BY Mahir Ali
DAWN, 21-09-2011

FIFTY years ago last Sunday, a plane crash in what was then Northern Rhodesia claimed the life of the only secretary general of the United Nations to have died while in office. An official inquiry blamed the tragedy on pilot error.

Not everyone accepted the verdict. Doubts have persisted ever since, and recent revelations support the suspicion that Dag Hammarskjöld’s demise in the heart of Africa was a case of targeted assassination rather than death by misadventure.There are, of course, those who dismiss speculation in this regard as just another 20th-century conspiracy theory. Others concede that the facts may have been obscured, but insist that trying to pursue them half a century later is bound to be a fruitless endeavour.

A great many conspiracy theories are, no doubt, balderdash. It often isn’t difficult, however, to distinguish between those that are purely the product of heated imaginations, and others based on a paucity of accepted facts — especially when it appears that the official version of events leaves plenty of inconvenient questions unanswered.

Hammarskjöld, at the time of his death, was on his fourth mission within 14 months to the profoundly troubled African state of Congo, whose formal independence from Belgium the previous year had been followed by internecine violence and a blatant attempt by the former colonial power to retain its economic interests by supporting secessionists in the country’s resource-rich Katanga province.

The radical nationalist Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba was perceived as the biggest threat to the neocolonial project. Belgian fears in this respect were shared by France, Britain and the United States, and more than one assassination plot was put into action in brief interim between Lumumba’s accession to power and his overthrow by Col Mobutu.

Popular support for Lumumba, not least within the army, meant, however, that the prospect of his return to power could not be written off. The Belgian government persuaded Mobutu to hand him over to Katanga, where he was brutalised and then murdered by secessionist troops and Belgian forces. It took 40 years for Brussels to acknowledge its responsibility for this travesty.

At the UN Security Council, Hammarskjöld denounced the assassination as “a revolting crime against principles for which this organisation stands”, while promising to investigate whether UN forces, whose Congolese intervention had been based on a request from Lumumba’s government, bore partial responsibility for his fate.

Lumumba and Hammarskjöld had not seen eye to eye on the former’s insistence that the UN forces deployed in Congo should consist exclusively of African units. The UN secretary general was also disinclined, however, to ally himself with western interests.

The Swedish economist’s independent streak — which Britain and France had presumably not foreseen when they recommended him for the post in 1953 — also irked Moscow, but was broadly appreciated by the smaller nations that made up the bulk of the UN’s membership.

Hammarskjöld was keen for the blue berets to replace Belgian forces in Katanga, while insisting that UN troops would do nothing to prevent the province from seceding. The rebel leader, Moise Tshombe, could not have failed to realise, however, that his political survival depended on the support he received from Belgium and assorted western mercenaries (nowadays referred to as contractors).

That Tshombe and his multiple backers were implacably hostile to the UN intervention has never been a doubt. On the fateful night of Sept 17-18, Hammarskjöld was flying to Ndola in Northern Rhodesia — then a British colony — for talks with Tshombe.
It was a night flight because of the risk that the plane would be too easy a target in daylight for Katangan rebels.

Last month, Göran Björkdahl — a Swedish aid worker who became interested in the Hammarskjöld saga after discovering that his father, while representing the UN in Zambia in 1975, had been handed a metal plate from the crashed plane — revealed that he had found more than one witness who recalled seeing a smaller aircraft open fire on the secretary general’s transport after the latter had circled the area thrice.

Communications between Hammarskjöld’s plane and the control tower remain shrouded in obscurity. And there has never been any convincing explanation for a comment by the British high commissioner to Rhodesia, Lord Alport, who was present at the airport in Ndola, that Hammarskjöld had changed his mind about landing in Ndola.

His private secretary, Brian Unwin, derided recent claims in a letter to The Guardian — but if there was a British role in the cover-up at the time, as widely suspected, its perpetuation can hardly come as a surprise.

Björkdahl’s thesis appears to be broadly supported by Susan Williams, whose extensive independent investigation has yielded the book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? published earlier this month. Their call for a fresh inquiry — which is certainly feasible while there are witnesses willing to testify, and given that it may well be possible to pick out kernels of the truth from official documents that have hitherto remained secret — deserves to be taken up by the UN.

That this case does not fall into the category of garden-variety conspiracy theories is illustrated by a letter published by two of Hammarskjöld’s better-known aides, Conor Cruise O’Brien and Ivan Smith, back in 1992, in which they contend that “the European industrialists who controlled Katanga” had sent two aircraft to intercept and divert the UN chief’s plane because they did not want him to meet Tshombe; what was intended as a warning shot, however, triggered off the explosions that brought the plane down.

The circumstantial evidence that casts doubt on the official version of events is overwhelming.

Would discovering the whole truth at this late stage matter?

Well, given that the western quest for Third World resources remains as relentless and ruthless as ever, and given that the UN never quite regained its relative potency or independence, a complete picture of what happened 50 years ago would certainly help to fill a crucial gap in the string of events that have brought us to this stage.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com