of Martyrs Stadium where Tshisekedi insisted on staging his
swearing-in farce is the very site where one Prime Minister and three
ministers where hanged on trumped-up conspiracy charges called
"Pentecost Conspiracy" in 1966--a conspiracy hatched in the criminal
minds of Mobutu and his then right-hand man, Interior Minister Etienne
Tshisekedi, in order to do away with the remnants of President Joseph
Kasa-Vubu's regime they had toppled in 1965.
(Tshisekedi's long-running role as Mobutu's top henchman goes back to
the early days of DRC independence--including the arrest and
assassination by proxy of Prime Minister Patrice Emery Lumumba in
1961. The US, which actively conspired in planning the assassination
of Congo's first democratically-elected Premier Lumumba, lacks today
the moral credit to lecture the DRC on democracy. No wonder Secretary
Hillary Clinton was pressing Congolese students to forget the past and
to move on... Only in the Congo would one see such travesty: the very
power that assisted in the demise of a country's founding father
lecturing the surviving citizens of that country without first
apologizing for its horrendous crime!)
Well, the exact place where the quickly-erected scaffold stood would
be somewhere right in the middle of the pitch of the stadium the
Chinese built several years after the state murders co-sponsored by
Tshisekedi. It is rumored that neither Tshisekedi nor Mobutu attended
the opening ceremony of the new stadium for fear of being confronted
by the ghosts of Prime Minister Evariste Kimba and his erstwhile three
ministers (incidentally, Premier Kimba was from the Katanga Province:
just to show that Katanga would never vote for Tshisekedi). On that
grim day, just after the hanging, a freak whirl of dust sent a wave of
panic through the throng of Kinois who attended the grisly event. This
triggered a stampeded that claimed a half-dozen victims trampled to
death. In the minds of the Kinois cheering the hanging, the whirl was
caused by the escaping souls of Kimba and his companions who were
hellbent on taking a few souls with them to the beyond as retribution
for being at the hanging. (Don't laugh at this seemingly benign
superstition. Four years ago, West-African and Angolan residents of
Kinshasa had to seek police protection as they were under the threat
of being lynched by mobs of Kinois men on suspicion of making their
penises vanish!)
But what is more outrageous is what Interior Minister Tshisekedi then
told the international media to rationalize after the fact the grisly
public murders of Kimba and his companions. The person of the chief is
sacred in Africa, said Tshisekedi, and the mere fact that the four
"Pentecost Conspirators" met to discuss about ending Mobutu's rule
qualified as a capital crime. (By the way, the four innocent men never
met, let alone discuss the end of Mobutu's fledgeling dictatorahip.)
This was an overwhelming reason of state to have the four top senior
government officials and political leaders to be court-martialed and
hanged, Tshisekedi forcefully argued. He angrily brushed off the
suggestion by the international media interviewing him after the
murders that it would have likewise been an overwhelming reason of
state to have the four "Pentecost Conspirators" pardoned. How the man
could sleep at night is beyond me...
And yet, this is the kind of a political blood-drenched
repeat-offender that a section of historically-challenged or
tribally-motivated Congolese wants to see at the helm of DRC. And some
Western countries--including the US--want to drive through the tiny
wedge presented by some "irregularities" having no bearing whatsoever
on the actual outcome of the elections their own national agenda: the
competion with China over Congo's resources for one. For had they been
serious about democracy, they should been lecturing Rwanda day in day
out. Or Saudi Arabia for that matter. But American oil addiction would
undoubtedly prevent Secretary Clinton to deliver such a fool-hardy
lecture to the "petrodictators" (Thomas L. Friedman) of the Middle
East.
Is something nefarious afoot? Is an assassination of Joseph Kabila
being contemplated? This wouldn't be the product of the frenzied
imagination of a paranoid! It's not like they haven't done it before,
have they? Everyone knows that the "worth of life" of African leaders
has always been, well, worthless in Western political inner circles...
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