In July the Dáil adopted a motion to send troops to the Congo as part of the United Nations forces, and we supported that motion. However, in the course of the debate we suggested that it was of the greatest importance, due to the extremely complicated situation in the Congo, that a liaison officer, political officer, or some person other than military personnel should be sent out there in order to ensure that we would know whether our troops were being used to the best possible advantage and for the most desirable purposes.
The Taoiseach at that time refused to accept that suggestion put forward by Deputy Corish and supported by myself and Deputy McQuillan. We sent troops out, in the extremely confused situation, at the request of the Congolese Government which was led by Mr. Lumumba and we accepted that responsibility. We considered the matter at that time under the threat of a civil war, it could be said, and certainly under the threat of secession by Mr. Tshombe in the province of Katanga. It was an extremely important consideration because it meant that the greatest and the richest part of the Congo was controlled by Belgian financial interests under the premiership of Mr. Tshombe. The position of Katanga is that while it contains only about 12% of the total population of the Congo it produces 60% of the total wealth. Consequently it was most important that our troops should not be permitted to be used in any way to jeopardise this wealth for the whole of the Congolese people.
At that time Mr. Tshombe insisted that he wanted to secede from the Congo, to establish a partitioned State, to divide the Congo as our own country was divided 40 years ago, and to take away this industrial potential from the whole of the Congo. To any of us who have even longrange contact with this problem of Partition in our own country, the partitioning of any country is equally repugnant. We felt that it would be a disastrous thing for the Congo were Mr. Tshombe to proceed with his suggestion for the partitioning of the Congo. It was suggested that the troops being sent there would be engaged merely on police work. The Taoiseach did not define what the police work was. I think he said he was not quite sure, which was reasonable enough in the circumstances.
This was a very unusual and unique situation, but he appears to me to have grossly under-estimated the appalling difficulties which have been faced by our troops since they left here. There is the fact that this is a largely French-speaking area and that very few of our troops spoke French. There was also the many great conflicting interests, and the fact that many of the people are illiterate and uneducated, knowing nothing about the United Nations. The fact that our troops are white people and looked like the Belgians also created many problems.
There was also the inevitability which we mentioned in the debate that the colonial interests, the Belgians particularly, would come together in the Security Council of the United Nations with other great ex-colonial countries such as Britain and to a certain extent, as a dollar-imperialist country, the United States, and attempt to change the political situation in the Congo and restore if possible the position of the Belgian financial interests there. When we speak about the financial interests of the Congo we are mainly concerned with Katanga. That is the situation which we foreshadowed and it seems to me that every one of those rather depressing forecasts are in process of being fulfilled.
The Taoiseach has taken the line that we have certain obligations to the United Nations to send out troops to act as a police force. We believed that the function of this force was to restore the total property of the Congo to the Congolese people, to take it from the Belgians and give it back to its rightful owners. The Taoiseach's attitude is that, our function being purely police action directed and dictated by the United Nations, we must abrogate our rights, divest ourselves of our sovereignty over these troops, hand them over to the United Nations Commander in the Congo and leave them to their best devices and to any consequences that might befall them.
We greatly deprecate this attitude on the part of the Taoiseach. There are essentially serious and complicated political difficulties involved in the solution of this problem, and the soldiers out there, however talented and courageous they may be, are completely incapable of keeping in touch with the intricacies of Congolese politics. Therefore it is vital that the Taoiseach should send out a representative to help them in deciding for whom we are fighting and whose property we are defending, and in what way we are protecting the interests of the Congolese people.
The Taoiseach says he will not take any part in the day-to-day or week-to-week political decisions in the Congo on behalf of our troops. He has stated, however, that we have a right to protest against decisions we do not like and to withdraw our troops if they are put to any tasks of which we disapprove. I think he made that concession in the course of the debate. He was asked by somebody: "May we withdraw our troops if we wish?" and he said: "Of course we may, at any time." I hope I am not misquoting him but I assume that is what he said.
There are, in any event, precedents for protests being made. On the question of the threat to shoot Mr. Lumumba, the Premier, the new Arab Republic protested as did also the Ceylon Government and Mr. Nkrumah of Ghana. We have the right to protest and the Taoiseach has no right to divest himself of that authority when it comes to guarding our very difficult position in the Congo. The Taoiseach has the right to protest at decisions of which he does not approve and I suggest there has been a decision taken in the Congo against which we should have protested.
I asked the Taoiseach by Parliamentary Question whether he had heard of the threat to shoot the Premier of the Congo, Mr. Lumumba. I do not know anything about matters in the Congo beyond what I read in the newspapers. I am not expertly advised but I do know the Premier of the Congo invited the United Nations to go into the Congo. As a result of a directive given by Mr. Hammarskjoeld of the United Nations, this man who had invited the United Nations forces into the Congo was threatened with shooting if he did not leave the national radio station.
I do not know anything about the merits of Mr. Lumumba. All I know is that he was elected by the black people of the Congo to represent them. As far as I can see, he is another Nyeri, Nboyo, Nkrumah, Nehru or Dr. Banda. As far as we can gather, that is how he will turn out, if he survives. Consequently, it was very wrong to allow this man to be threatened with shooting. It would have been quite appalling if that order had been given to an Irish soldier and if Mr. Lumumba had lost his head— he did not do so—and had been shot by one of our soldiers. It seems to me to have been a most unwise decision to take on the part of whoever took it. On that occasion, we should have protested against that decision and made it quite clear that our soldiers would not be prepared, and could not be and should not be asked, to shoot the elected Premier—elected and ratified in his election at a subsequent meeting of their Parliament and ratified as Premier. That is one point.
Secondly, and I suppose I should have put this point as the more important one, when Mr. Tshombe said he was going to secede and when there was an elected Government and when Mr. Lumumba was Premier, it was up to the United Nations to send armed forces into the Katanga Province and tell Mr. Tshombe that he could not secede, that there was an elected Government and an elected Premier and that he had no right to secede from the Congo. He should have been told that we would not stand over this decision of an individual to partition the country. This was an occasion on which we of all peoples in the world should have urged that the United Nations should have sent troops to Katanga in order to see that this man was not allowed to carry out his threat to secede and put himself in the position in which he now is, where he has a force organised which can move in or attack or defy any central Government which may be elected in the Congo. That was another great failure on the part of the United Nations forces against which we should have protested. We should not have been party to this further political decision taken by the United Nations.
The United Nations has stood by and watched the Belgian Government supplying unlimited qantities of military stores to the Katanga forces, to the Tshombe Government. It was an outrageous thing to allow in the first place in a society in which there is incipient civil war. It was outrageous in that respect, but equally it seems to me particularly vindictive in light of the fact that we refused the elected Premier who was vested with the responsibility of keeping law and order —and the Taoiseach knows all about that——
