Today's NY Times offers the following Lumumba editorial:

EDITORIAL OBSERVER

The Rise and Violent Fall of Patrice Lumumba

By BILL BERKELEY

There is a scene in the director Raul Peck's chilling biographical film
"Lumumba" in which the title character, the doomed Congolese Prime Minister
Patrice Lumumba, played by Eriq Ebouaney, confers alone with his army chief
of staff, the soon-to-be military strongman Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. It is
September 1960. Their fledgling independent nation is disintegrating into
chaos. "I am at your side," coos the suavely malign Mobutu, played by Alex
Descas. Lumumba replies: "You are no longer beside me. You're behind my
back." Mobutu returns soon thereafter to place Lumumba under house arrest.

In The New York Times Index for 1960, the Congo occupies more than 12 pages
of entries, more than any other country except the United States, and just
slightly more than Fidel Castro's Cuba. Four decades later, with Congo
again consumed by a more obscure but no less ruinous war, Mr. Peck's film
provides a disturbing reminder of a turning point in history that helps
explain how that African nation wound up on the road to its present ruin.

Mr. Peck, a Haiti-born director who examined that country's Duvalier
dictatorship in his 1993 film "The Man on the Shore," has said his aim was
to produce a political thriller that illuminates how power works behind the
scenes in such places.

"Lumumba" recounts the swift rise and fall of the man who became Congo's
first and last legitimately elected prime minister after it won
independence from Belgium in 1960.

The film begins with images from the Belgian colonial era - pith-helmeted
white officers lording it over barefoot natives in scenes that recall one
of Africa's most violent and predatory colonial orders. The narrative picks
up the energetic and articulate Lumumba as a young salesman for a Belgian
beer company who emerged in 1959 as a popular nationalist leader. Jailed
and brutally beaten, he was then freed to participate in negotiations in
Brussels that would lead to the Congo's independence. Lumumba's party won
the largest number of votes in the country's first free elections, and he
became prime minister at the age of 35.

Within days, the vast new nation began to unravel. The army mutinied.
Belgium's military intervened to protect its citizens and encourage the
mineral-rich province of Katanga, led by the conniving opportunist Moïse
Tshombe, to secede. United Nations troops intervened to little effect.
Nikita Khrushchev decided to send Soviet planes, weapons and advisers to
help Lumumba, seeming to confirm the worst fears of the Eisenhower
administration.

Lumumba and his neophyte nation, which at independence had barely a dozen
university graduates, were caught up in a web of cold-war intrigue and
neocolonial knavery. Just six months after he took office, Lumumba was
murdered by Congolese rivals with the collusion of the United States and
Belgium.

Americans tend to think of Africa's current wars as remote and irrelevant
to our interests. "Lumumba" recalls that in fact Americans have been
centrally involved in events that set the stage for these wars. The movie
is grounded in well-documented historical fact. The Senate Intelligence
Committee concluded in 1975 that there were grounds for "a reasonable
inference" that President Eisenhower had authorized Lumumba's
assassination, and that the director of the Central Intelligence Agency,
Allen Dulles, had approved a plot that involved sending a doctor equipped
with vials of poison to Léopoldville, the Congo's capital. The committee
found no evidence of direct American involvement in Lumumba's eventual
murder, though. Instead, it said Washington had supplied money and arms
that enabled Mobutu to consolidate power. Mobutu in turn delivered Lumumba
into the hands of his Congolese rivals and their Belgian allies.

In martyrdom, Lumumba achieved iconic status across Africa and much of the
third world. It is not necessary to accept Mr. Peck's largely uncritical
rendering of his personal character, nor to assume that Lumumba would have
proved an enlightened leader. What we do know is that his murder paved the
way for three decades of Mobutu's kleptocratic despotism, in what he called
Zaire, and the chaos that has engulfed Congo since he fled in 1997.

Some 2.5 million Congolese may have died in three years of fighting, famine
and disease in wars that have drawn in six neighboring countries and
profited business as far afield as Belgium, Pakistan and Russia.

"We thought we controlled our destiny," the embattled Lumumba laments at
one point in this powerful film, "but other powerful interests pulled the
strings." Forty years on, Congolese can be forgiven if they feel the same
way.