Dag Hammarskjöld: a defiant pioneer of global diplomacy who died in a mystery plane crash

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Binoy Kampmark, RMIT UniversityThis piece is part of a new series in collaboration with the ABC’s Saturday Extra program. Each week, the show will have a “who am I” quiz for listeners about influential figures who helped shape the 20th century, and we will publish profiles for each one. You can read the other pieces in the series here.

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The idea of a global institution has captivated thinkers since Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. But a body set up to create and maintain world peace and security needs the right people to make it work.

When the United Nations was created in 1945, old sentiments — seen in the disbanded League of Nations — threatened to prevail. Would the UN and its leadership simply comply with the great powers of the day?

Dag Hammarskjöld was the UN’s second secretary-general from 1953 to 1961. He showed that defiant independence in this role was possible.

Political upbringing

Hammarskjöld was born in Jönköping in south-central Sweden in 1905, the fourth son of Sweden’s first world war prime minister Hjalmar Hammarskjöld.

In 1953, he reflected on his family’s influence on his career.

From generations of soldiers and government officials on my father’s side I inherited a belief that no life was more satisfactory than one of selfless service to your country — or humanity.

After doing degrees covering literature, linguistics, history, economics and law, he entered the Swedish civil service in 1930, ending up in Ministry for Foreign Affairs. In the late 1940s he represented Sweden at the newly formed United Nations.

A new secretary-general

In 1953, he succeeded Norway’s Trgve Lie as UN secretary-general — easily securing enough votes for the job. At this point, the international state system was in crisis. The Cold War and the Iron Curtain threatened the paralyse the entire organisation.

Hammarskjöld’s approach and lasting legacy was to develop the secretary-general’s political role. He took executive action, which filled power vacuums as the colonial system broke apart after the second world war.

Two concepts underpinned this approach. The first was intervention to maintain international order — thereby transforming the UN from a static international body to a more engaged one.

These interventions including “preventative diplomacy” – trying to stem conflict from developing and spreading — fact-finding missions, peacekeeping forces and operations, technical assistance and international administration.

Hammarskjöld was heavily influenced by his family’s background in public service and politics.
AP/AAP

Fledgling states could rely on UN assistance till they were self-functioning. Doing so would preserve the independence of decolonised countries and forge an international system with “equal economic opportunities for all individuals and nations”.

As Hammarskjöld explained in 1960, the UN was ideal for this task.

a universal organisation neutral in the big power struggles over ideology and influence in the world, subordinated to the common will of the Member Governments and free from any aspirations of its own power and influence over any group or nation.

Indeed, the second key concept was a firm commitment to neutrality when maintaining international order. This was considered a vital element for an international organisation dedicated to global governance.

In practice, Hammarskjöld negotiated the release of United States soldiers captured by the Chinese volunteer army during the Korean War and attempted to resolve the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956. He was also instrumental to facilitating the withdrawal of US and British troops from Lebanon and Jordan in 1958. In such conduct, he defined the secretary-general’s office in international diplomacy and conflict management and ensured the lingering role of peacekeeping operations.

Making waves — and enemies

But the expansion of this type of intervention by the UN was not welcomed by the traditional powers. Reflecting on the role played by Hammarskjöld during the Suez Crisis, Sir Pierson Dixon, British Ambassador to the UN, observed the secretary-general could no longer be considered a “a symbol or even an executive: he has become a force”.

As historian Susan Williams writes,

Hammarskjöld sought to shield the newly-independent nations from the predatory aims of the Great Powers. His enemies included colonialists and settlers in Africa who were determined to maintain white minority rule.

In September 1961, Hammarskjöld was on a peace mission in the newly independent Congo. But while flying from Leopoldville, former capital of the Belgian Congo, to Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (present day Zambia),
his plane crashed. Everyone on board, including the secretary-general, was killed.

Unsolved mystery

The crash has never officially been recognised as a political assassination. But there have always been deep suspicions, making it one of the great unresolved mysteries of the 20th century.

As former US president Harry Truman told reporters immediately after the crash, Hammarskjöld

was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him.’

Hammarskjöld’s legacy was so profound as to encourage a range of theories as to why he died. In 1992, Australian diplomat George Ivan Smith and Irish author Conor Cruise O’Brien, both UN officials in 1961 in Congo, opined the secretary-general had been shot down by mercenaries in the pay of European industrialists.

In her 2011 book, Who Killed Hammarskjöld? Williams examined the possibility of an assassination or a botched hijacking. Noting details were still murky, she concluded:

his death was almost certainly the result of a sinister intervention.

Peacekeeping, neutrality, independence

To this day, Hammarskjöld’s legacy endures through the continued deployment of UN peace keeping operations with the aim of promoting “stability, security and peace processes”.

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Read more:
‘Our own 1945 moment’. What do rising China-US tensions mean for the UN?

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His shaping of the general-secretary position is also marked: an international, neutral figure tasked, however successful, with using preventative diplomacy, promoting peace and securing an environment where states can develop on their own terms.

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Correction: an earlier version of this article incorrectly quoted Susan Williams to say Hammarskjöld’s death was “most certainly” the result of a sinister intervention. It has been amended to “almost certainly”. The piece has also been amended to correct Truman was the former US president at the time of the crash, not the current president.

Binoy Kampmark, Senior Lecturer in Global Studies, Social Science & Planning, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The UN Security Council

The 1956 Suez Crisis

The Korean War

North Korean POWs seeking last chance to return home after decades in exile

At the United Nations’ prisoner-of-war camp at Pusan, North Korean and Chinese prisoners are assembled in one of the camp compounds.
Wkimedia/Larry Gahn/US State Department, CC BY-ND

Hea-Jin Park, Victoria University of Wellington

More than six decades after the Korean War, a small group of North Korean prisoners of war who made a new life in South America may get a chance to return home as part of a documentary film.

Last weekend marked the anniversary of the last major war in the Korean peninsula. The 1950–1953 Korean War or, in the words of Tessa Morris-Suzuki, the great “hot war” within the Cold War, started when North Korean troops crossed the arbitrarily established 38th parallel and forced their way south. The United Nations Command (UNC), composed of forces from 16 nations, including Australia and New Zealand, joined the South Korean military effort to halt the North Korean advance.

As the war unfolded, both sides soon faced the complicated task of handling prisoners of war (POWs), whose numbers were rapidly expanding. The UNC established several POW camps around South Korea, with the largest on Geoje-do (or Geoje) Island. It is said the camp was a little city within the island where around 170,000 North Korean and Chinese POWs waited, uneasy and fearful.

Negotiating POWs fate

The POWs’ repatriation was indeed a point of fierce debate in the negotiations of the armistice that started a year after the outbreak of the war. Accordingly, the UNC position was to allow North Korean POWs to decide between staying in the south or returning to the north, while North Korea insisted on the return of all POWs.

The Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission (NNRC), with India as umpire, chairman and executive agent, supervised the repatriation of POWs from both sides. Statistics shows that under the operations Little Switch and Big Switch eventually around 83,000 POWs were repatriated to the north, while around 22,000 preferred to remain in the south.

There were, however, 88 POWs — 76 North Korean and 12 Chinese — who declined either option and went to India instead, and then later to Argentina and Brazil.

Decades later, Korean filmmaker Cho Kyeong-duk is trying to preserve their memories in a documentary that reverses their trip, taking them from South America back home to North Korea.

Stripped of their weapons, North Korean prisoners line up in Seoul on Oct. 10, 1950.
Frank Noel/flickr, CC BY-ND

New start a world away

In 2007, I met one of the surviving North Korean POWs who lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Kim Kwan-ok was born and raised in Pyongyang. He was 21 years old when the South Korean Army captured him in North Chungcheong province and transferred him to the UN POW camp on Geoje-do. Upon the ceasefire in 1953, Kim decided he could not return to the north, as he feared for his life, yet he could not stay in the south either, because it was not his homeland.

Finding himself without a family, relatives or friends, he decided to leave Korea and restart life elsewhere. Kim remembered sobbing endlessly as the Astoria, the ship that took him and other POWs to India, slowly departed Incheon harbour on 9 February 1954. At that point, he thought his connection to his motherland was truly over.

While in Madras (now Chennai), Kim learnt poultry farming, took a course in photography and practised some sports. Although “free”, he remembered that there was not much to do for the POWs in India. Yet the issue that troubled them more than boredom was their uncertain future.

As the wait became longer, the POWs grew anxious and one day they all marched to remind the authorities of their existence — only to be confronted by guards.

Eventually, a few POWs decided to settle in India. Others returned to North Korea and three went to South Korea. According to Kim, however, most wished to emigrate to the United States. When the option became unlikely, many chose Mexico instead, hoping to remigrate to the US at a later date.

Unfortunately, Mexico declined their request, but Brazil and Argentina agreed to accept Korean POWs. Almost two years after their arrival in India, 55 North Korean POWs embarked to Brazil to start life anew, and in the next year or so 12 followed suit to Argentina.

When the then stateless Kim arrived in Argentina, all he possessed was his youth. With the help of a local Catholic organisation, he found shelter and a job, slowly making his way through a new life.

Consequences of war

When the first South Korean immigrants arrived in Argentina almost a decade later, Kim was at the port to welcome them and helped them get settled. He even served as the first president of the Korean Association in Argentina.

A few other North Korean POWs, especially those in Brazil, took a similar initiative, even when South Korean newcomers tagged them as “the prisoners” or “the communists”. Yet many POWs preferred to quietly blend in to local society and slowly disappear from the eyes and memories of all. They wanted to get away from the trauma of the war and the atrocities witnessed at Geoje-do POW camp. The POWs sought to live free of ideologies and prejudices.

Whether or not the POW participants of this project complete their return home, it is a reminder that the human consequences of any war are carried in the hearts and memories of the people who fought, wherever they end up living.

Hea-Jin Park, Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies, Victoria University of Wellington

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.