Moise Tshombe
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Moise Kapenda Tshombe (1919-June 29, 1969) was a Congolese politician.
He was the son of a successful businessman was born in Musumba, Congo. He received his education from an American missionary school and later trained as an accountant. In the 1950s he took over a chain of stores in the Katanga province and became involved in politics, founding the CONAKAT party which ran under a banner of an independent, federal Congo.
In the general elections of 1960, CONAKAT won control of the Katanga provincial legislature. That same year the Congo became an independent republic, and in the resulting strife, Tshombe and CONAKAT declared Katanga's secession from the rest of the Congo.
The Christian, anti-communist, pro-Western Tshombe was elected president of Katanga in August of 1960, and declared that "we are seceding from chaos." Favoring continued ties with Belgium, Tshombe asked the Belgian government to send military officers to recruit and train a Katangese army. The Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and his successor Cyrille Adoula requested intervention from United Nations forces, which they received.
When Lumumba was turned over to Katangan officials in early 1961, he was executed. It took the United Nations two years to force Katanga back under Congolese rule.
In 1963, UN forces succeeded in capturing Katanga, forcing Moise Tshombe into exile in Northern Rhodesia, later to Spain. He returned to the Congo to serve in a new Coalition government, but was dismissed from his position the following year by President Kasavabu. In 1966, Prime Minister Joseph Mobutu, who had staged a successful coup against President Joseph Kasavubu a year earlier, brought charges of treason against Tshombe, and he again fled the country, and settled in Spain.
In 1967 he was sentenced to death in absentia. In June, 1967, a plane he was traveling in was hijacked to Algeria, where he was first jailed and then kept until his death from heart failure in 1969.pl:Moise Tshombe sv:Moise Tshombe