Cover stories
'History will one day have its say'
Finally the chickens are coming home to roost. Thirty-nine years after the Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba was assassinated on 17 January 1961, the truth is finally emerging. A book based on newly declassified Belgian archives has firmly pinned Belgium in the dock. The revelations, including the fact that Lumumba's body was cut into pieces and doused in sulphuric acid to erase the evidence, are so startling that the Belgian parliament decided on 9 December 1999 to set up a commission of inquiry into Lumumba's death and Belgium's responsibility in it. A can of worms, likely to touch Washington, is about to be opened, writes our Brussels correspondent, Francois Misser.