The Congo in July was like the Marie Celeste-a large, fully equipped ship from which the crew had vanished and in which fear and utter disorder had already caused the breakdown of many essential services. In some cases, stenographers and office boys had overnight become chiefs of services without any real training for the job; nursing orderlies had become chief surgeons, and truck drivers had become directors of transportation.
Those of us lucky enough to take part in the first months of ONUC will certainly never forget it. To say that it was, and is, a unique operation is an understatement. For most of us it became an obsession-a constant source of enthusiasm, fascination, amazement, exasperation and sometimes, it must be admitted, of hopeless laughter. There was plenty to do, it was never dull; the words "usual" and "normal" had no meaning or currency whatsoever.
This group worked out of Room 410 in the Stanley Hotel and in spite of the size of the room in relation to the 24-hour-a-day crowd which filled it, a firm grasp had already been established on the tangled and writhing skein of Congo events. Although a single over-worked telephone, which often disintegrated under the strain and at best led only to a capricious hotel switchboard, and the public telegraph service from an entirely disorganized post office were the group's only link with the outside world, indomitable resource and energy made such disadvantages seem trivial. This small group seemed to be, and perhaps was, the only fixed point in an otherwise totally fluid and changeable scene. Thus, ministers, ambassadors, refugees, journalists, soldiers and everyone else in Leopoldville with something on their mind (and most people had) converged like homing pigeons on Room 410. It was, on one occasion, the scene of an armed incursion by the mutinous army and on others the place where orders were given to the commanders of outgoing UN contingents. It was also Dr. Bunche's bedroom.
By Brian Urquhart. Secretariat News, Copyright 1960.
