Cover Story Black History Month
insist that the secretary general must have decided “to go elsewhere”? Why did it take until four hours after daybreak to start a search,
On 18 September 1961, the second UN secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld, was killed in a mysterious plane crash in the Zambian town of Ndola. He was on a mission to resolve the crisis that convulsed Congo in the first months of its independence. Britain, Belgium, the USA, South Africa and the white Rhodesians were immediately suspected of murdering him. The Swede, who became secretary general in 1953, had said only the year before that “the hardest thing of all – to die rightly – [is] an exam nobody is spared, and how many pass it?” Did Dag die rightly? In a sensational new investigative book (left), out in London on 13 October, Susan Williams probes the controversy. Below is an extract from the book.
Who killed Hammarskjöld?
B
ETWEEN 10 AND 15 MINUTES AFTER MIDNIGHT ON Monday 18 September 1961, a DC-6B aircraft crashed near the airport of Ndola, a town in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), not far from the Congo border. The plane had flown from Leopoldville
(now Kinshasa) and was taking Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN secretary general, and his entourage, on a mission to try to bring peace to Congo. It was reported that only one of the 16 passengers was found
alive – Harold Julien, chief of security, who died six days later. Questions were asked as strange details of the crash emerged. Given that Ndola air traffic control had seen the plane flying overhead and had granted the pilot permission to land, why did the airport manager close down the airport? Why did Lord Alport, the British high commissioner in Salis- bury (now Harare, the Zimbabwean capital), who was at the airport,
56 | October 2011 | New African
even though local residents, policemen and soldiers reported seeing a great flash of light in the sky shortly after midnight? Why was the missing aircraft not found for a full 15 hours, even
though it was just eight miles away from the airport where it had been expected to land? What about the second plane that had been seen to follow the
secretary general’s aircraft? Why did the survivor refer to an explo- sion before the crash? Why did Hammarskjöld have no burns, when the other victims
were so badly charred? How did he escape the intense blaze, which destroyed 75 to 80 per cent of the fuselage?
Investigations Two days after the crash, the Rhodesian Federal Department of Civil Aviation set up an air accident investigation, as required by the international civil aviation authorities. Te report concluded that the approach to the airport was normal and correct, except that it was about 1,700 feet lower than it should have been. It stated that the evidence available did not allow for a “specific
or definite cause” for the crash, because so much of the aircraft had been destroyed and there was so little information from the single survivor. While it observed that pilot error was a possibility, it was un-
able to rule out the “wilful act of some person or persons unknown which might have forced the aircraft to descend or collide with the trees”. Tis initial investigation was followed by two major public
inquiries. Te first was conducted by a Rhodesian commission, which produced its report in February 1962. It concluded that the crash was an accident, caused by pilot error. Te second major public inquiry was conducted by a UN com-
mission. Unlike the Rhodesian inquiry, it delivered an open verdict on the cause of the crash when it produced its report in April 1962. It argued that, as no special guard was provided for the plane
prior to its departure from Leopoldville airport, an unauthorised approach to the aircraft for purposes of sabotage “cannot be ex- cluded”: although the doors were said to have been locked when the plane was parked at Leopoldville, access was possible to the hydraulic compartment, the heating system, and the undercarriage. Te commission added that it “cannot exclude attack as a pos-
sible cause of the crash”. Concern was expressed at the delay in the search and rescue procedures, particularly since the plane crashed not far from an airfield on which 18 Rhodesian military aircraft, capable of carrying out an air search, were stationed. Controversy over the cause of the crash continued. Tirty years
later, international interest was revived by a letter written to the British newspaper, Te Guardian, on 9 November 1992 by two former UN officials, George Ivan Smith and Conor Cruise O’Brien. Te heading of the letter made its contents clear – Hammarskjöld plane crash ‘no accident’. In order to investigate Smith and O’Brien’s findings, the
Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs authorised a further in- quiry into the crash. The inquiry, which was a small-scale investigation, was conducted by Bengt Rosio, formerly the Swedish consul and head of mission in the Congo in the early
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