Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa by Susan Williams (review)

One of the unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century is the death of Dag Hammarskjöld, the Swedish-born second Secretary-General of the United Nations. On 18 September 1961, Hammarskjöld's plane crashed into a dense forest near Ndola, in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (now the Republic of Zambia)—a fatal accident which abruptly ended his mission to bring peace to the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Substantial new evidence has recently come to light to indicate that Western multinational corporations and the governments of Belgium and the United States had been directly involved in the 17 January 1961 murder of Congo's first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. The conspiracy surrounding Lumumba's death has been abundantly documented by Ludo De Witte (2001), Colette Braeckman (2002), and Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja (2002).

In this book, Susan Williams, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies of the University of London, conducts an exhaustive—and often delicate—investigation into the Secretary-General's death. On the basis of sensitive and top-secret documentation and materials, she reveals that conflict in the Congo was essentially driven by the determination of an unholy alliance of Western forces, including Great Britain and the white minority leaders in Southern Rhodesia (now the Republic of Zimbabwe) and South Africa, in addition to Belgium and the United States. The rationale is that all the parties involved were absolutely determined to keep political, economic, and financial power out of the hands of the newly independent African governments.

At the heart of the author's exposé is Dag Hammarskjöld himself, portrayed as a courageous idealist intent upon protecting the newly independent nations from the predatory policies of the Great Powers. The questions that drove Williams's research include the following: "Did any person or group of people, or any organization or political party, have any reason to want Mr. Hammarskjöld out of the way? What was the political background to the sudden death of the Secretary-General and the other passengers and crew on that moonlit night in the center of Africa?" (p. 15).

The author's biographical sketch of Dag Hammarskjöld reveals a dedicated and selfless Swedish civil servant, a man with absolute integrity, whose concern for the vulnerable and the needy and deep sense of social justice led him to help launch the Swedish welfare state (pp. 19-20). He brought to the UN secretary-generalship his "concept of an independent civil service as the keystone of an effective global order" and a keen advocacy "of [multilateral] 'preventive diplomacy,' as a strategy to influence the political decisions of individual countries" (pp. 18-19). According to Williams, he also brought to his position an "uncompromising commitment to the newly decolonized, less powerful nations" (p. 38) and a firm belief that the Secretary-General should be able to act independently of the wishes and interests of the Great Powers.

As has been abundantly documented elsewhere (see in particular Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002), within days of Congo's independence from Belgium on 30 June 1960, Lumumba, suspected of communist sympathies, faced an array of forces bent on his demise, led by the government of Belgium, and including: the United Kingdom and the United States; the provincial government of Katanga (led by Moïse Tshombe); and the white minority regimes of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, which adamantly opposed the movement toward African independence.

Backed by the Belgian government and military, which had intervened one day before, led by the top executives of the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) and using Tshombe as a front man, the group known as the "Katanga Lobby" engineered the secession of Katanga on 11 July 1960, and, on 5 September 1960, instructed President Joseph Kasa-Vubu to dismiss Lumumba as Congo's prime minister. These events encouraged Joseph-D...