France's Dirty War in Cameroon: The Assassination of Félix-Roland Moumié (I)

By Dibussi Tande

The use of political assassinations against key leaders of liberation movements has had a major impact on the course of history in Africa and the Middle East. Not only have some of the greatest of Third World leaders been killed but so, too, has the hope for political change they embodied - Victoria Brittain [Race & Class, Vol. 48, No. 1, 60-74 (2006)]

Early in October 1960, Dr. Félix-Roland Moumié, the exiled leader of the Camerounian nationalist movement, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, on a mission. On the eve of his return to Conakry (Guinea) where the UPC had set up its headquarters in exile, he was invited to dinner by an individual whom he had met earlier in July in Accra, Ghana. The individual, 66-year old William Bechtel, claimed to be a journalist interested in the UPC’s armed struggle against the French-backed regime of Ahmadou Ahidjo.

But William Bechtel was no ordinary journalist. A former member of the French Foreign Legion and one of the first soldiers to rally De Gaulle’s Free France Forces in London in 1940, he was also a reserve officer in the French secret service, the SDECE. Most importantly, he was a member of the "Main Rouge" (Red Hand), a covet unit within the SDECE charged with assassinating anti-French and pro-independent African nationalists and their supporters in Europe.

According to Richard Belfield in The Assassination Business: A History of State-Sponsored Murder,

Moumie knew he was at risk as the French were running a major assassination programme at the time, targeting and murdering African Nationalists, as well as journalists and academics who supported them (or even wrote about them from anything other than the French government point of view). Moumie believed that while he was in Geneva he would be safe, a big mistake as Swiss neutrality meant nothing to the French.

In their award-winning investigative book on the French secret service titled La Piscine [English version], Roger Faligot and Pascal Krop give a detailed account of the Moumie assassination as narrated to them by General Paul Grossin, the head of the SDECE from 1957 to 1962.

According to Grossin, Moumie showed up for the dinner at the Plat d’argent restaurant on Saturday October 15, 1960 with Jean Martin Tchaptchet, the President of the French section of the UPC. Upon their arrival, Moumie was informed that he had a phone call. Surprised that anyone knew of his whereabouts at that moment, Moumie left the table to answer the phone. Bechtel distracted Tchaptchet with some documents on Cameroon and then poured a lethal dose of Thallium into Moumie’s aperitif. Moumie returned shortly, complaining that no one had answered the phone. He did not touch his aperitif. When it became obvious that Moumie did not intend to drink his aperitif, Bechtel seized on a moment of distraction during diner to pour another dose of Thalium into Moumie’s wine.

This time Moumie literally swallowed the bait.

Bechtel was ecstatic: The poison would take effect only after Moumie arrived in Conakry where the doctors would be unable to figure out what was wrong with him. And, in a classic case of killing two birds with one stone the French expected that Guinea’s rabidly anti-French President, Sekou Toure, would be blamed for Moumie’s death. But things would not go as planned.

According to Belfield,

“It was the first time this particular poison had been used and the French doctors who had made it were incompetent. The poison was poorly refined and did not work in the way it was supposed to. This was just the beginning of the ineptitude of the French: their assassin then administered the wrong dose.”

Krop and Faligot however quote General Grossin as saying that the plan went awry when, just before the end of the dinner, Moumie suddenly picked up his untouched aperitif and drank thereby taking a double dose of the Thalium poison! The poison which had been carefully prepared at the “carsene Mortier” was now too strong, and took effect before Moumie could catch his flight for Conakry. The next day, a very ill Moumie was admitted into the Hôpital Cantonal de Genève where he lived in great pain and agony for two weeks before dying on November 3 1960 at the age of 34.

As a result of the botched operation, the Swiss police quickly realized that Moumie was the victim of foul play. They initially suspected Lilianne F., described either as Moumie’s secretary or as a “woman of the night” with whom he spent his time in Geneva. Their suspicion even extended to Jean Martin Tchaptchet who had accompanied Moumie to the plat d’argent. Eventually their attention turned to Bechtel. The Swiss police found traces of Thalium in Bechtel’s apartment and on his clothes. In spite of this, no arrest was made as the investigation painfully dragged on, ostensibly because of immense political pressure from the French.

Bechtel was ultimately whisked out of Geneva by the French while the Swiss turned a blind eye, and was resettled in Southern France. Switzerland eventually issued an international warrant of arrest for Bechtel. However, no real efforts were made to arrest and bring him to justice. It was some 30 years later that he was “accidentally” arrested in Belgium in 1979 and extradited to France. In 1980 he was set free without a trial after a French judge inexplicably rendered a judgment of nonsuit.

According to Frank Garbely, producer of the acclaimed documentary on the assassination of Moumie which was broadcast on Swiss TV in 2005, the Moumie case was a political hot potato that both France and Switzerland badly wanted to go away.

On the Swiss side, there were fears that the Moumie case would reveal how the allegedly neutral Swiss collaborated with, and covered the tracks of the French secret service  as it persecuted and eliminated african nationalists.

For France the stakes were even higher; an in-depth investigation of the Moumie case would have revealed that the SDECE had carried out an « Operation Homicide » on the nationalist leader, and would have invariably exposed France’s brutal « pacification campaign » in Cameroon, which was being carried out far from the scrutiny of of the international community, distracted at the time by the ongoing Algerian war of Independence.

William Bechtel died in a French military hospital shortly after he was set free without paying for his crime.

So who exactly ordered the hit on Moumie and how high up in the French government did the plot the assassinate Moumie go? That will be the focus of Part II of the Moumie Story.

 

Comments

[SJ]

The French assasination of African nationalists is ongoing, and it also extends to French nationals who sympathise with these Africans.The recent death of Belli Bello, until his passing the Angolan Ambassador to Ivory Coast is being attributed to foul play by the French Secret Services who allegedly poisoned him while he was on a visit to Mali.

Any one, and I encourage all Africans to do so, who reads a book like "Noir Silence" by Verschave or Patrick de Saint-Exupery's accounts of the French role in Rwanda will come to the conclusion that the French government is an Al Queda on the Seine.

But more distrubing in this terrorism by France against Africa, is the complicity of the rest of the so-called civilised world. The Moumie case is paradigmatic of the ungoing understanding that the civilised white cousins extend to each other when they kill these Africans whose lives are worthless in their eyes.

[saba]

It is worthin noting that in cases where Thallium doesn't kill, it leads to chronic fatigue, persistent stomach ache, Parkinsons'type trembling of the body,loss of hair, etc. It is suspected that Yasser Arafat was the victim of thallium poisoning by the Israeli Mossad...

[OMG]

For more on the work of so called French journalists, check THIS out.

[Ambe Johnson]

It seems like the Russians read your article on Moumie - "Ex-Russian Spy Poisoned In London":

(CBS/AP) British police are investigating the near-fatal poisoning of a former Russian spy who has been an outspoken critic of the Kremlin and of his former colleagues in Russia's security agency, authorities said Sunday.
...
A doctor treating Litvinenko told the British Broadcasting Corp. that tests showed he had been poisoned by THALLIUM — a toxic metal found in rat poison.

"He's got a prospect of recovering, he has a prospect of dying," said Dr. John Henry, a clinical toxicologist who treated Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko when he was poisoned by dioxin during his 2004 presidential election campaign.

Henry told the BBC that thallium can cause damage to the nervous system and organ failure, and that just one gram can be lethal.

Friends visiting Litvinenko in hospital said they were shocked by his appearance.

"He looks like a ghost," said Goldfarb. "He's a very fit man, he never smoked, he never drank, he would run five miles a day, but now he has lost all his hair, he has inflammation in the throat, so he cannot swallow."

Litvinenko quit Russia for Britain six years ago and has been an outspoken critic of the Kremlin ever since.

In 2003 he wrote a book, "The FSB Blows Up Russia," accusing his country's secret service agency of staging apartment-house bombings in 1999 that killed more than 300 people in Russia and sparked the second war in Chechnya.

His friends have said they believe Russian authorities could be behind the poisoning. Moscow did not comment on the allegations.

Russian dissident and tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who was at Litvinenko's bedside on Friday, told The Associated Press he suspected Russia's intelligence services were behind the alleged assassination attempt.

"It's not complicated to say who fights against him," Berezovsky said in a telephone interview. "He's (Russian President Vladimir) Putin's enemy, he started to criticize him and had lots of fears."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/19/world/main2199604.shtml

[bandeke]

Many thanks to the internet. That which was hidden has now come to light and will stay in the light. This evil men can no longer hide and proudly boast of their crime. When do we take this french bastards to court in Germany? If they think they can try runsfed, how bout all this old french crocodiles? Why not unless the germans are a bunch of freaking hypocrites like a lot of europeans. They make these laws to catch African savages. Now European abarbarians falling in it.

[Che Sunday]

What gulls me is the continued presence of French troops in Africa. The so called foreign legion are nothing but hardcore criminals who can not be allowed to reside in France. These idiots will kill without remorse. The arial bombardment of the Bamilike people by French troops under Ahidjo qualifies as Genocide. We speak of the Rwandan genocide and trial of those responsible, what about what happened in Burundi on achieving independence? Belgian troops flew extermination missions in the country and killed over 500,000 Hutus to allow Tutsi control of the country managable. They are yet to be tried for that. The assasination of Patrice Lumumba is still a silent issue amongst Western nations. No one has ever owned up.Several years ago, an article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education trying to justify the systematic elimination of Congolese by Belgian authorities. The author claimed that even if they were not killed, malaria was capable of killing just as many. Thus giving an excuse why the Democratic Republic of Congo, as large as it is still has a seemingly small population.
We are fair game, so long as we continue to allow our national interests defined by the Champs Elysee`. When Degaule declared that the question of independent Sub-Saharan African States was not to deliberated on now or the forseable future, it became apparent that France was ready to go to any extent to keep its influence visible in the region. See what they have given us as leaders. The Bongos, Biyas, Bokasas and the Papa Docs.To get France to listen, one must employ Moi Tse Tung's philosophy, i.e, "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

[Che Ndipewah]

France plotted for moumie's death, Moumie fought for justice because he was a nationalist, Moumie's death dislocated the home front of the UPC. Had it been Moumie wasn't poisoned the political history of CAMEROUN would have been different today. Moumie today in Cameroun have been declared a National Hero.