Conor Cruise O'Brien

The Congo crisis of 1961-62 was no simple affair, even if its complexities tend to merge in one's memory into a vast bloodbath. Probably no one is more aware of those complexities than Conor Cruise O'Brien, who was at times their author, but in the end their victim.

On September 13, 1961, O'Brien--then the U.N.'s chief of operations in Katanga--authorized U.N. troops to move against the forces of Moise Tshombe's secessionist government. At first it was reported that Tshombe was subdued and would have to accept whatever cease-fire terms might be offered him. But it quickly became clear that Elisabethville was not yet under U.N. control, and what had seemed an easily won victory evolved into a costly defeat.

Britain and France, never particularly enthusiastic about the U.N.'s Congo policy in the first place, clamored for a cease-fire on any terms. They also questioned on what authority the attack on Elisabethville had been ordered. In response, O'Brien indicated that Secretary-General Hammarskjold had authorized the attack after Tshombe had ignored a U.N. ultimatum demanding that he oust all foreign mercenaries from Katanga. But it was impossible to verify what Hammarskjold actually had or hadn't authorized since a plane carrying him to a conference with Tshombe had crashed in the meantime, and the Secretary-General was dead.

At any rate, O'Brien's influence seemed to wane and his position became less and less secure during the next few months, and he finally resigned in December, from the Irish foreign service as well as the U.N.

Subsequently, he became vice chancellor of the University of Ghana, but ultimately resigned that post too, over policy differences with the Ghanaian government. Now he holds the Albert Schweitzer chair in Humanities at N.Y.U., and lives in Washington Square Village, a multicolored concoction which towers over New York's Third Street. Now, also, he can speak freely about the U.N.'s adventure in the Congo, about the aims and means of the Ghanaian government, and about anything that should happen to come up.

Last week O'Brien journeyed to Cambridge to exercise all three of these options. He arrived by train and was rushed off to a Faculty Club luncheon, thence to a taped interview for WHRB, and finally to Kirkland House where he spoke on "The United States and Africa."

He prefaced his remarks with an anecdote about what it takes to be an authority on such a subject, relating that--at one point--the U.N. feared it was being too lax about the qualifications of its African experts. As a result, a directive was issued which established that "you can't be an expert on an African country any longer if you've only flown over it by night."

As for his own qualifications, O'Brien merely acknowledged that he "knew something of the Congo at an instructive period in its history." Then he proceeded to analyze American policy toward the Congo, which he divided into three phases. The first, he said, was one of support for the interests of Belgium and France, and remained basically unaltered until Patrice Lumumba's death.

O'Brien then dealt in passing with the crisis provoked by Moscow's unwillingness to pay for U.N. operations in the Congo. He recalled that "the bill sent to the Soviet Union included the little item: 'eight million francs for eviction of Soviet embassy.' Frankly, I can understand why they wouldn't pay it."

"After Lumumba's death," he continued, "Kennedy turned to support U.N. efforts against Tshombe." But if O'Brien saw Kennedy's Congo policy as at least belatedly sound, he bestowed no such praise on the Johnson administration's policy, which he described as one of "keeping the Communists out and finding out why afterwards."

One of the instruments of this policy, O'Brien said, is the CIA. He explained that there have recently been four successful coups in African nations, and that in three of the four cases the first act of the new government was to expel the Chinese embassy. "In the remaining case--that of Upper Volta--there was no Chinese embassy to expel," he added. While unable to implicate the CIA with any certainty, O'Brien did say that "when a government expels the Chinese embassy it doesn't do so in an inscrutable and spontaneous demonstration of Sinophobia."

He also had much to say about Ghana. George Lichtheim recently criticized O'Brien in the letters column of the New York Review of Books for not taking enough of a stand against Nkrumah. But if there was ever any foundation to this criticism, it became awfully weak after O'Brien's remarks last week.

"They had elections in Ghana just before I left which were hailed as the greatest development in democracy since the beginning of time. And so they were," he noted, "because every member of parliament ran completely unopposed."

Asked what kind of government might emerge when Nkrumah passed from the scene, O'Brien replied "it depends on the manner of his passing." The tone in which he spoke didn't imply any inclination to see Nkrumah live a long and prosperous life. "Quite a lot of people in Ghana," he remarked, "feel that more piped water and fewer palaces would be quite in order."

O'Brien plainly enjoys speechmaking and knows he is good at it. Not only can he drop a line expertly, but he knows just how long to continue before giving way to the laughs or--on occasion--the applause of the audience.

When he wrote To Katanga and Back, the story of his six months in the Congo, various U.N. officials argued that he had no right to tell his story, which they felt was biased anyway. He was pictured as a guilty victim bent on self-justification. But O'Brien seems awfully clearheaded, and even lighthearted, as his U.N.-inspired image would imply. True, he quit two jobs after disagreements with his superiors, but there is much to indicate that he may have been justified in both cases.

At the end of the question period that followed his speech, O'Brien was escorted by a small security guard of Harvard leftists to a party held in his honor. He knew only a few of the forty or so in attendance, but seemed to have friends in common with most everyone. It would have been no easy trick picking the former Irish diplomat out from among the Cambridge crowd. He held his glass as deftly as anyone. He did speak with a slight accent, but it could almost as well have been English as Irish.

At one point during the party, O'Brien launched into a general discussion of American foreign policy, which he is none to fond of. He said that when a civil war breaks out, the U.S. steps in, finds the nearest general, and says he's a neutralist general.

Someone in the room--they were all leftists--insisted that American foreign policy wasn't nearly so offensive as O'Brien described it. And O'Brien, who can be dead serious when the occasion warrants, said simply that "Not being American, I can be more objective."