The Congo Crisis, 1960-1961: A Critical Oral History Conference Organized by: The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Cold War International History Project and Africa Program Sponsored by: The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars September 23-24, 2004 Opening of Conference – September 23, 2004 CHRISTIAN OSTERMANN: Ladies and gentlemen I think we’ll get started even though we’re still expecting a few colleagues who haven’t arrived yet, but I think we should get started because we have quite an agenda for this meeting. Welcome all of you to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; my name is Christian Ostermann. I direct one of the programs here at the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Cold War International History Project. The Center is the United States’ official memorial to President Woodrow Wilson and it celebrates, commemorates Woodrow Wilson through a living memorial, that is, we bring scholars from around the world, about 150 each year to the Wilson center to do research and to write. In addition to hosting fellowship programs, the Center hosts 450 meetings each year on a broad array of topics related to international affairs. One of these meetings is taking place today, and it is a very special meeting, as I will explain in a few moments. This meeting is co-sponsored by the Center’s Cold War International History project and 1 the Center’s Africa Program, directed by former Congressman Howard Wolpe. He’s in Burundi as we speak here, but some of his staff will be joining us during the course of the day. The Cold War International History project has, for almost a decade and a half now, tried to internationalize the history of the Cold War, by providing access to sources and perspectives on countries other than the United States. As many of you may know, the history of the Cold War was until about ten years ago written largely on the basis of American documents [and] through the eyes of American officials; written in many ways from one side of an era and a confrontation that involved two sides, or, as we like to think, many sides. The Cold War International History Project, through publications, through conferences and fellowships, has tried to bring in international perspectives into the debate, into the writing of Cold War history. That’s why we’re so emphatic about the word ‘international’ in the title of our project. In many ways, this project is a giant effort at empathy, empathy being the ability that a good statesman and certainly a good historian must have, to put himself or herself in the shoes of the other, or for an historian into the shoes of the players, the actors at the time. We have tried to facilitate the process by collecting, translating and publishing documents from those archives from those countries that were inaccessible for much of the Cold War. Initially that meant mainly the Russian archives and the Eastern European archives. Increasingly we’re getting access to other archives, including the Chinese archives, the Vietnamese archives, the Cuban archives. One of the great difficulties in bringing out perspectives, the views of other players in the Cold War, has been the difficulty in accessing archives, be it in South East 2 Asia, in Africa, Latin America, other parts of the world. This is something we hope very much to focus on in the next few years. Let me just show everyone our main publication, the Cold War International History Project Bulletin, which is a collection of documents from the Russian, Eastern European and other archives on various subjects of the Cold War, from North Korea to Afghanistan. We translate materials from 15 different languages and due to limits of budgets and resources had to focus on one language for publication, so unfortunately I can only present this to you in English. We have amassed a wealth of documentation over the last few years, published in the Bulletin and on our website. It has allowed scholars to write, to rewrite and to reassess the history of the Cold War, in a multi-archival multi- perspective international fashion. When you put these documents from the Russian, Eastern European, other archives together with those from the US archives and US documentation that our colleagues at the National Security Archives have brought out over the last few years, you can write Cold War history in a much more interactive fashion. Documents are clearly important to the Cold War International History Project, but we fully realize that documents can only tell you a fraction of the story of what actually happened. So for the last few years we have created and specialized in a certain type of conference which we call ‘critical oral history conferences.’ These are not just scholarly conferences with scholars presenting papers on certain subjects. The idea is to bring together veterans of a crisis or an event for discussion of some of the blank spots in history, stimulated by as comprehensive a set of documents as we can put together. What we hope to do in the next day or two here, is to have a conversation, not a structured 3 meeting with papers, but a conversation in which the veterans of the events that we are talking about at this conference, the 1960-1961 Congo crisis, really are the primary actors, the primary participants. We hope that with questions from the scholars that are present here, stimulated by some of the documentation in front of you, we can fill in some of these blank spots with information that has not made it into the history books. What we are facing as historians of the Cold War, [and] as historians of late 20th Century international history, is a dilemma. We have an increasing amount, an exponentially increasing amount, of sources of documents. We can only publish and translate a tiny fragment of what is available, but we have a slowly dwindling number of eye-witnesses, so that’s why we hope this conference will be timely and important as a source for those interested in the history of Cold War and in the history of the Congo. We have done a number of these critical oral history conferences. This is probably the one that reaches the furthest back in history. More recently, in July 2004, we had a larger conference on the Iran-Iraq war, with veterans of the policy making process, veterans of the intelligence community, and others from the United States, the Soviet Union, Iran, Iraq and other countries in the Middle East. Two years ago, we organized a major conference of this sort on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A year before that we were in Havana for a conference on the Cuban missile crisis in which Fidel Castro participated for two days. There have also been other conferences, and I will be happy to share the results and findings with you later. Before I introduce the moderator of the first session, let me just point out that the agenda for this meeting is rather flexible. The questions that are on the program are some of the key questions that scholars are interested in, but we do not necessarily have the 4 ambition to answer all of them, or to cover all of them. My hope is that the discussion will in many ways be driven by the contributions of those who were present at the events, in exchange of course with the scholars and experts here today. I especially want to [thank] our Congolese guests for coming this far and for traveling to the United States. It’s not as easy as it used to be and I know some of you had to spend several hours at customs. I also thank Larry Devlin for coming all the way from Europe. I’m not an expert on this crisis in the Congo, and have been inspired by and relied on a team of 3 that conspired this conference – Dr. Lise Namikas, who's done extensive research in the Russian archives and is completing a major work on the Congo crisis; Dr. Herbert Weiss, senior fellow and scholar here with the Wilson Center, and one of the foremost experts in this country on the Congo; and Dr. Sergey Mazov from Moscow, who has also helped tremendously with accessing the Russian materials. I will not end before thanking my staff and the team that has really made this conference happen: Associate Mircea Munteanu, who will be here later today, Bridget Kessler who’s been busy helping to get documents and other materials together, but first and foremost Dee Beutel, without whom all of us wouldn’t be here today, so thank you very much for all your help with this conference. What I would suggest before we get into the first session is to go once around the table, and to briefly introduce ourselves. Rather than having a participants list with longer biographies here, we thought we should leave it up to you to introduce yourselves, as your biographies relate to the theme of this conference. So, I have said enough about myself and I wanted to just start the round. Welcome again to the Wilson Center. 5 JEAN MUKE: My name is Jean Muke. I work at the Congolese Senate, I am an assistant, I was asked to accompany Senator Kamitatu on the journey to participate in this conference. Thank you. GEORGES NZONGOLA-NTALAJA: Professor emeritus of African Studies at Howard University and Director of UNDP Oslo Governor Center in Oslo Norway. I’m a scholar of the Congo as well as a native of the Congo.