African securityWho killed Dag Hammarskjold? Sweden calls for new inquiry into 1961 death of UN chief
One of the most intriguing, and unresolved, questions in contemporary African history – and in the history of the cold war – is: How and why did UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold die on 18 September 1961? More often than not, people more directly ask: Who killed Hammarskjold? On 18 September 1961, Hammarskjold boarded a DC-6 airplane to fly to Ndola, a mining town in Zambia, which at the time was called Northern Rhodesia, for a meeting with Mois Tshombe, the leader of mineral-rich Congolese province of Katanga. A year earlier, Tshombe announced that Katanga was seceding from the newly independent Congo. Hammarskjold was flying to meet Tshombe in an effort to negotiate a peaceful resolution of the conflict between Congo and Katanga – but he never made it. The plane crashed in a heavily forested terrain a few miles from the Ndola airport. Different inquiries conducted in the following fifty years into the reasons for and circumstances of the crash were inconclusive. Last year a United Nations panel concluded that there was “persuasive evidence that the aircraft was subjected to some form of attack or threat as it circled to land at Ndola.” Last Monday, Sweden – Hammarskjold was a Swede — formally asked the UN General Assembly to reopen the investigation into his death.
One of the most intriguing, and unresolved, questions in contemporary African history – and in the history of the cold war – is: How and why did UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold die on 18 September 1961?
More often than not, people more directly ask: Who killed Hammarskjold?
To answer the question, we should go back to 1960, the year Congo gained its independence from Belgium.
In negotiations in Brussels January 1960 over the steps toward independence, the Belgian government and Congolese politicians agreed that the elections for the first Congolese parliament, and the swearing in of a new government, would take place in the weeks leading up to independence, so that when Congo officially became an independent country, on 30 June 1960, it would already have a governmental structure in place.
The elections for the first parliament of an independent Congo were held, under Belgian supervision, from 11 to 25 May 1960. The winner of the election was 34-year old Patrice Lumumba, the leader of the left-leaning, urban-based Mouvement national congolais (MNC). He was sworn in as Congo’s first prime minister on 24 June 1960. The second largest party to emerge from the election was the ethnically based Alliance des Bakongo (ABAKO) – supported mostly of tribes living along the Congo River – whose leader, Joseph Kasa-Vubo was sworn in the next day as the first president of independent Congo.
On 30 June 1960 Congo became an independent country, and Lumumba and Kasa-Vubo assumed their posts.
It did not take long for troubles to emerge – in fact, it took less than a week. Five developments combined to plunge Congo into chaos and violence within days of independence:
