NA Declassified CONGO
flow of information that shaped their understandings was so completely at odds that one might imagine that they were engaged in wholly separate settings”. At the end, this was certainly a contributing factor to the ghastly fate of Lumumba, whose life ended on 17 January 1961. It remains a matter of controversy to what extent the UN should have protected Lumumba after he decided to leave the house in which he stayed under UN observation. As Hammarskjöld and others argued, by removing himself from the direct protection in order to mobilise for the restoration of his political influence, Lumumba was returning into active Congolese politics. His continued protection would therefore have been interfering in domestic policies and would have resulted in a violation of the mandate. In the meantime it is a well-established and documented fact, that in the absence of such protection the USAmerican intelligence services played a major role in his liquidation under horrific circumstances. Belgian journalist Ludo de Witte, perhaps the most vociferous critic of the UN and specifically, Hammarskjöld’s role in Lumumba’s assassination, charges that the UN and its secretary-general were accomplices in the gruesome act. In the preface to the English edition of his exhaustive investigation, The Assassination of Lumumba, De Witte maintains that without the UN, Lumumba’s “assassination could never have been carried out”. The critical review of the English edition of his book in the New York Review of Books by Brian Urquhart, who was also among the high-ranking UN officials surrounding Hammarskjöld, sparked an illuminating exchange. De Witte repeated his accusation that “UN Secretary-General Hammarskjöld played a decisive role in the overthrow of the Congolese government of Patrice Lumumba”, thereby willingly or not, becoming complicit in his subsequent assassination. For him, the “UN was the most important vehicle of destroying the Congolese government and laying the groundwork for the dictatorship of Mobutu”. De Witte regards Western criticism of aspects of the UN operation as being merely “for public consumption, or a counterweight to the Afro-Asian pressure on the UN leadership to help Lumumba”. In response, Urquhart qualified De Witte’s “elaborate fantasy of Hammarskjöld’s conspiracy with the Belgians” as “absurd to anyone who worked with Hammarskjöld at the time and experienced his frustration and his frequent rages at, and denunciations of, both the Belgians and their protégé, the Katangese leader, Moïse Tshombe”. Hammarskjöld’s private comment on the brutal assassination might be telling. On 28 February 1961 in a letter to his friend, the novelist John Steinbeck, he wrote: “No one, in the long pull, will really profit from Lumumba’s death, least of all those outside the Congo who now strain to do so but should one day confront a reckoning with truth and decency.” On the day eight months after Lumumba’s execution, Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others (entourage and crew), died in the wreckage of the DC6 airplane
“The solution of the problem of the Congo lies in the hands of the Congolese people themselves without any interference from outside.”
Patrice Lumumba being greeted by supporters following negotiations
Dag Hammarskjöld
Albertina. It crashed when approaching the airport of the Northern Rhodesian mining town of Ndola in the night from 17 to 18 September 1961. Officially considered the result of a pilot error, evidence ever since then nourished suspicions that the plane crashed because of external influence. Testimonies of numerous credible local eyewitnesses were deliberately ignored. As the German scholar Manuel Fröhlich commented: “It is interesting to note that almost all of the major secret services in the world are at least suspects in one or another theory. In retrospect, Hammarskjöld’s death becomes singular evidence of the Secretary-General’s independence.” Since the publication of Who Killed Hammarskjold?, the pioneering book by Susan Williams in 2011 (now re-published in a second edition), this private inquiry into the death of the Swedish UN secretary-general impelled the UN to re-open further investigations, which had been dormant since the mid-1960s. On 6 December 2016, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution to pursue investigations into Hammarskjold’s death. It was, remarkably, the third resolution since 2013. During the hearings at the UN, Sweden’s UN Ambassador, Olof Skoog, stressed the “shared responsibility to pursue the full truth in this matter” while “the need for additional follow-up remains”. Skoog also told the General Assembly: “Time is of the essence as with every passing year the door is closing further on finding the truth. But our efforts must continue. We owe it to the families of those that
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