What you wrote about Congo's size surprised me to the extent of looking it up -- I find Paris-Moscow is just short of 2500 km, while DR Congo is 2350 km across Northwest-Southeast, so it's true! However, the EU is almost 4 million km², and even the EU-15 was 3.24 million km².
premier Lumumba assassinated (with cooperation of Belgium and the US)
Wasn't he assassinated by Belgian agents after he was kidnapped? *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
A pleasure I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude
However, this same disclosure showed that US perception at the time was that Lumumba was a Communist. Eisenhower's apparent call for Lumumba's elimination must have been brought on by this perception. Both Belgium and the United States were clearly influenced in their unfavourable stance towards Lumumba by the cold war. He seemed to gravitate around the Soviet Union. Arguably that was because that was the only place he could find support in his country's effort to rid itself of colonial rule, and not because he was a communist.
Note : the murder took place on 17 jan 1961. It took the Belgians till 2001 to admitthey played a role in it. The struggle of man against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting.(Kundera)
