Sixty years ago a patrol of 11 Irish UN peacekeepers was attacked by Baluba tribesmen near the small town of Niemba in Katanga, a province in south-east Congo. Nine soldiers died. Half a million people later lined the streets of Dublin during the soldiers’ funerals. The word ‘Baluba’ or ‘Balubas’ entered the Irish lexicon; according to the journalist Cathal O’Shannon, the name became “a very byword for savagery and evil.”

On the early afternoon of 8 November, Lieutenant Kevin Gleeson went with 10 men in a land rover and a pick-up truck to a destroyed bridge on the Niemba-Manono road. They were armed with two Bren guns, four Gustav M-45 submachine guns and four Mark 4 Lee Enfield rifles. They did not carry a radio, which were in short supply. Gleeson’s mission was to see if they could reopen the road.

On approaching the bridge, Gleeson saw a party of Baluba armed with clubs, spears, bows and arrows and bicycle chains, on the other bank of the river. A Baluba warrior fired an arrow at Gleeson. He in turn gave the order to fire. It was too late – the war party crossed the stream and rushed the Irish soldiers within seconds. According to a survivor, Private Tom Kenny, four of the Irish soldiers were unarmed; Sergeant Hugh Gaynor and the two Bren gunners had left their weapons in the vehicles. The medical orderly also did not have a weapon.

Some of the soldiers succeeded in making it to the surrounding thick scrub and forest. Pte. Kenny remembered the Baluba successively locating and stabbing or beating to death individual Irish soldiers. Soon it was his turn. Struck in the neck by an arrow and clubbed repeatedly on the head, Kenny waited to die. His life was saved by Trooper Anthony Browne, who opened fire on the Baluba tribesmen, drawing them away from Kenny. Browne was later posthumously awarded the Bonn Míleata Calmachta, the highest Irish military award for bravery.

Private Joseph Fitzpatrick was found alive the next morning after a patrol was sent out to try to locate the missing patrol. Kenny was found on 10 November. The following day Colonel Harry Byrne cancelled the joint Irish-Ethiopian patrol that planned to search for “the body” of Trooper Browne, who had still not been located. The garrison at Niemba was also withdrawn. During the forty-eight hours since the attack, two Irish soldiers were accidentally shot – one fatally – by nervous Irish sentries.

Anthony Browne may not have been dead. Irish officers who returned to the area to search for Browne’s remains in 1962 were told that,  “… some days after the ambush, wounded, exhausted and starving he had called some women at the outskirts of a village and asked them for food and directions to the railway line, offering them 200 Francs.”  Local Baluba warriors were informed and a party of them later found and killed Browne.

Why were Lt. Gleeson and his men attacked? According to the commanding officer of 33^rd Battalion, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Bunworth, the motivations for the ambush on his soldiers were “a mystery”. The Minister for Defence, Kevin Boland, claimed that there was, “… no reason to believe that an attack like this might happen.” Media coverage focused on the savage nature of the tribesmen, their belief in witchcraft, and use of narcotics. Ireland’s soldiers of peace had been inexplicably cut down.

Far from being a mystery, the reasons for the attack at Niemba are self-evident. In August 1960 the United Nations had made a number of concessions in Katanga that benefitted the Baluba’s main political rivals in the province. The Baluba had originally been part of the Conakat Movement (Confédération des Associations Tribales du Katanga), a loose association of tribes in the province. The Baluba later left the Conakat and moved closer to the national liberation movement headed by Patrice Lumumba, a socialist with ties to the Soviet Union. The Conakat party, led by Moïse Tshombe and dominated by tribes in the south of the province, aligned itself with Belgian interests, both before and after Congolese independence on 30 June 1960. Katanga produced 60 per cent of the world’s cobalt and was the principal source of uranium used for the United States’ nuclear programme.

A speech by King Baudouin on the eve of independence, in which the Belgian monarch praised the civilising “genius” of his predecessor Leopold II – responsible for approximately 10 million deaths during the colonisation of the Congo – led to political unrest including the mutiny of Congolese soldiers in the white-officered army. Katanga, under the leadership of the Conakat movement, unilaterally seceded, with varying degrees of Belgian, British, French and American support. A Belgian intelligence officer, Colonel Frédéric Vandewalle, later boasted that when the heads of the Belgian Technical Mission met, “all the grey matter ruling Katanga was gathered together.”

The Katangan gendarmerie were mosty led by Belgian or other European mercenary officers. They unleashed a systematic campaign of murder and arson against the Baluba population, killing thousands. By mid-August 1960 eight African countries had sent contingents to serve as part of the hastily mandated UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo. These, such as Ghana and Tunisia, were generally sympathetic to the anti-colonial sentiments of the Congo’s new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, and wanted to immediately end Katanga’s secession – if necessary, by force. The Belgians and their allies were determined to keep them out of the province.

Sir John Nicholls, British ambassador to Belgium, was at the forefront of Anglo-Belgian cooperation to protect both countries’ interests in Katanga during the summer of 1960. Nicholls advised his government to insist on only using “white troops” in Katanga. British diplomats believed that UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold, would resist Lumumba’s demands to end Katanga’s secession by force. Hammarskjold told a British diplomat at the UN that Lumumba was a “a communist stooge”. Britain saw Hammarskjold’s decision to send troops from his native Sweden to Katanga as a personal guarantee of non-interference in the province, at least while Lumumba was in office. But Hammarskjold needed another European country to send troops to Katanga. Ireland – a country without colonial baggage but with strong ties to Belgium – was a good fit.

At the end of 1961 the then Irish UN representative in Katanga, Conor Cruise O’Brien, would move to end the secession of Katanga by force. But in the summer of 1960 Irish diplomats took a hostile view of the Congolese government – an attitude which changed after Patrice Lumumba was removed from office in a Western-backed coup (he was later transferred to Katanga where he was murdered in January 1961). On 22 August 1960 Eamon Kennedy, a diplomat at the Irish mission to the UN in New York, prepared a memorandum for Con Cremin, Ireland’s most senior diplomat. In it, Kennedy observed that, “The n____r in the wood-pile is the government itself, which means Lumumba.  No one here seriously doubts this.” King Baudouin later passed on his appreciation to the Irish government on the deployment and performance of Irish troops in the province.

The Belgians had good reason to be pleased with the Irish presence in Katanga in 1960. Colonel Harry Byrne’s directive on 22 August to his Irish and Swedish troops recognized the primacy of the Katangan gendarmerie in policing the province, and also noted that the Katangan authorities could request operational assistance from the UN. Byrne went on to state that, apart from UN officials and peacekeepers, “United Nations troops may not in any way interfere with police control of all other persons and property.” The UN agreed to coordinate patrols with the Belgian officered gendarmerie in order to avoid “unnecessary duplication”. UN observer units were briefly attached to mobile units of the gendarmerie but these did little to inhbit abuse and murder on the part of the Belgian or mercenary commanded forces while giving the impression of UN complicity or, at best, helplessness.

In August, Patrice Lumumba wrote to Hammarskjold demanding the withdrawal of Irish and Swedish troops from Katanga and their replacement with African contingents, “It is incomprehensible to me that you should have sent only Swedish and Irish troops to Katanga, systematically excluding troops from the African States…” African UN troops were later sent to Katanga. But most of these arrived only after Lumumba was ousted as prime minister on 5 September.

Irish officers had to stand by and watch as the Katangan gendarmerie continued their campaign of atrocity. UN medical officers treated civilians, including children, for extreme burns as a result of the actions of the gendarmerie and air strikes. The UN later tried to set up neutral zones, including agreeing to protect Western-owned mines in the place of the gendarmerie in north Katanga. The Katangan government nominally agreed but, in reality, the gendarmerie paid little heed to UN zones when it suited them.

In early October, two months after the deployment of Irish troops to Katanga, the British Special Branch in neighbouring colonial Uganda met with an Irish military intelligence officer, Commandant Fleming. Fleming wanted information on a Haitian UN official he suspected of having “communist leanings”. The Special Branch report of the meeting noted that, “morale is allegedly low amongst the Irish troops, this being attributed to lack of activity and their somewhat negative role.  This consists of what may be best be considered as police patrol work and they have little or no authority to intervene in incidents.”

Fleming also complained of a lack of equipment and troops to cover large areas in both the provinces of Kivu and Katanga. Kevin Boland later claimed not to have “any information” that Irish troops were underresourced in Katanga, even though shortages of vehicles, weapons and radios are recurring themes in Irish military reports of the period. No armoured vehicles were deployed to the Congo until January 1961.

Following a series of violent incidents near Niemba in early October, the Katangan gendarmerie threatened to occupy the town if Irish soldiers did not deploy a garrison there. Colonel Bunworth and his officers organised a large-scale movement into the town, maintaining radio contact with the Katangan aircraft as they did so. Upon arrival in the town they met a group of Belgian officers and Katangan gendarmes, who were offered a meal by Colonel Bunworth. Soon afterwards the same Belgian-led unit shot and killed a Baluba and wounded another who they claimed were about to attack the Irish soldiers. Bunworth and his men then withdrew, leaving Lt. Gleeson in charge of the small UN garrison at Niemba from 8 October until his death a month later.

Gleeson, a military engineer, concentrated on clearing roadblocks around Niemba. The local Baluba had put these up in order to prevent the Katangan gendarmerie from using the road to burn their villages. On 22 October Gleeson’s men removed tools left at a roadblock by a party of Baluba. It is not difficult to see why Baluba tribesmen came to resent the Irish presence in the area.

After the attack at Niemba, the Katangan secessionist leader, Moïse Tshombe, urged the Irish to show the Baluba “who is the boss”. In response, Colonel Bunworth “assured Mr. Tshombe his troops would do all in their power to restore order to the strife-torn North”. George Evans, the British consul-general in the Katangan city of Elisabethville reported a change in posture on the part of Irish soldiers after the Niemba incident, “UN troops do not hesitate to take reprisals against the Baluba.  Berendsen [the UN political representative to Katanga] knows this goes on all the time, but I do not think he reports it.  I overheard instructions being given to an Irish officer joining the Battalion at Albertville: ‘As soon as you see an African on patrol, shoot it at once.  On no account talk first.’”

Other accounts also noted a more aggressive Irish approach after Niemba, even if the types of reprisals alluded to by Evans were strongly denied in my interviews with Irish soldiers who served in Katanga in 1960. An officer recalled that, when approaching a Baluba area, Irish soldiers used “reconnaissance by fire” tactics to draw out any warriors who may have been planning an attack.

Colonel Bunworth believed that his men were fulfilling the UN’s mission to ensure the “protection of the permanent assets of the Congo”, most notably the infrastructure and industry of Katanga. The Baluba saw things very differently. The Irish were helping to keep the Belgian-dominated secessionist state of Katanga viable. The results were disastrous.

Edward Burke is Assistant Professor in International Relations at the University of Nottingham. His chapter on Niemba is published in Michael Kennedy and Deirdre MacMahon, ‘Obligations and Responsibilities: Ireland and the United Nations, 1955-2005’.

This article was first published by the Irish Examiner on 11 November 1960.