From: Consortium News
By Lisa Pease
Exclusive: More than a half-century ago – at a
pivotal moment in the emergence of independent African states – UN
Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold was brokering peace in a divisive
civil war in Congo when he died in a plane crash, leaving behind an
enduring Cold War mystery, as Lisa Pease reports.
Fifty-two years ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane
carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down
in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but
the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious.
There have been three investigations into the crash: an initial civil
aviation Board of Inquiry, a Rhodesian Commission of Inquiry, and a UN
Commission in 1962. Not one of them could definitively answer why the
plane crashed or whether a deliberate act had been responsible.
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| United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. |
While a few authors have looked into and written about the strange
facts of the crash in the years since the last official inquiry in 1962,
none did a more thorough reinvestigation than Dr. Susan Williams, a
Senior Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University
of London, whose book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? was released in 2011, 50 years after the crash.
Her presentation of the evidence was so powerful it launched a new UN
commission to determine whether the UN should reopen its initial
investigation. “It is a fact,” the current Commission wrote in its
report, “that none of these inquiries was conducted to the standard to
which a modern inquiry into a fatal event would be conducted….”
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