The Guardian has an interesting article from a chapter of history about which I had previously known nothing. In 1961, Dag Hammarskjold was the UN Secretary General when his plane went down over northern Rhodesia on his way to peace talks about a rebellion in the Katanga region.
According to the article, the plane crash was chalked up to operator error at the time. But, it appears that the investigation was suspiciously cursory and that there is fairly good evidence that the plane was, in fact, shot down. Hammarskjold had pissed off just about everyone in the world already; and these peace talks were particularly unpopular in some quarters.
The investigation led Björkdahl to previously unpublished telegrams – seen by the Guardian – from the days leading up to Hammarskjöld’s death on 17 September 1961, which illustrate US and British anger at an abortive UN military operation that the secretary general ordered on behalf of the Congolese government against a rebellion backed by western mining companies and mercenaries in the mineral-rich Katanga region.
Hammarskjöld was flying to Ndola for peace talks with the Katanga leadership at a meeting that the British helped arrange. The fiercely independent Swedish diplomat had, by then, enraged almost all the major powers on the security council with his support for decolonisation, but support from developing countries meant his re-election as secretary general would have been virtually guaranteed at the general assembly vote due the following year.
Looks like maybe some truly hardball politics was at work there. Anyway, nice, long article for those of you interested in such things.
Let’s not dwell too much on Hammarskjöld’s plane crash—whether by accident or design—as it doesn’t really matter who gave the initial order or shot the last bullet. We should, instead, be asking what Hammarskjöld achieved with his life; what he managed to fulfill before he died? Already before his death he’d written to himself: “Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.” http://www.knotofstone.com/blog/