Shortly after midnight on September 18, 1961, sixty years ago, the radio tower of the city of Ndola, in the then Northern Rhodesia, that is, present-day Zambia, communicated for the last time with the pilots of a Douglas DC-6. of the Swedish charter company Transair. The plane had just begun landing maneuvers. A few minutes after one in the morning he crashed into the forest near the city. It is difficult to know the exact time because the searches began only ten hours later. When rescuers arrived at the crash site, near the wreck of the DC-6 they found the body of Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN secretary general. For reasons that were never entirely clear, Hammarskjöld had an ace of spades tucked into his shirt collar.
Sixty years later, Hammarskjöld’s death is still a controversial case and many of the experts who have dealt with this affair refuse to consider him the victim of an accident.
Dag Hammarskjöld, born in 1905 in Jönköping, a city in southern Sweden, became the UN Secretary General in April 1953. Those were rather difficult times for diplomacy: the Korean War was in its final phase and the Cold War was a reality, the end of colonialism was imminent and the situation in the Middle East was rather delicate. When he became secretary general, Hammarskjöld worked to give the UN more autonomy, with its own administration and a stable group of officials, and powers to intervene during international crises.
To show that this policy would have been far-sighted and decisive in delicate diplomatic situations, Hammarskjöld dealt personally with negotiations and negotiations: he dealt with the release of US prisoners during the Korean War, he sent UN forces to prevent the crisis from escalating. Suez and also intervened in the Hungarian uprising of 1956. He also supported the decolonization process, upholding the rights of small nations seeking independence and thus attracting much criticism from Western countries.
Dag Hammarskjöld (third from left) arrives in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, Congo, for the peace mission (AFP / Getty Images)
–
When his plane crashed, Hammarskjöld was negotiating a ceasefire between the Congo, which became independent of Belgium in 1960, and the Katanga province in the southeast of the country, which had declared itself independent in the same year. Katanga’s independence was supported by Belgian soldiers with the interest of European mining companies. Moise Tshombe, the secessionist leader of Katanga, rejected the proposal to replace the Belgian soldiers with those of the UN: in fact, he feared losing military support for the secession. The government of Congo, on the other hand, was supported by the Soviet Union, which declared itself dissatisfied with the role assumed by the UN. In 1961, Hammarskjöld went to southern Africa to meet with stakeholders and negotiate a ceasefire.
At 6 pm on September 17, the plane carrying the UN secretary and fifteen other people on board left the Congo capital, Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), to reach Ndola, in the southeast, where it was supposed to meet the secessionist leader Tshombe. The only survivor of the crash that occurred shortly after 1am was Harold Julian, a bodyguard, who died three days later. Before he died, Julian had told authorities that before the crash there had been an explosion in the plane. A few weeks after his death, Dag Hammarskjöld was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The wreck of the plane on which Hammarskjöld flew (Photo by Central Press / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
–
In the decades that followed, Hammarskjöld’s death spawned an incredible amount of conspiracy theories according to which, depending on the case, he would be killed by gunfire from a person hired by the CIA or American ground troops, by a Belgian pilot who claimed to shot down the plane, or by a South African mercenary who allegedly shot him in the head after he survived the crash.
The UN official who first identified his body swore that Hammarskjöld had a bullet-sized hole in his forehead. However, the autopsy, during which an X-ray of Hammarskjöld’s body was also taken, did not confirm this thesis. The UN also discarded a number of other theories, such as the reconstruction that an alleged South African mercenary named Swanepoel boasted that he participated in the murder while he was drunk.
Even today, the incident remains controversial for at least two reasons. The first is the lack of evidence. Only 20 percent of the plane could be examined because the remaining 80 percent had been destroyed. Furthermore, the investigations were conducted with a certain superficiality: many of the people who had witnessed the crash were not heard.
In 2011 the Guardian published the conclusions of a Swedish aid worker, Göran Björkdahl, who in the previous three years had interviewed alleged eyewitnesses of the disaster who lived in neighboring villages. According to Björkdahl, the testimonies and other elements he uncovered would prove that a second plane shot down the DC-6 carrying Hammarskjöld, and that the Rhodesian army intervened in the disaster area hid the evidence and delayed rescue.
In 2016, the UN reopened the investigation into Hammarskjöld’s death. In a first relationship he called the presence of a second aircraft “plausible” and suggested asking the governments involved to demonstrate that they had carried out thorough checks of the flight logs. An investigation by Associated Press published in 2011 from Washington Post he argues instead that the most likely cause of the crash was a pilot error due to fatigue.
In May 2015, an American, Paul Abram – who claims to have served at an NSA listening post in Heraklion, Greece – told the UN expert group that he had heard a radio interception on the night of the death of Hammarskjöld, in which a non-American person with a heavy accent said: “The Americans just shot down a UN plane.”
(AFP/Getty Images)
–
The second reason for the controversy is related to the abundance of enemies that Hammarskjöld had made in the course of his career. In those years there was a notable movement of intelligence agents from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and West Germany in the Congo. The country had enormous mineral wealth, largely concentrated in the province of Katanga, where, among other things, uranium was mined, essential for the development of nuclear weapons. The United States feared that UN intervention in Africa would hand over dominance of the continent to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, thought that Hammarskjöld was a Western stooge.
Hammarskjöld’s work was very important in defining and expanding the roles and tasks of the UN Secretary General and the organization itself. The decisiveness of his leadership, recalls his main biographer Brian Urquhart, “has never been equaled”: it is an even more remarkable merit in a historical period that was very complex and dangerous.
–
