Heart of Darkness, Electric Boogaloo
The protests of 1963 would be difficult to understand outside of the context of the largest major war waged by the Kennedy administration, the Congo War. Whereupon the Kennedy administration was able to largely extricate America out from wars in Venezuela, Oman, and Indonesia, the Congo represented a war that just would not end. The playbook that the administration took towards ending the war was similar to their tack in Oman, Indonesia, and Venezuela - find local anti-colonial leaders who were anti-communist and willing to play with the United States in order to boot out both the Europeans and the Communists. That strategy largely worked in Indonesia in particular, where the United States of Indonesia was run by an uneasy alliance of anticommunist military nationalists and Islamists that was closely allied to the United States.
Indeed, a failed attempt to end the war was nearly brokered in 1961, when the leader of the Dominion of the Congo, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, directly met with his former friend and leader of the Free Republic of the Congo, Patricia Lumumba, met in the neutral city of Geneva in order to hash out compromise constitution that would have the Congo formally declare independence from Belgium as a republic (rather than a dominion) and federalize the nation, but retain "special connections" with the Kingdom of Belgium. However, the agreement was formally opposed by the King of Belgium, Leopold III, who had grown more stubborn after surviving a widespread leftist, anti-monarchy general strike paralyzing the nation in 1951, perhaps Belgium's largest spat of political violence in its history. King Leopold III in fact had only narrowly won a monarchy referendum in 1946 by around 5 points, emboldening a left that only grew stronger.[1] The Three Years War only exacerbated tensions in Belgium - radical leftist French intellectuals, including many radical trade unionists, often fled into Wallonia to escape the French secret police, increasingly radicalizing Wallonia's trade unions. In contrast, Flanders largely received refugees fleeing from Soviet-sparked violence, whether from Poland, Yugoslavia, or Finland, further radicalizing Flemish society in the other direction. With Flanders the center of Belgian monarchism, even the issue of Belgium's system of government became divisive.
The Geneva conventions was only brought to an end not because an agreement was hammered out - but because a bomb in the signing room killed both Kasa-Vubu and Lumumba almost immediately, as well as several other top government leaders on both sides. A furious frenzy was launched to find the culprit, but it was at that moment when Kasa-Vubu's second-in-command, Moishe Tshombe, seized control of the capital with the help of Belgian troops, calling an end to the peace negotiations. Almost at the same time, Antoine Gizenga succeeded his former boss, and vowed vengeance against Belgium, claiming that Belgian special forces or at the very least royalist terrorists had masterminded the plot. The Americans furiously wanted to hunt down who was responsible to scuttling the peace negotiations and much to their surprise, they found out that the culprits were not actually Soviets hoping for a prolonged war. Indeed, the culprits seem to have communicated in French, suggesting that it was Belgium special forces operating under the orders of King Leopold III - a fact that caused outrage among Belgian and Congolese leftists. In reality, modern documentation reveals that the plot was probably actually not run by the Belgians - it was most likely run by French special services fearing that the "fall" of Congo would threaten the French hold on Equatorial Africa. The Belgians seizing control of the Congolese government was just them taking advantage of the situation.
The war quickly exploded in all-out violence, with the United States possibly caught in the middle. On one hand, the United States was furious at the Belgians. On the other hands, Belgian planners successfully understood that with the Congolese Free Republic becoming increasingly Marxist in its orientation, the United States would have no choice but to essentially support them in their war unless they desired to see a socialist powerhouse in Central Africa. As a result, Kennedy massively scaled up the numbers of Americans on the ground in Congo, reaching 200,000 by the end of 1961 and 400,000 by 1962. Conscription began sending all kinds of Americans to the Congo, including black Americans. Interestingly, while most Black Americans were loyal to Kennedy and the Democratic Party, supporting the war in the Congo, an increasing number of young black men, predominantly those that served in the Congo, became increasingly radicalized.
The American military was fully desegregated and most of the civil rights agenda had been implemented - however, many young black soldiers couldn't help but notice the often shocking lack of concern displayed by (almost entirely white) American officers towards Congolese civilian casualties that often dipped into casual racism. One future black radical recited that the moment that set him off on his new political path was hearing a commissioned officer comment, in the aftermath of an unintentional American mortar strike on a refugee column, that "at least there's fewer n*****s to feed now." Embittered returning veterans found a support system for radicalized, angry veterans - indeed, nuclear victims from the Three Years War
still had failed to be compensated. The once ramshackle crew of angry veterans led by Socialist Marine Corps officer Robert Bork had developed into a sophisticated political organization, Veterans Against the Wars (VAW), with their supporters described as VAWpers, which welcomed disaffected African-Americans into their ranks.
The Congo War was perhaps one of the most brutal wars in the Cold War - as both sides were so well-supplied. The Congo was simply too geographically large for the Allies to close off the route of supplies running into the region. For example, Marxist rebels in Egypt smuggled in weapons to help the Congolese Reds, causing the United States to respond with Operation Linebacker, a mass bombing of supply lines in Sudan from Anglo-American air force bases in Ethiopia, which became one of the highest recipients of Western military and economic aid due to the wars in both Egypt and the Congo. The results severely damaged the supply situation of the Congolese Reds, but caused mass civilian casualties in Sudan, outraging the local population against the Western powers (Britain had signed onto the bombings). Most of the killed were Christians in South Sudan, which drove even more Christians into the hands of the Communist Party of Egypt.
Meanwhile, the Belgians had created their own problem in neighboring Rwanda and Burundi. In 1960, the Belgian colonial government had abolished the Tutsi monarchy in Rwanda, sparking mass pogroms against Tutsis by Hutu elites who once disfavored by Belgium, now became favored by Belgium. Tutsi elites, despite being favored by Belgium, had agitated for rapid independence in order to cement the Tutsi monarchy as a sovereign entity, which angered the Belgians enough to support Hutu elites instead. The pogroms forced hundreds of thousands of Tutsi refugees to flee to Congo and Burundi, something that then became impossible as the Congo exploded into its own gruesome civil war. Similarly, in order to defeat independence activists, Belgian special forces assassinated Crown Prince Louis Rwagasore, the popular leader of Burundi's only multiethnic political party, which had earlier won Burundi's local elections in a landslide. Most notably, Mwami Mwambutsa IV, the father of Prince Louis, refused to take the throne as the head of a new, Belgium-friendly independent Burundi, being convinced by the earlier assassination of Lumumba and Kasa-Vubu that the Belgians had to be behind his son's death.[2] Calling for vengeance, and radicalized by Hutu pogroms of Tutsis in Rwanda, the King of Burundi (a Tutsi) launched brutal reprisals against the Hutu majority. Casualties were massive - and he quickly became isolated internationally, with only tacit support from the Federation of Kenya as led by President Amin.
Ironically as a result of the Congo War, Belgium ended up becoming the number one recipient of American foreign aid, alongside widespread American intervention in the war. Cognizant that excessive civilian casualties would endanger support for the war, the rebuilt Force Publique largely relied on native African soldiers, generally opting to only use troops from one side of the country to patrol a very different side of the country. Although this weakend the operational efficiency of Belgian troops and increased war crimes against locals, this meant that the Force Publique was largely loyal. The attempt of the Congolese Reds to spawn guerrilla movements in Belgian-controlled territory largely failed due to the fractured, tribal nature of Congolese society. To some Congolese, a distant tribe was just as foreign as the Belgians - and much poorer. As a result, the Congolese Reds quickly restored to conventional warfare, sending armed troops into Burundi and Rwanda to directly combat the Belgians there in hopes of pressuring their withdrawal from all of Congo.
With the Congolese Reds largely in power in Eastern Congo, they weren't able to make any progress in gaining more territory in Congo in the face of overwhelming Belgian-American firepower superiority - moreover, they had to struggle to survive as Belgian gunboats sailed down the Congo River, wrecking havoc. The Congo was simply too large for either side to hold all of the territory, so the war was conducted almost entirely over control of the various rivers and waterways of the Congo. Although the Americans were properly supplied, both the Congolese Reds and the Force Publique lived like the armies of the Thirty Year Wars, plundering from the locals and driving endless villages into starvation. The war for the waterways between the Reds and Force Publique has also been compared to the struggle between the National Revolutionary Army and Imperial Japanese Army in the Second Sino-Japanese War - and indeed, lurid (and true) tales of atrocities from the Congo found their way on newspapers in the West. Immediately, strong parallels were drawn between the Congo War and the Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Indeed, academic interest in the history of the Belgian Congo and Leopold II vastly expanded until Leopold II was actually a figure that most educated Americans had heard of before. All of this hurt public support for the Congo War, as young radicals increasingly sympathized with the cause of Gizenga and the Congolese Reds.
The Belgians were able to hold out in Rwanda and Burundi fairly effective, using superior air-power to decimate scattered bands of Reds, but in 1963, after Idi Amin's rise to power in Kenya, the Amin government increasingly fighting a low-intensity war with the Central African Federation decided to retaliate against the West by cutting off military access to Belgian supplies, a move followed by his tepid allies in the Kingdom of Buganda. Combining that development with Britain's concurrent meltdown in Tanzania, the supply situation of Belgian troops in Rwanda and Burundi quickly deteriorated, forcing the Americans and Belgians on the offense against the Congolese Reds in hopes of relieving those two regions. The 1963/1964 Winter Offensive in the Congo would become by far the bloodiest operation of the entire war...
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[1] OTL, he won by about 15%.
[2] OTL, he accepted.