Force Publique
The Force Publique ( fɔʁs pyblik ; Dutch Openbare Weermacht ) was a gendarmerie and an army in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo . It existed from 1885 to 1960. After the independence of the Belgian Congo , the Force Publique became the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo .
founding
The Force Publique was conceived in 1885 by the Belgian King Leopold II , who held the Congo Free State as personal property , following preparatory work by Camille Coquilhat . He commissioned his Secretary of the Interior to create a military and police force for the Free State. Soon after, at the beginning of 1886, Captain Léon Roger was sent to the Congo by the carabiniers of the Belgian Army to build up the force. On August 17, he was promoted to "Commander of the Force Publique". Other Belgian as well as Swedish and Danish officers and non-commissioned officers were also sent to the area to form the core of the officer corps. All officers in the Force Publique were Europeans. These included regular Belgian soldiers and mercenaries from other countries who were drawn to the prospect of prosperity or simply adventure in Africa.
In the Congo Free State
Ethnically mixed African soldiers served among the European officers, comparable to the Askaris in British or German service. Many were recruited or drafted into the warrior tribes of the Upper Congo . Others came from Zanzibar and West Africa. The task of the Force Publique was to defend the Free State and to pacify it internally. She fought from 1892 to 1894 in the war in Eastern Congo against the Tippoo Tip . Between 1896 and 1897, the Force Publique under Louis Napoléon Chaltin against the Mahdists of Sudan brought the Lado enclave under control.
Atrocities
A main purpose of the Force Publique under Leopold was to ensure compliance with rubber quotas and other forms of forced labor. Armed with modern weapons and the hippopotamus whip , the soldiers often took hostages and mistreated them. Reports from foreign missionaries and consular officers describe a series of incidents in which Congolese men and women were whipped or raped by Force Publique soldiers , unhindered by their officers and non-commissioned officers. They also burned unruly villages and there is evidence, including photos, of soldiers chopping off hands. On the one hand, chopped off hands served as trophies, on the other hand, as evidence that bullets were not wasted.
In the era of the Free State, the Force Publique was hit by institutional problems. In their early years there were often uprisings by African soldiers. At the beginning of the 1890s, large areas in the east of the Free State were in the hands of Arab ivory and slave traders. Although the government was able to regain control of the East in the same decade, problems with the organization continued. Many Force Publique units were located in remote areas of the territory, where some officers took soldiers under their own control and used them for their own business rather than military affairs. At the end of 1891 the force consisted of 60 officers, 60 NCOs and 3,500 African soldiers. Friend tribes and militias were often used to maintain control over the most remote parts of the Free State.
In Belgian Congo
Organization and role
After the Belgian government took over the Congo Free State in 1908, the Force Publique was divided into 21 individual companies . At first they were numbered, later they were given names. There was also an artillery and engineering unit with over 12,100 members.
More than 2,400 men were trained in six training camps. The Force Publique companies sometimes numbered over 600 men. All but the constituent units, known as détachemente , were so widely dispersed that the force had no real military value. It was planned that a Compagnie Marche with 150 men belonged to each company . Each marche or field company should consist of four Belgian officers and NCOs as well as between 100 and 150 Africans, divided into trains of 50 men each. Together they formed three Marche battalions. Eight Congolese NCOs were part of the association.
Belgian officers and NCOs replaced almost all Europeans of different nationalities who were employed under the Free State. The 2875 members of the Troupes de Katanga formed a semi-autonomous force with six companies: four de marche and two of the remaining infantry as well as a cyclist company and a headquarters for a battalion . There was also a Compagnie d'Artillerie et de Génie in Fort de Shinkakasa in Boma on the Congo .
In 1914 the Force Publique , including the Katanga companies, numbered over 17,000 Askaris, commanded by 178 white officers and 235 white non-commissioned officers. The majority served in small static garrisons , which under the name poste served mainly as police posts . When the First World War broke out , the Katanga units for military service in northern Rhodesia and the eastern border of the Congo were divided into three battalions. The FP was able to form another battalion from smaller units.
Much has been done to remedy the worst excesses of the Free State era. The Force Publique was now more like a typical colonial army : disciplined but with an inevitably repressive task. They wore a blue uniform with red stripes, a red fez, and the Free State sash until it was replaced by a khaki uniform in 1915. The Askaris, who served for an initial seven-year period, were fitted with outdated single-shot rifles measuring 11 mm in caliber, while their Belgian officers used FN pistols . The Askaris in Katanga, which formed a kind of elite unit, were, however, equipped with the Mauser model 98 and also had individual Madsen machine guns . In addition, the Force Publique had Maxim machine guns , 47-mm Nordenfelt cannons (20 of them in Katanga), and some Krupp guns . After the beginning of the First World War, France left some Canon de 75 mm modèle 1897 guns to the FP , which were used in East Africa.
First World War
In the First World War (1914-18) an expanded Force Publique fought against German colonial troops in Cameroon and German East Africa . They fought alongside the British and Portuguese against the Germans. From 1916 on, the FP grew to three mobile groupes (brigades) named Kivu, Ruzizi and Tanganyika. They consisted of a total of 15 battalions, the permanent garrison and the police force from 1914.
Charles Tombeur (1867–1947) led the Force Publique as a general in World War I. In 1916 he became military governor of the Belgian-occupied territories in East Africa .
During the Battle of Tabora in September 1916, around 25,000 men were under arms, supported by over 260,000 porters.
Second World War
After Belgium capitulated to Germany on May 28, 1940, Governor Pierre Ryckmans decided that the colony would continue to fight alongside the Allies. At the time of the occupation of Belgium, the support of the free Belgian army was particularly important for the Allies in economic terms. They obtained copper, tungsten, zinc, sheet metal, rubber, cotton and other goods from the Belgian Congo . Even before the war, uranium was shipped from the Shinkolobwe mine to New York. It was later used to make the Hiroshima atomic bomb . The military contribution was also important: the Force Publique grew to 40,000 soldiers in the course of the war. They were divided into three brigades, a river force and auxiliary units. The Force Publique took part in the East Africa campaign against Italy.
At the end of 1940 the 11th Battalion of the Force Publique was made available to the British forces in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan . It took part in the campaign in Abyssinia with 5700 men. They took Asosa and Gambela with little resistance and shot at the Italian troops in Saïo. When the retreat was cut off, the Italians and their native soldiers surrendered to General Auguste-Édouard Gilliaert on July 7th. The Force Publique lost around 500 men in the East Africa campaign, including four Belgians.
The Force Publique then participated in the construction of an overland route from Lagos via Fort Lamy and Sudan to Cairo. Between 1942 and 1943 a 13,000-strong expeditionary force was sent to Nigeria. 9,000 of these soldiers served in Egypt and Palestine. They returned to the Belgian Congo at the end of 1944 without having been in combat.
The Force Publique also sent a field hospital to the front lines. Between 1941 and 1945 around 350 Congolese and 20 Belgians worked with the British medical service in Abyssinia, Somalia, Madagascar and Burma. They excelled particularly in service with an Indian corps on the Chindwin . In the confusion of the jungle war, the Belgian medical unit was once even in front of the front line troops. This fact was then used by British officers to incite the combat forces to better performance.
At the end of Belgian rule
In 1940 the FP headquarters began to set up the Aviation militaire de la Force Publique as an air force, equipped with converted civil aircraft. Their base was the N'Dolo airport in Léopoldville. The aircraft first purchased for the Force was a De Havilland DH.85 Leopard Moth , which entered service on October 9, 1940.
For the remainder of the Belgian rule, the Force Publique continued its military and police role, divided into territorial units, charged with maintaining public order and with mobile units that were supposed to take care of defense tasks.
In 1945 the mobile FP units consisted of six infantry battalions, three reconnaissance units, military police units, a brigade in the Camp Hardy training camp, which was then being built in Thysville , four coastal defense cannons and a small air force element with two De Havilland DH.104 Doves .
Between 1945 and 1960, Belgium continued to run the Force Publique as a unit, separate from the people it monitored. The recruits served in ethnically mixed units and only a quarter in each company came from the province in which they served. The Force Publique impressed visitors to the Congo with its meticulous discipline and drill, but a culture of separation promoted by Belgian officers contributed to brutal and unrestrained behavior when the barriers to colonial administration were lifted in 1960. The infamous hippopotamus whip was only banned in 1955. The Belgian government made no effort to train Congolese officers. It was not until the very end of the colonial period that there were 20 African officer cadets in military schools in Belgium.
In 1960 the Force Publique consisted of three groups, each responsible for two provinces. The first group had its headquarters in Elisabethville in Katanga . The second group covered Léopoldville and Equateur and the third group, headquartered in Stanleyville, was active in Kivu and the Orientale province . There were three infantry battalions with about 800 men each, two gendarmerie battalions with about 860 men each, a reconnaissance squadron with jeeps, trucks and armored M8 greyhound vehicles and about 300 men, a transport company, a military police company with about 100 men, a mine thrower train, a genius company and a training camp in Lokandu.
After independence
On July 5, 1960, five days after the country gained independence from Belgium, the Force Publique garrison mutinied near Léopoldville against their white officers, who were still in command, and attacked numerous European and Congolese targets. The immediate cause of the uprising was reportedly the tactless speech by Belgian Lieutenant General Émile Janssens to African soldiers in an exhibition hall at the headquarters near Léopoldville. The senior officer told the soldiers that independence would not change their status. Janssens' intention may only have been to highlight the benefits of constant discipline and obedience. But the effect on the soldiers, restless about the demands to maintain order during the independence celebrations and concerned that they would be excluded from the benefits of the new freedom, was disastrous. The outbreak of violence created fear among the 100,000 Belgian and other European civilians and officers who were still living in the Congo. It damaged the new government's credibility as it proved incapable of keeping its own armed forces under control. The white population in Luluabourg was locked in an improvised fortress for three days, until it was freed from it by Belgian paratroopers.
The violence led Belgium to intervene in the Congo to keep its citizens safe. The previous Luluabourg intervention had been carried out contrary to current orders. The invasion of such forces in the Congo crisis was a clear violation of the sovereignty of the new nation, since it did not seek Belgian support.
Shortly thereafter, the FP was renamed the Congolese National Army ( Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo ) and its leadership was Africanized.
As a result, Joseph Mobutu ( Mobutu Sésé Seko ), a former sergeant major in the FP, who was promoted to chief of staff by Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba , later came to power and installed a dictatorial kleptocracy that lasted until May 1997.
literature
- Peter Abbott: Armies in East Africa 1914-18. Osprey 2002, ISBN 1-84176-489-2 .
- Adam Hochschild : King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Houghton Mifflin Company 1998.
- Louis-François Vanderstraeten: De la Force Publique à l'armée nationale congolaise. Histoire d'une mutinerie. Académie royale de Belgique, Brussels, Impression decidee le 18 avril 1983. ISBN 2-8031-0050-9 .
- Bryant Shaw: Force Publique, Force Unique: The Military in the Belgian Congo 1914-1939. Ph.D dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1984.
- Philippe Jacquij, Pierre Lierneux, Natasja Peeters: Lisolo Na Bisu: Notre histoire: le soldat congolais de la FP 1885–1960. Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and of Military History, Brussels 2010, ISBN 2-87051-049-7 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Rudi Geudens: Force Publique: Organization (1885-1918). accessed in October 2011.
- ↑ John Keegan: World armies . Macmillan, London 1979, ISBN 0-333-17236-1 , pp. 822 .
- ^ Thomas Pakenham: The scramble for Africa . Abacus, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-349-10449-2 , pp. 600 .
- ^ Thomas Pakenham: The scramble for Africa . Abacus, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-349-10449-2 , pp. 29-33 and 394-396 .
- ^ Zaire: Evolution of the armed forces - The Colonial Period
- ↑ Robert Ross, Marja Hinfelaar, Iva Peša: The objects of life in Central Africa. The History of Consumption and Social Change, 1840–1980 (= Africa Study Center Series ). Brill, Leiden 2013, ISBN 978-90-04-25624-8 , pp. 50 ( books.google.de ).
- ^ David van Reybrouck: Congo The Epic History of a People . HarperCollins, 2014, ISBN 978-0-06-220011-2 , pp. 132 ff .
- ^ David van Reybrouck: Congo The Epic History of a People . HarperCollins, 2014, ISBN 978-0-06-220011-2 , pp. 182 ff .
- ↑ John Keegan: World armies . Macmillan, London 1979, ISBN 0-333-17236-1 , pp. 57 . J
- ↑ skynetblogs.be ( Memento of the original from February 16, 2013 on WebCite ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Dutch).
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20110524063743/http://www.mil.be/vox/subject/index.asp?LAN=nl&ID=628&PAGE=7 (Dutch).
- ↑ Un Belge face aux japs. You fort de Battice a la Brimanie. (= Vécu en Belgique . Band 19 ). JM Collet, Brussels 1986, OCLC 145028862 (French).
- ↑ Luc Baudoux: Les Avions de la Force Publique du Congo. ( Memento of March 13, 2013 on WebCite ), accessed October 2011.
- ^ Émile Robert Janssens: Histoire de la force publique. Ghesquière, Brussels 1979, OCLC 640087876 , p. 239-240 .
- ^ Louis-François Vanderstraeten: De la force publique de l'Armee Nationale Congolaise. Histoire d'une mutinerie, juillet 1960 . Brussels 1985, ISBN 2-8011-0557-0 , pp. 469-471 , Annex I .
- ↑ The actual location of the headquarters on June 30, 1960 is unclear.
- ↑ Une école au Congo Belge dans les années 50, Watsa - p. 16 - Camps militaire de Watsa on ecoledewatsa.blogspace.fr
- ↑ Armée et police
