Associated Press, by Lynn Heinzerling

Editor's Note: Lynn Heinzerling, veteran AP foreign correspondent who has spent the last three years in Africa, was in the midst of Wednesday's Belgian attack on the Congolese-held airport at Leopoldville. This is his eyewitness account.

Leopoldville, The Congo (AP) -- "I'm tired of waiting," declared Col. Roger Adolphe Gheysen, his face white with anger. "I am going to move into the airport right now."

And with that, the commanding officer of Belgian forces in riot-torn Leopoldville ordered his paratroopers to take over the city's airport from soldiers of the multitudinous Congo army.

Congolese troops had moved into the airport at 6 a.m. They spread out, posting guards around the field. Several with bayonets stood in the waiting room of the airport terminal where some 200 white refugees were sleeping on floors or wherever they could find room. Children played on the floor.

The Negro troops, about 200, made no attempt to interfere with the movements of refugees. But when a Belgian military plane landed with two wounded soldiers from Kitona the Congolese refused to let the Belgians take care of them. Instead, they put them under guard in the airport dispensary.

That, declared Gheysen, was the last straw. The paratroopers were ordered to move in by automobile from a camp on the outskirts of Leopoldville.

At 10:12 shots rang out. Congolese guards ran to take up positions. Belgian paratroopers burst through the front door of the terminal and began firing.

Women and children were ordered to lie on the floor, as rifle bullets ricocheted off walls, exploding fragments of plaster. Submachine gun fire rattled in the cavernous building. A hand grenade tossed into a stairway by a paratrooper, after fleeing Congolese, clipped the top off a small palm tree and brought down a shower of plaster and chipped marble.

Women moaned and screamed but the children were strangely silent.

Dolls and toy engines were scattered about. Some were stained with blood.

Friendly Congolese who had taken refuge in the terminal building huddled together with whites. A Congolese boy with a Red Cross band on his arm dodged about carrying bandages and disinfectant to Belgian Red Cross workers.

A thoughtful clerk barricaded a group of women and children behind a pile of suitcases.

From a balcony of the airport window I could see the whole action. Three Congolese were trapped on a staircase trying to get out of the terminal building. They fired their rifles wildly. Other paratroopers cornered several Negro soldiers on the roof of the airport building. There was an exchange of gunfire.

Associated Press photographer Jean Jacques Levy was caught on a stairway in a near-fatal rundown when two opposing groups suddenly met head on. Levy managed to dive clear just before gunfire opened up.

Most of the shooting was in and around the big terminal building. With that building secured, the paratroopers fanned out over the airfield.

A lone jeep with a mounted machine gun drove out on the field, Congolese troops scattered in all directions. A handful of paratroopers rounded up about 50 Negro soldiers. At first they refused to surrender their arms. A Belgian officer told them he would give just so much time to make up their minds. He began to count. The Congolese quickly handed over their weapons.

Other Congolese troops fled in panic to fields beyond the airfield.

About 500 paratroopers who had been held on a standby basis took part in the operation. Others later were flown in from a base at Kitona.

The operation was completed just 48 minutes after it started. One Congolese soldier was killed, another was wounded seriously and three Belgian civilians -- two women and a man -- suffered slight wounds.

At 11 a.m. the Rev. Ferdinand Moreau, a chaplain, walked into the terminal. He looked at the tangled masses of women and children huddled on the floor.

"It's all finished," he said. "You can stand up."

Editor's Note: Since the Belgian Congo became an independent republic a little over a month ago, AP correspondent Lynn Heinzerling has been on the scene covering that African nation's travail and trouble. In the following article, he analyzes some of the causes of Congo's birth pains and the problems it now faces.

Leopoldville, the Congo (AP) -- The Congo came perilously close to exchanging a thin veneer of civilization for a return to the tom-tom and tribal life of the 19th Century.

In the heady days which followed independence June 30, it would not have taken much of a spark to set off a truly catastrophic racial explosion.

The bullying, the assaults, the harassment and the violence against the whites if continued might have been fatal to the new republic.

Only the swift and timely intervention of the United Nations saved the situation. And the United Nations now has one of the most formidable jobs in its history on its hands.

The new republic is a state on which the Belgians for 80 years tried to fit western civilization from the top. It penetrated only one very thin layer and this only imperfectly.

More than 80 per cent of the Congolese still live as their ancestors did in the bush, respecting the ancient superstitions and hating the neighboring tribe.

Independence had barely begun when the Bakongo and Bayaka tribesmen in the proudly modern city of Leopoldville were cracking each other's skulls and burning each other's shacks/

There was hardly a pause in the deadly warfare between the Lulua and Baluba tribesmen in Kasai Province to note the independence ceremonies. The Baluba now are reported in full flight before their enemies, with hundreds of casualties in the remote bush country.

What went wrong with the birth of this new African nation, so rich in natural resources, so poor in wisdom and statesmanship.

In the first place Belgium, apparently intent on long and profitable exploitation of the Congo, made no effort to develop leaders among the Congoese. There are only a handful of Congolese university graduates -- no doctors, no engineers, no lawyers, no accountants. There was no attempt to develop a national consciousness.

When the day of freedom came and the more aggressive of the long-repressed Congolese felt the urge to turn the stick on the white man, there was no authority they respected, no single black man they would follow.

Ministers, including Premier Patrice Lumumba, who toured the city trying to restore order, were booed and derided.

It is to the credit of Lumumba and President Joseph Ksasvubu that they saw the danger and called for United Nations intervention.

But before the United Nations could act, the new nation lost many priceless assets -- teachers, missionaries, technicians, businessmen, doctors, lawyers and engineers. And on the deeply human side, practically all the white women and children.

There were 10,000 Europeans in the government service last year. Even with the Africanization of the service it was felt that 5,000 would be required to keep the government wheels rolling. Now it is estimated that only 1,500 remain, and many of them are thinking of leaving.

The Congolese simply do not have the educated, experienced men to handle administration of such a huge operation.

Shops, factories and stores closed as owners and operators fled from the danger which threatened. In some cases the fears were justified; in others the only explanation was panic. The number of debts left behind is incalculable, and bankruptcy will be the result for many.

The Post Office, which keeps the Congo in contact with the rest of the world, is down to a minimum of white technicians, and they are not happy.

Hundreds of plantations whose coffee, palm oil, cotton and other products provide nearly half the Congo's export revenue, lie untended, with the bush beginning to creep over them.

Katanga's rich copper mines are operating, but the province is toying with the idea of secession and independence. Many mines, including the rich diamond diggings in other provinces, are closed down.

Thousands of Congolese -- the exact number is unknown because there is no one to keep track -- are out of work. Some are drifting back to their tribes in the bush. Others are brooding angrily in the cities on the bitter disappointment of independence which promised so much.

They may not even be able to send their children to school unless hundreds of teachers and missionaries return to their posts.

The missionaries, the teachers, the technicians will long remember their time of terror or humiliation -- the bayonet pointed at the chest, the submachine gun laid carelessly on the baby's cot, the brusque frisking for weapons.

It is a situation made to order for Communist penetration, but the speedy action by the United Nations has given the non-Communist world a little more time.