“Scorched Earth” Plan Reported

Press, Volume C, Issue 29695, 13 December 1961, Page 24

“Scorched Earth” Plan Reported

(N.Z.P^A.-Reuter —Copyright) NEW YORK, December 12. A group of French “expert destroyers” had drawn up a scorched earth policy that would reduce the entire Union Miniere operation in mineral-rich Katanga to rubble, the United Nation’s top military official in the New York headquarters said yesterday.

The official. Brigadier I. J. Rikhye of the Indian Army, told a news conference that the United Nations had told the mining company of the plan. He described the group of about a dozen exiled Frenchmen, who had been barred from their own land as one of the strong foes of United Nations in Katanga because of their direction of Katanga’s psychological warfare. The men learned their methods in Indo-China and practised them again in Algeria, he said. Brigadier Rikhye also repeated that the United Nations operation in Katanga was to “restore freedom of action in Elisabethville and re-establish full security of aU United Notions people—civilian* and military?*

The Indian officer, as senior military adviser to the acting Secretary-General <U Thant) said that Katangese tactics were concentrated in harassing mortar-fire directed by a Portuguese officer, named Delmasso, and psychological warfare, directed by the French experts. The Katangese Interior Minister (Mr Godefroid Munongo) had hired the group of Frenchmen and it was on that group’s advice that plans had been drawn up for the demolition of Union Miniere installations, he said. “This would be a terrible thing if it were ever carried into effect. We know that Urge amounts of dynamite bad been brought in and that the scorched-earth policy is based on this group of expert destroyers,” he said.