Who killed Dag Hammarskjold? Sweden calls for new inquiry into 1961 death of UN chief

• On 4 July, four days into his tenure, Lumumba announced that he was raising the salaries of all government employees – except for the military. Congolese officers and soldiers, who hoped their lot would improve after independence, decided to rebel.
• The Congolese politicians who negotiated Congo’s independence were aware of ethnic divisions within the ranks of the military. To ensure a smooth transition to independence, they asked the Belgian government to leave Lieutenant-General Émile Robert Janssens, the Belgian commander of the Congolese armed forces — known as Force Publique – in his post for up to a year. On 5 July, a day after Lumumba’s announcement that the salaries of officers and soldiers would not be raised, Janssens called a meeting of the NCOs of the Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) garrison. When hundreds of NCOs entered the hall where his talk was to be given, they were welcomed by a large banner which read: “Avant l’indépendance = Après l’indépendance” (before independence = after independence). Janssens, an old-school, strict, spit-and-polish officer, proceeded to give a stern talk in which he informed the stunned NCOs that independence notwithstanding, nothing would change for the army, and that everything will continue as before. News of Janssens’s stern lecture – which was perceived by those present as patronizing and, coming from a Belgian officer, inappropriate only a few days after Congo gained its independence – spread quickly, and by 7 June those officers and soldiers who hesitated about joining the mutiny over the issue of pay raise, now joined it in order to remove the White Belgian officers from senior command positions where the government had wanted them to stay.
• Some disaffected soldiers also attacked white residents in Leopoldville and Stanleyville (now Kisangani), resulting in a panic flight of thousands of Belgians and their families. Since Belgian nationals were tightly integrated into Congo’s life and economy – as government officials, engineers, teachers, doctors, business people, farmers, and more — the sudden flight of thousands of them brought the country to a standstill.
• In response to the mutiny by officers and soldiers of the Force Publique, Lumumba decided to disband the force and replace it with a new military formation called the Armée nationale congolaise (ANC). Colonnel Joseph Mobuto was appointed the ANC’s chief of staff with a mandate to “Africanize” the officer corps. Congo, however, continued to disintegrate. By mid-August 1960, only six weeks after independence, there were four separate armies operating in Congo, each in control of a different part of the country: Mobotu’s ANC, numbering about 12,000; the South Kasai Constabulary loyal to Albert Kalonji, with about 3,000 soldiers; the Katanga Gendarmerie, with about 10,000, loyal to the leader of break-away Katanga Moise Tshombe (see below); and a formation of about 8,000 former Force Publique soldiers in the Stanleyville garrison, loyal to Antoine Gizenga.
• Belgian mining interests, led by Union Minière, which had always opposed Congolese independence, saw the growing chaos as an opportunity. Together with elements in the Belgian government which had also opposed Congolese independence, they persuaded Moïse Tshombe, the powerful leader of the mineral-rich Katanga province in south Congo, to announce that Katanga was seceding from Congo. On 11 June, less than two weeks after Congo became an independent country, Katanga, where Belgian and other Western mining concerns held lucrative concessions producing uranium and cobalt, declared its own independence. “We are seceding from chaos,” Tshombe declared, and immediately asked the Belgian government to send military officers to recruit and train a Katangese army. Katanga, which is larger than California, would remain independent until 15 January 1963, when it was recaptured by the Congolese army.

With Congo disintegrating, the economy paralyzed, and a war with break-away Katanga looming, Lumumba was toppled on 14 September 1960, after two-and-half months in office. Colonel Joseph Mobutu, who led the military coup which toppled Lumumba, would continue to rule Congo with an iron fist until he himself was removed from office by east-Congolese rebels on 16 May 1997.

Lumumba would be killed on 17 January 1961 in a remote region of Katanga, in circumstances which are still unclear. Historians have concluded that he was tortured and killed – and his body burned in order to leave no trace — by Belgian or South African mercenaries, but it is not known on whose behalf: Mobuto, who wanted to eliminate a popular rival? Tshombe, who wanted to make sure that the most anti-Katanga Congolese politician was neutralized? Belgian mining interests or the CIA? Both viewed Lumumba either as an outright communist or, at the very least, as a vehicle for the expansion of Soviet influence on the continent.

Which brings us back to then-UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold and his mysterious death.

Mobuto removed Lumumba from power and consolidated his power, but events in Congo were spiraling out of control. A year after Mobuto took power, and with a humanitarian crisis in the country growing, Hammarskjold decided that the UN should become more involved in efforts to negotiate a peaceful end to the secession by Katanga, especially since the toppling of Lumumba on and the rise of Mobuto appeared to offer a way out of the impasse between Lumumba, who favored a tough line toward Katanga, and Kasa-Vubo, who preferred a more conciliatory approach.

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 Katanga’s leader Tshombe, 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.

The New York Times reports that last year, however, 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. The request pointedly called for all member states to release any hitherto unpublished records – the Times notes that this is a reference aimed largely at securing the declassification of American and British files, particularly intercepts thought to have been made at the time by the National Security Agency (NSA).

“This has been an open wound in Sweden for more than fifty years,” the Swedish envoy to the United Nations, Per Thoresson, told Agence France-Presse. “We are anxious to try to make closure.”

Historians say that a definitive explanation of the plane crash would shed light on an important moment in Africa’s history during the cold war.

The fact that no conclusive determination was made as to the circumstances for the crash allowed for all manner of theories to flourished: Was Hammarskjold the victim of an accident, or was he killed? Was he killed in the crash – or did he survive the crash but killed by mercenaries? If he was killed by mercenaries, who paid them to kill him? Was the plane sabotaged – and, if so, who was behind it (note that this is a case of the “usual suspects,” as the list of those with a motive to kill Hammarskjold in September 1961 is identical to the list of those with a motive to kill Lumumba in January 1961): Katanga? Powerful Western mining interests? South Africa? The CIA (Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union to help in arming and training the Congolese military so it could take on Katanga, so some CIA analysts pointed to Tshombe and Katanga as bulwark against the expansion of Soviet influence in Africa)? Perhaps it was Mobuto himself: he took power only four days before Hammarskjold’s planned trip, and the last thing he wanted was a UN meddling in his effort to solidify his control over Congo.

In a report issued in September 2013, a UN panel, led by Stephen Sedley, a retired British judge, referred to evidence of a second airplane flying close to or alongside the DC-6 carrying Hammarskjold.

The report quotes a Belgian former pilot as saying that he had been under orders to force Hammarskjold’s plane to divert to Kolwezi, a mining town in Katanga, and had fired warning shots which accidentally clipped the DC-6 and brought it down.

“The aerial attack claim,” the report said, “is in our judgment capable of proof or disproof.”

The report concluded, moreover, that the United States had access to crucial evidence that could prove to be decisive in unraveling the Hammarskjold mystery.

“It is highly likely that the entirety of the local and regional Ndola radio traffic on the night of 17-18 September 1961 was tracked and recorded by the NSA, and possibly also by the CIA,” the report said.

The report notes that a Freedom of Information Act request to the NSA drew a response that two of three documents it sought “appeared to be exempt from disclosure by reason of ‘top secret’ classification on national security grounds.”

Thoresson, the Swedish ambassador to the UN, last Monday repeated the call for secret documents to be released. The aim, he said, is “to help shed new light on the circumstances surrounding the death of Dag Hammarskjold and those on board his flight, not only by bringing existing documents forward, but also by providing the conditions necessary to finally hear witnesses whose testimony has so far not been given due attention.”

— Read more in The Hammarskjöld Commission: Report of the Commission of Inquiry (The Hague, 9 September 2013; amended on 15 September 2013)