.
Remember that the target of the assassination plot is an unarmed, innocent, legitimate civilian leader who is not a declared enemy of either the United States, Belgium or England.
He is also the Prime Minister of a sovereign country that is not at war with, nor attacking any of the above-mentioned countries.
In the Guardian newspaper, American journalist Martin Kettle wrote that US President Dwight Eisenhower directly ordered the CIA to “eliminate” Patrice Lumumba.
“The evidence [of Eisenhower’s order] comes in a previously unpublished 1975 interview with the person who wrote the minutes at a White House meeting in August 1960 where Eisenhower and his national security advisers discussed the Congo crisis.
Robert Johnson who wrote the minutes of the meeting, said in the interview that he vividly recalled the president turning to Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, “in the full hearing of all those in attendance, and saying something to the effect that Patrice Lumumba should be eliminated”.
Mr Johnson recalled that “There was stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued.””
Mr. Johnson revealed the White House exchanges in 1975, when he was interviewed by the Senate intelligence committee inquiry into US covert action.
The committee confirmed that the CIA had conspired to kill Patrice Lumumba on Eisenhower’s direct orders.
It also appears that British intelligence was part of the assassination plot together with the Belgians and the CIA.
Baroness Daphne Park who was known as the “Queen of Spies” after four decades as one of Britain’s top female intelligence agents, is believed to have been sent by British intelligence service MI6 to the Belgian Congo in 1959 under an official diplomatic guise as the country was about to become independent and the Belgians were on the point of being ousted from Congo.
While discussing with Labour peer Lord Lea about the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalling the concerns that MI6 might have had something to do with it, Baroness Park reportedly admitted saying; ‘We did, I organised it. Lumumba would have handed over the whole lot to the Russians: the high-value Katangese uranium deposits as well as the diamonds and other important minerals largely located in the secessionist eastern state of Katanga.”
American Larry Devlin was the CIA field agent in Congo entrusted by the US government to organize the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
A classified cable shows that he received $100,000 dollars and orders to embark on the covert action.
In his only known public interview on the matter, agent Devlin said: “I remember being totally surprised at being instructed to get rid of Lumumba.”
