IN GLASNEVIN cemetery there is a small plot that will forever be linked with Africa. For it is here that many of the 26 Irish soldiers who were killed while serving in the Congo under the flag of the United Nations in the early 1960s are buried.
More than 6,000 Irishmen served in the Congo between 1960 and 1964, and those still alive are following the unfolding events in Zaire (as the country was renamed in 1971) with keen interest.
The place names might have changed, but Africa's most notorious despot, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku wa za Banga, is still around. Back then, though, he was merely a journalist who had recently become chief of staff of the Congolese army.
It is a long way from the plains of the Curragh to the African bush, and the young soldiers who made the journey will never forget the events they lived through at that time.
Many were virgin travellers, on their first tour of duty abroad. Ireland was emerging from an extended period of semi isolation, and the Army was sending armed troops abroad for the first time. Irish officers were put in charge of a vast expanse of territory, covering an area the size of Germany, Poland and Hungary combined.
"I was only a young fellow, who had never been further than Jersey for my honeymoon. Suddenly, we all arrived in this beautiful country, on a high plateau. Back home, it was deep winter and even the sea was freezing over," recalls [Cot Sean Norton of his arrival in Elizabethville in December 1961.
The town, long since renamed Lubumbashi, was taken by Laurent Kabila's rebel forces last week. "There they were the same old buildings we'd been in, on the television the other night. It was an attractive place then, even if everything had started to decay."
The UN had been called in to prevent civic and ethnic strife which had broken out with the hasty departure of the Belgian colonists in June 1960. When the mineral rich Katanga (now Shaba) province seceded from the newly independent state, Irish battalions were sent to help bring them into line.
The secessionist government was led by Moise Tshombe, a volatile and violent character who once told UN officers: "I will nail your heads to the wall. You will leave your hides in Katanga."
Tshombe was regarded by many as a front for Belgian interests who hoped to keep a firm grip on the province's enormous mineral wealth. It was Katanga that provided the uranium used in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The area has vast reserves of diamonds, gold and cobalt even the waste in the huge slag heaps which dominated the landscape near Lubumbashi contained more copper than the best output of an Irish mine.
"At the time Lubumbashi was quiet. The Belgians were willing to withdraw, but only as their troops were replaced in the same locations by UN soldiers," says Cot E.D. Doyle. Many of the Belgians had been evacuated to Northern Ireland during the second World War, he remembers, and knew Dublin well.
Outside the towns, though the breakaway government and its colonial backers were deeply unpopular. Numerous attacks were mounted on Belgian interests by small groups operating out of the bush. It was into one such attack that Irish soldiers fell, mistaken for Belgian mercenaries, on November 8th 1960.
"I was second in command in the 33rd battalion, and had been in Niemba the day before. We sent a group there to repair a bridge which had been destroyed. But when they arrived they were ambushed by Baluba tribesmen armed with bows and arrows," recalls Comdt RD. Hogan.
Niemba cost nine Irish lives and caused convulsions at home. Thousands of shocked citizens lined the streets of the capital for the funeral cortege. The Irish Times ran an appeal fund. There was intense questioning of our role in such faraway conflicts but, ultimately, the consensus was that Ireland could no longer remain aloof from the world. The 1960s had truly begun.
People had accepted the fact that there would be casualties. Although there was a great out pouring of grief, no one ever said we should pull out. That has all changed now," said Col Doyle.
Conor Cruise O'Brien also went to Lubumbashi as the UN representative to Katanga in 1961, but left both the Congo and the UN in a well publicised split within a year. Battalions of Irish troops continued to go to the Congo in six month stints until 1964, when [the rebellion was quelled and the UN mission completed.
"I followed events until 1964, then the Congo disappeared from the headlines. It was almost impossible to find out what was going on after that," said Col Hogan.
The history of the following 30 years records that the rapacious colonists were followed by what was arguably an even greater evil, the kleptocracy of a dictator who has salted away at least $5 billion in European banks, who keeps luxury villas in France and Belgium, thinks nothing of sending his private jet to South America to "pick up 5,000 long haired sheep, and oversees the most widespread system of state sponsored corruption the world has yet seen. All this while Zaire sinks ever further into penury, in spite of the vast wealth under its soil.
More than 30 years on, the Irish veterans of the Congo have no doubt that their intervention was justified. "The UN mission was certainly worth it. It gave some sort of stability to the country. What would have happened if we weren't there?" Cot Hogan asked.
Sean Norton still meets his old comrades in Glasnevin each December, where they say the Rosary for three battalion colleagues who were killed in Lubumbashi. "It was the Cold War, East versus [West, at the time. We were only" doing our bit."
