Elation for Moise

No one needed a victory more than Moise Tshombe, and last week he could revel in a big one. His army had retaken Albertville, the first major city captured by the rebels, who for more than two months had used its Lake Tanganyika port to ferry in arms and supplies from their headquarters in Burundi.

To soften up the city, B-26 fighter-bombers, piloted by anti-Castro Cubans supplied by Washington, relentlessly blasted strategic targets. Then a force of 1,000 Congolese army troops launched a two-prong invasion which caught the rebels by surprise. Coming from the north, one column overran the port area and airfield. The other column skirted the city, attacked from the south. When the rebels tried to counterattack, a government armored car's machine gun was waiting for them. The battle raged on for eight hours before the rebels finally fled, but it was one-sided all the way: more than 450 rebel dead littered the streets. The Congolese army claimed that only two of its troops had been killed.

Hats in the Streets. When the good news reached Leopoldville, Tshombe was so elated that he personally delivered a victory message to the government radio station, then flew off to Albertville to congratulate the victors. He found the city a shambles. Its dusty streets were strewn with the abandoned hulks of autos, dozens of the rebel warriors' leopardskin hats, and here and there a mutilated body. All shops had been looted, many buildings gutted, rail and shipping centers all but wiped out. In addition, the rebels had driven away or killed the city's whole police force.

As Tshombe inspected the ravaged city, he grew so emotional that at one point he stopped to embrace a Belgian priest who had survived the ordeal. He also gathered some much-needed evidence to present to the Organization of African Unity at its emergency Congo conference in Addis Ababa. To reply to the inevitable demand that he get rid of his white mercenary troops, Tshombe needed solid proof that the rebels were indeed bad medicine for the Congo. At Albertville, he picked up at least three valuable exhibits: a series of photographs showing the rebels executing leading citizens, a 22-year-old Burundi prisoner who, Tshombe claims, was a "captain of the rebel general staff," and a symbol of revolutionary arrogance--a rubber stamp marked "Republique Revolutionnaire du Congo, Secteur Albertville." Evidence in hand, he took a much more important step toward winning African sympathies: as he left for Addis Ababa, Tshombe ordered the hated white mercenaries shipped home.

Hostages in the City. But success was hardly the whole story in the Congo last week. The important river town of Stanleyville was still firmly in revolutionary hands--and with it some 300 white residents who had been trying desperately to get out since the rebel invasion five weeks ago. Concerned for their safety, U.N. Secretary-General U Thant last week cabled his personal "urgent appeal" to Lieut. General Nicholas Olenga, Stanleyville's rebel commander, to allow the U.N. to send planes to evacuate them.

At first Olenga agreed, announced his airport would reopen to commercial traffic. At last, he fired off a violent message charging the mercy flights were "an imperialist plot," ordered "all soldiers of the Popular Liberation Army to shoot on any plane--military or civilian --that approaches Stanleyville." Most ominous of all, he said that whites would have to remain in the city--as hostages against air bombardment.

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