The question of who killed Patrice Lumumba is a complicated one. It is unlikely that any parties from outside of the Congo would claim resonibility for a part of his assasination or even any support that they may have secretly showed if they had any involvement. Because of this, it is best to examine various sources and to look at similar actions from these parties that could also have taken place in the Congo. Unsurprisingly, if there was any country that could be suspected of having a part in the death of Patrice Lumumba it would be the United States. We know from once top-secret CIA documents that during the early 1960's the CIA considered the Congo's government to be weak but also mentioned that Lumumba had accepted financial aid from sources that were communist and that Lumumba's enemies felt the the U.S should check "communist forces" in the Congo. We also know that Nikita Kruschev acknowledged the Congo's struggle and that the U.S.S.R publicly announced some support for the Congo. From this evidence we can see that during this time, the U.S knew that Congo had the support of the Soviets and that the Soviets were making no attempt to hide that support. Not long before this the U.S had been involved in the Korean War and was at the moment involved in the Vietnam war, all to stop communism from spreading. Based off of this, it is not too far to assume that even if the U.S was not directly involved in the assassination of Lumumba, they may have supported Mobutu Sese Seko. The United States went to great lengths to try and stop the spread of communism in Asia which means that the assassnation of a Soviet friendly Lumumba and the installation of a new leader would have taken comparativly little effort. Although Lumumba's assassination may have seemed to be only so that Sese Seko could take power, Lumumba may well have been another chess piece that the U.S felt they needed to take out in order to stop the spread of communism.
When it comes to the circumstances surrounding Lumumba's death, more countries were involved than just the United States. Another key country in his death happened to be Belgium, the very country that the Congo had just gained their independance from. It was mentioned earlier that parties would be unlikely to claim responsibility for involvement but for Belgium this was not the case. We know this because in the late 1990's an investigation in Belgium concluded that they had some responsibility in the death of Patrice Lumumba. They confirmed that there was a distrust between their government and Lumumba and that public opinion was harshly opposed to events in the Congo after independance. They also brought up the fact that they were worried about economic losses that crisis in the Congo would cause. Undoubtedly, Belgium's withdrawl from the Congo did not go how they had planned which, paired with a leader who was not keen to trust them meant that was not all too keen on them would have meant that they needed to come up with a solution for their newfound Congo problem. This of course ended up being to push for Lumumba's downfall politically. In their eyes, the only way to fix what they started was to either bring about either his political faliure or his death. We now know that they went with the latter of the two options. It is as Lumamba said in his final letter to his wife:
"Our country's right to an honorable life [and] unrestricted independence goes against the wishes of Belgian colonialism and its Western allies"
After seeing all this evidence of involvement from countries outside of the Congo in the death of Patrice Lumumba, it is clear that he was assassinated because in the eyes of the west, he had chosen to accept the help of the U.S.S.R, or in other words, "the bad guys," further contributing to the spread of communism, which the leaders of the Soviet Union may have had in mind when they made the decision to offer help to the Congo. In the years following the death of Lumumba, whether it was Mobutu Sese Seko or another leader who took control of the Congo, things would have gone vastly different in the Congo than they would have had Lumumba not faced such opposition from other nations. Even if he was willing to accept the help of the Soviets, Patrice Lumumba had a vision of a better Congo that he was devoted to. When the UN gave the Congo little attention it seems that he did what he had to to try and improve his country. Although we cannot turn back time and undo the damage done by Sese Seko, hopefully the Congo can get to a point where it reflects Lumuba's vision somewhere in the future.
