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The Day the UN Died
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 29 2023
Pages: 188
Weight: 0.49
Height: 0.40 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
On the morning of Sunday 17 September 1961 Dag Hammarskjöld packed a single change of clothes and left his wallet behind at the Hôtel Le Royal. Beside it lay Thomas à Kempis's 'The Imitation of Christ', held open at page 119 by a small card bearing the oath he had sworn on taking office - to accept instruction from no government or authority outside the Organization. Sixteen hours later the Albertina went into the bush short of Ndola with her Swedish crew and the Secretary-General of the United Nations aboard. Within a day the Rhodesian authorities had settled on pilot error.
He had been the compromise candidate nobody had heard of. Within five years he was among the most famous men alive, and had turned a clerkship into the only office on earth that could stop a great power without threatening one. Suez was the proof of method: a wafer of blue helmets improvised over a weekend, carrying only the authority of the General Assembly, inserted not to defeat anyone but to give everyone a dignified reason to step back. What he was attempting in the Congo was the same idea at full scale - and what he was attempting beyond the Congo was larger still. In the autumn of 1961 Hammarskjöld and John F. Kennedy were converging on a general disarmament framework, a UN guarantee for West Berlin and an organisation with the standing, and the soldiers, to enforce its own decisions. Both projects died, as did the men who carried them.
The Day the UN Died rebuilds those months from the record: the Léopoldville cable traffic, the Berlin papers of September 1961, the Khiary telegrams, the Swedish inquiries and archives that Anglophone historians have never read, and Lord Alport's own dispatch confirming that two American aircraft sat on the Ndola apron that night, packed with radio equipment, in continuous contact with Léopoldville, Élisabethville, New York and Washington - without the knowledge of the authorities whose airfield it was.
The book does not claim to have solved the crash. Nor does Mohamed Chande Othman, the jurist appointed by the General Assembly, whose reports since 2017 conclude something more damaging: that the case cannot be solved, because Britain, the United States and South Africa are withholding documents he has good reason to believe they hold. Sixty-five years on, that is not a fringe view. It is the considered finding of the most rigorous official investigation since 1962.
What remains lies in two archives, one in London and one in Washington, still closed. Two mediators were removed within twenty-six months, each at the moment he was on the point of getting something done, and the disarmament they were building was never finished by anyone else.
Notice that I have said removed.
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