Dag Hammarskjöld in retrospect

Jehangir Hussain

Jehangir Hussain

Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld, Swedish economist and diplomat, was the 2nd secretary-general of the United Nations.

At age 47, in 1953, he was elected as the UN secretary-general to serve his first term.

He remains the youngest ever UN secretary-general.

He was born in 1905 and died in 1961, in a mysterious plane crash when he was on his way to resolve a diplomatic crisis.

The plane crash cut short his 2nd term as the UN secretary-general when he was on his way to take part in the cease-fire negotiations to end the Congo crisis.

His tenure was characterized by efforts to strengthen the newly created UN internally as well as externally.

He took initiatives to improve the UN’s morale and efficiency to make it more responsive to burning post World War II international issues and crises.

He chaired the creation of the first UN peacekeeping forces in Egypt and the Congo, and personally intervened to defuse and resolve diplomatic crises.

For his untiring efforts to resolve various global crises, he was the only posthumous recipient of Novel Peace Prize.

He is considered one of the two best UN secretaries-general, along with his successor U Thant of Burma, now Myanmar.

US President John F Kennedy described Hammarskjöld  as ‘the greatest statesman of our century.’

The fourth and youngest son of Swedish prime minister  from 1914 to 1917, Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, Dag Hammarskjöld was born in Jonkoping, Sweden, to the noble  Hammarskjöld  family and he spent most of his childhood in his family home Uppsala Castle.

In 1930, Hammarskjöld took his Licentiate of Philosophy and Master in Law from the Uppsala University.

Before completing his law degree he had already obtained a job as Assistant Secretary of the Unemployment Committee.

From 1930 to 1934, Hammarskjöld was Secretary of a governmental committee on unemployment.

During this time he wrote his economics thesis, ‘Konjunkturspridningen’ ‘The Spread of the Business Cycle’ for which  received a doctorate from Stockholm Universitry.

In 1936, he became a secretary of Riksbank,  Sweden's central bank and from 1941 to 1948, he served as chairman of its General Council.

Hammarskjöld quickly developed a successful career as a Swedish public servant. He was state secretary in the Ministry of Finance 1936–1945, Swedish delegate to the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation from 1947 to1953, cabinet secretary for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1949–1951 and minister without portfolio from 1951 to 1953.

He helped coordinate government plans to solve the post-World War II economic problems  and was a delegate to the Paris conference that established the Marshall Plan.

In 1950, he became head of the Swedish delegation to UNISCAN , the post World War forum to promote economic cooperation between the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries.

Hammarskjöld served in a Swedish cabinet dominated by the Social Democrats, but  he never  joined any political party.

In 1951, Hammarskjöld was vice chairman of the Swedish delegation to the UN General Assembly in Paris.

He became the chairman of the Swedish delegation to the UN General Assembly in New York in 1952.

In 1954, he was elected to take his father's vacated seat in the Swedish Academy.

In 1952, the first UN secretary-general Trygve Lie  resigned , negotiations ensued between the Western powers and the Soviet Union, without reaching an agreement on his successor.

In March 1953, the Security Council voted on four candidates and Lester B Pearson of Canada was the lone candidate to receive the required majority, but he was vetoed by the Soviet Union.

At a consultation of the permanent members on 30 March 1953, French ambassador Henri Hoppenot suggested four candidates, including Hammarskjöld, whom he had met at the Organisation for European Cooperation.

The superpowers were looking for a secretary-general who would be interested only in  administrative issues and stay away from political issues.

Hammarskjöld's reputation at the time was, ‘ a brilliant economist, an unobtrusive technician, and an aristo-bureaucrat’, in the words of his biographer Emery Kelèn.

So,  there was  no controversy to elect him as the 2nd UN secretary-general.

Soviet permanent representative, Valerian Zorin found Hammarskjöld ‘harmless’.

Zorin declared that he would be voting for Hammarskjöld, to the surprise of the Western powers, setting off hectic diplomatic activity.

British foreign secretary Anthony Eden,  strongly in favour of Hammarskjöld, requested the US to ‘induce the Nationalist China to  abstain’ as Sweden had recognized the People's Republic of China and faced a potential veto from Formosa.

The US State Department, completely surprized over Hammarskjold’s  nomination, started  to find out who Mr. Hammarskjold was and what his qualifications were.

The State Department authorized, US ambassador to UN, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.,  to vote for  Hammarskjöld after he informed that he ‘may be as good as we can get’.

On April 1, 1953, when a reporter told Hammarskjöld in Stockholm: ‘We understand you've been designated Secretary-General of the United Nations’ he replied, ‘This April Fool's Day joke is in extremely bad taste: it's nonsense!’

On March 31, 1953, the UN Security Council voted 10-0-1 to recommend Hammarskjöld to the General Assembly, with Nationalist China abstaining.

Shortly after midnight on April 1, 1953, Hammarskjöld was awakened by a telephone call from a reporter  with the news, he again dismissed the news  as an April Fool’s Day joke.

But he believed the news after a third phone call from the Swedish mission in New York confirmed the nomination at 3 AM and a communique from the Security Council was soon thereafter delivered to him.

After consulting with the Swedish cabinet and his father, Hammarskjöld decided to accept the nomination.

In his  wire to the Security Council,  Hammarskjöld wrote,

‘With strong feeling personal insufficiency I hesitate to accept candidature but I do not feel I could refuse to assume the task imposed on me should the UN General]Assembly follow the recommendation of the Security Council by which I feel deeply honoured.

Later in the day Hammarskjöld held a press conference at the Swedish Foreign Ministry, where he displayed a deep interest and knowledge in the affairs of the UN, which he had never shown  before.

The U.N. General Assembly voted 57-1-1 on 7 April 1953 to elect Hammarskjöld as the 2nd secretary-general of the United Nations and he was sworn in on April 10, 1953.

He was unanimously re-elected  September 26, 1957 for the 2nd  term, that began on April10,  1958.

Immediately following the assumption of the Secretariat, Hammarskjöld establish good rapport with his UN  staff.

He visited  every UN department and shook hands with as many staff  as possible, ate in the cafeteria as often as possible, and relinquished the secretary-general's elevator for general use.

He began his term by establishing his own secretariat of 4,000 administrators and setting up regulations that defined their responsibilities.

He took active interest in smaller projects relating to the UN working environment and built  a meditation room at the UN headquarters for people to withdraw and spend time in silence, regardless of their faith, creed, or religion.

During his term, Hammarskjöld tried to improve relations between Israel and the Arab states.

In 1955, he visited  China to negotiate the release of 11 captured US pilots who had served in the Korean War.

In 1956, he  established the UN Emergency Force  and in the same year, he intervened to resolve the Suez Crisis.

He is credited for allowing participation of the Holy See  the United Nations, in the same  year.

In 1960, the newly independent Congo sought UN assistance in defusing the Congo Crisis.

Hammarskjöld made four trips to Congo, but his efforts toward the decolonisation of Africa were considered insufficient by the Soviet Union and in September 1960, the Soviet Union t denounced his decision to send a UN emergency force to keep the peace.

The Soviet Union demanded his resignation and his replacement by a three-member committee, ‘the Troika’  with a built-in veto, with the objective of equal representation of three group of countries: capitalist, socialist and recently independent, according to the memoirs of  Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

On 18 September 1961, Hammarskjöld was on his way to negotiate a cease-fire between the United Nations Operation in the Congo forces and the Katangese troops led by  Moise Tsombe.

His Douglas DC-6 airliner crashed near Nodla, Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia.

Hammarskjöld died in  the crash, as did all the 15 other passengers.

Hammarskjöld's death set off a succession crisis at the United Nations.

The circumstances of the crash are still an unresolved mystery, as there is evidence thatsting the plane was shot down.

A CIA report blamed the Soviet intelligence agency KGB for the crash.

The day after the crash, the then US president Harry Truman said that Hammarskjöld ‘was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said 'when they killed him'.

In 1998, documents surfaced suggesting CIA, British intelligence agency MI6 and/or Belgian mining interest were involved via a South African paramilitary organization.

The information, contained in a file of the South African National Intelligence agency was provided to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in connection with the 1993 assassination of Chris Hani, the leader of the South African Communist Party.

These documents included an alleged plot to ‘remove’ Hammarskjöld were contained in  a supposed statement of CIA director Allen Dulles, ‘Dag is becoming troublesome … and should be removed.’

Hammarskjöld's mission to end the war over the mineral-rich Katangese secession from the newly independent Republic of Congo was contrary to the interests of those organizations. However these documents were copies and not the originals.

Göran Björkdahl, a Swedish aid worker whose father worked for the UN in Zambia, wrote in 2011 that he believed Hammarskjöld's death was a murder committed, in part, to benefit mining companies like Union Miniere after Hammarskjöld had made the UN intervene in the Katanga crisis.

Björkdahl based his assertion on the basis of  interviews with witnesses of the plane crash near the border between the Congo and Zambia and on archival documents.

In 2013 accident investigator Sven Hammarberg was asked by the International Commission of Jurists to investigate Hammarskjöld's death.

In 2014, newly declassified documents revealed that the American ambassador to the Congo sent a cable to Washington DC warning that the plane could have been shot down by Belgian mercenary pilot Jan van Risseghem, commander of the small Katanga Air Force.

Risseghem died in 2007.

On 16 March 2015, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon appointed members to an Independent Panel of Experts to examine new information related to Hammarskjöld's death. The three-member panel, led by Mohamed Chande Othman,  the Chief Justice of Tanzania, included Kerryn Macaulay, Australian  representative to the International Civil Aviation Authority and Henrik Larsen, a ballistics expert from the Danish National Police.

The panel's 99-page report, released on July 6, 2015,suggests that Hammarskjöld's plane was already on fire as it landed.

In 2016, the original documents from the 1998 South African investigation surfaced and those familiar with the investigations  cautioned that even if authentic, the documents could have been doctored as part of a disinformation campaign.

In 2019, the documentary film Cold Case Dag Hammarskjöld by Danish filmmaker Mads Brugger claimed that Jan van Risseghem had told a friend that he shot down Hammarskjöld's plane.

Aa copy of the oath of office Hammarskjöld carried , since he became UN secretary-general,  was found at the crash site.

Hammarskjöld's only book, Vagmarken, Markings, or more literally Waymarks, was published in 1963, a  collection of his diary reflections, beginning 1925, when he was 20 and ending a month before his death in 1961 with a foreword by his friend and poet W H Auden.

The diary was found in his New York house, after his death, along with an undated letter addressed to then Swedish Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Leif Belfrage.

After Hammarskjöld's death, U.S. president John F. Kennedy regretted that he had opposed the UN policy in the Congo and said: ‘I realise now that in comparison to him, I am a small man. He was the greatest statesman of our century.’

In 2011, The Financial Times wrote that Hammarskjöld has remained the benchmark against which later UN Secretaries-General have been judged.

jehangirh01@gmail.com