How to Win Wars & Elections

When Stanleyville fell last November, the white mercenaries who had fought the Congolese rebels began to fall apart themselves. They were getting little money, weapons or encouragement from Premier Moise Tshombe's government in Leopoldville. One by one, the mercenaries drifted away, leaving their doughty leader, Major Michael Hoare, to find a new group of white foreigners to fight the Communist-backed Simbas who threatened to take over the whole northeast corner of the nation.

Hoare sent out an appeal for more mercenaries, and by last week he had recruited and trained 270 new whites from South Africa, Rhodesia and Britain, who got six weeks of drill at the Congo's Kamina airbase, then moved north with Hoare to perform their first big mission--isolation of the rebels from their sanctuaries in Sudan and Uganda.

By sealing the borders, Hoare planned to end the flood of Communist-bloc arms pouring into the Congo. Going the other way were picked bands of Simbas wearing their monkey-skin headdresses. Three weeks later they would return, clad in a motley array of khaki uniforms and armed with the weapons they had been taught to use in a crash program officered by Algerian "volunteers."

Minus Magic. From Bunia, Hoare led an armada of three outboard as sault boats up Lake Albert and took the port of Mahagi with hardly a shot fired. A land force moved more cautiously, with four Ferret armored scout cars spraying likely ambush spots along the road with machine-gun fire. Congolese planes, flown by anti-Castro Cuban pilots, had showered leaflets on rebel territory. Printed in Lingala, Swahili and

Batetela, the leaflets bore a message from Mama Onema, a witch doctor formerly with the Simbas but now working for Tshombe. Mama Onema warned that the Simbas' dawa (magic) was no longer effective and urged the rebels to lay down their arms, for "otherwise, you will be cursed."

Apparently, only some of the Simbas can read. Hoare's new recruits soon learned they were in a far different war from the one fought around Stanleyville, where the Simbas were mostly armed with sharpened sticks, pangas and bows and arrows. In the first skirmish, a white mercenary was killed as crossfire raked the lead patrol. Hours later, another died when he stepped on a land mine.

Mike Hoare thought the Simbas might make their stand at Aru, which had been a main gateway for arms from Uganda. Instead, suicide squads stayed behind in Aru to snipe at the advancing mercenaries, and the bulk of the rebels pulled back in orderly fashion, carrying their arms with them. Hoare had sent a force to work around behind the town and cut off the retreating rebels, but it lost its way in the darkness.

Discarded Band. About 25 miles north of Aru, Hoare's men were held up by a strong rebel force, well armed with automatic weapons. Fourteen Simbas were slain, and the mercenaries stared in amazement at their gaudy green uniforms with red epaulettes and a red stripe down the pants. One white mercenary thought the Simbas had been outfitted with the discarded uniforms of a brass band.

At week's end the rebels were still falling back on Faradje and Aba. But they were not everywhere in retreat. At dawn in midweek, Simbas made a determined attack on Paulis that was beaten off only when 28 planes hit the rebel positions with rockets. Farther south, the district around Fizi was held by Simbas, and a resident wrote bitterly to a Leopoldville newspaper that "government forces would have been here long ago" if only "there had been white hostages in Fizi."

Happy Chance. While Mike Hoare was tracking down Simbas, Premier Tshombe was working hard at getting himself elected for a five-year term in office. The polling was cannily arranged on a staggered system, province by province. Tshombe saw to it that the first provinces to vote were the three that had formerly constituted his fief, Katanga.

In Cuvette Centrale province, the government discovered enough "corruption" to declare a state of emergency. The provincial governor and two of his ministers were placed under house arrest, and three special commissioners with dictatorial powers arrived from Leopoldville to take over. By a happy chance, all three are strong supporters of Tshombe as well as actual election candidates in the province. Tshombe's chances in Cuvette Centrale suddenly looked much brighter.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.