Review: Soundtrack to a Coup D'Etat
Reviewing the multi award winning documentary Soundtrack to a Coup D'Etat from the Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez.
The documentary film Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat is absolutely compelling stuff. It’s difficult to say what it’s all about without over-simplifying, but it’s based around the the 1960 coup against the first democratically elected leader of Congo, Patrice Lumumba.
It’s almost entirely comprised of archive footage from the time, with a jazz music soundtrack, and interspersed with later interviews with the foreign agents who manufactured the coup, and with mercenary fighters who openly admit the atrocities they committed in the Congo civil war.
The film gradually pieces together how the former colonial power of Belgium, the Belgian royal family, the US secret services, capitalist mining interests, and the United Nations conspired together to overthrow DR Congo’s first elected government within months of Lumumba coming to power.
The film isn’t just about the Congo crisis, other themes include the United States use of jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong as cover for their covert operations; the cold war; the American civil rights movement; decolonisation; and feminism.
Anyone who appreciates jazz will love the soundtrack and the archive footage of musicians like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Max Roach, Nina Simone, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and many more.
There’s also abundant archive footage of eminent political figures of the age like Dwight Eisenhower, Dag Hammarskjöld, Malcolm X, Fidel Castro, and Nikita Khrushchev.
One of the most compelling clips is an interview with an elderly Daphne Park, the British intelligence chief in Congo during the coup, who laughs as she explains how easy it all was. "You set people very discreetly against one another. They destroy each other" she smirks, knowing full well that this destabilisation operation led to the torture and death of the country’s rightful head of state, and a brutal civil war that killed hundreds of thousands more.
The CIA head of station in the Congo at the time, Larry Devlin, was even more forthcoming. "Lumumba was such a nuisance. It was perfectly obvious that the way to get rid of him was through political assassination".
One of the most heart-breaking revelations is that Lumumba called the United Nations into the Congo to protect his newly independent country from a violent insurrection in the south (bankrolled by the Union Minière mining operation), only for the UN to join in the efforts to overthrow his government by seizing the radio station and airport during the failed first coup attempt.
The UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld comes out looking particularly bad given his supposed role as a peacekeeper, while behind the scenes he was colluding with the United States and Belgium to secure Lumumba’s downfall.
The second coup was secured after the US secret services staged an assassination attempt against the military general Mobutu to make it seem like Lumumba’s doing.
Lumumba was removed from power, tortured and killed. The country degenerated into outright war that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, and Mobutu was installed as Congo’s dictator for the next three decades.
The interviews with utterly remorseless western mercenaries during the Congo civil war are particularly harrowing, especially the German one proudly displaying his iron cross and swastika as he speaks about the atrocities he was involved in, and paints himself as a man of culture because he goes to the orchestra.
Overthrown democracies; US-interference to secure natural resources; war criminals decked out in Nazi regalia; puppet dictators. The parallels with the present are too obvious to spell out.
The film doesn’t condescend to its audience like we’re idiots either. There are occasional flash-forwards to adverts for Teslas and mobile phones, but it’s assumed we’re smart enough to map out the progression from Union Minière’s resource grab and Lumumba’s assassination, through the Congo civil war, to the modern world.
There’s the President of the United States stating that "the people of the Congo are entitled to build up their country in peace and freedom", while behind the scenes he was doing everything in the United States power to undermine and destroy Lumumbu’s government and deny the people of Congo the peace and freedom he claimed to be championing.
And there’s Nikita Khrushchev’s heartfelt and idealistic speech against colonialism at the United Nations.
"The people will rise and straighten their backs to become their own masters, instead of being lackeys and slaves of the colonialists. Death to colonial slavery! Bury it deep in the ground! The deeper the better!"
Sadly Khrushchev was wrong. Colonialism wasn’t going to be dead and buried, it was simply going to transform into a different form of imperialist exploitation.
Direct colonialism was largely abolished in the post-WWII period, only to be replaced by capitalistic imperialism, where the resources of newly independent countries would still be looted, enforced by a depraved system of bribes for compliant lackeys, and sanctions, covert operations, and assassinations against those who dared to actually stand up for their countries and their people.
For every Patrice Lumumba there’s a dictator like Mobutu who is willing to sell out his country and his people to imperialist interests for personal enrichment.
For every Salvador Allende, there’s a murderous tyrant like Pinochet.
For every Sukarno there’s a vicious self-serving killer like Suharto.
The film ends with footage of the musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crashing the UN Security Council in protest at the killing of Lumumba. "Murderers", "Killers", "Assassins", "Bigoted sons of bitches", "You Ku Klux Klan motherfuckers".
Johan Grimonprez has created an absolute masterpiece of a documentary, and I fully recommend that you watch it for yourself.
This looks absolutely brilliant and is as relevant as it is timely. Funnily enough, I'm working on a drama with a Congolese connection at the moment and have studied the period in question in some depth both as an undergraduate student, journalist and lecturer. Of particular significance is how the history of Congo has been repeated as tragic farce. In 1960, following the election of Lumumba, Western Imperialist powers and mining interests established a bogus breakaway state entity in Katanga, rich in copper and other resources, using Belgian, German and other mercenaries, many of whom were Nazi War Criminals, and the British mercenary Mad Mike Hoare. The actors here were primarily the CIA, with MI6 in tow, and also MOSSAD, whose agent, Conor Cruise O'Brien, while working for the UN, betrayed and compromised the Irish UN peace-keepers facing down the mercenary forces in Katanga and helped arrange the CIA murder of Dag Hammerskald, after which the UN and US weighed in to support NOT the Katanga separatists (who were a busted flush) but Mobutu, the traitor in Lumumba's own camp. This tragic farce was replicated decades later when Glencore and the Katanga Mining Corporation, closely linked to MOSSAD, bankrolled Joseph Kabila's blood diamond war in 2001, when the eyes of the world were on 9/11 and the war on terror. Moving forward to the present time we all know that Rwanda, that "safe country" fit for sending asylum seekers to, is the principle regional actor backing "The Terminator's" M23 guerrillas who were on the back foot before Rwanda stepped in. But Rwanda is hardly a rich country with deep pockets and multinational mining interests must still be involved. The difference today is that the mercenaries, rather than being a rag tag of outlaws will be corporate entities in the fashion established by EXECUTIVE OUTCOMES and SANDLINES in the 1990s and they will be fighting for mineral concessions as they first did in Angola and Sierra Leone. They will be selling the minerals whose production they control through intermediaries and shell companies, probably in Britain's offshore territories, to so called legitimate mining corporations. Perhaps David Lammy., when he's not busy sucking Donald Trump's cock, would like to take a look at that one!
You can hardly call Khruschev idealistic - he was just as bad as every other power that wanted a piece of resource-rich Congo. Lumumba never stood a chance.