‘Help unravel cause of former UN Sec. Gen’s death’
A historian and Senior Research Fellow with the School of Advanced Study of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Dr Susan Williams, has said she believes Ghana can help resolve the mystery behind the death of the late former Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), Dag Hammarskjold, who met his untimely death while on a humanitarian mission in the Congo in 1961.
Dr Williams is of the belief that President Nkrumah was very closely in touch with the day-to-day events in Congo through his sources of intelligence and the UN contingent of Ghanaian troops as part of the UN mission and so it is possible that Ghana may have some records that will help cast light on the events leading to Hammarskjold’s death.
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She has thus called on the authorities to provide any information to the UN to help resolve the issue.
Dr Williams said this in an interview with the Daily Graphic.
Four recalcitrant nations
The interview came on the heels of the latest report of a UN Panel formed by the UN Secretary-General, Mr Antonio Guteress, with Justice Mohamed Chande Othman, a former chief justice of Tanzania, as its head.
In the said report, the panel concluded that Hammarskjold might have been murdered, his aircraft shot out of the sky by a hostile fighter jet as it prepared to land.
Four countries have so far been fingered as holding vital information on the UN chief’s death — Britain, Russia, South Africa and the United States. However, they have not been forthcoming with information that will effectively lay the issue to rest.
Hammarskjold’s death
Hammarskjold, a 56-year-old Swedish diplomat considered one of the most successful leaders of the UN, was on a mission to help settle a secessionist war in the newly independent Congo, a former Belgian colony.
His chartered aircraft, a DC-6, went down after midnight on September 18, 1961, moments before its scheduled landing in Ndola, a town in what was then the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia and now Zambia.
Fifteen people on board, including Hammarskjold, members of his staff and the crew, were killed in the crash.
The sole survivor, an American security officer named Harold Julien, died of injuries six days later.
Susan Williams’s book and matters arising
Investigations into the cause of the crash that culminated in the UN chief’s death were rekindled by a book written by Dr Williams entitled: “Who Killed Hammarskjold?” which argued the case for a new enquiry into the plane crash.
The impact created by that book led to the formation of the Independent Hammarskjold Commission in 2012, headed by Sir Steven Sedley, to which Dr Williams provided historical expertise.
It was based on the recommendations of that commission that a general resolution was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly authorising the General Secretary to appoint a UN Panel of Experts to examine the evidence.
The Othman Panel made a number of recommendations, with the final being: “I recommend that the UN continue to work towards making key documents of the Hammarskjöld investigation publicly available through a dedicated online collection. On this topic, I note that it is to be acknowledged and commended that the UN has, of its own initiative, already created a dedicated online collection on this topic, which marshals much information of significance. Although any further such work is ultimately a matter for the Secretary-General, I believe the approach to be a beneficial exercise in transparency.
“Regarding the records of the Hammarskjöld Commission, I understand that when that body concluded its work, it transferred its records to the UN, on the explicit understanding that it did not object to the material being made public. In concluding, I once again underscore the importance of continuing to work collaboratively in our search for the truth.”
At the core of the matter, the panel said: “Not only do such issues go to the heart of the role of the United Nations in the world and its relationship with Member States, they involve our duty to the families of the victims and to a true accounting of history. Significant progress has again been made towards understanding the whole truth about the conditions and circumstances that resulted in the crash of flight SE-BDY. Member states must be encouraged to redouble their active participation, which remains necessary to finally identify information that will allow the investigation of the tragic incident to be brought to conclusion.”
Theories about cause of death
Initial investigations had attributed the crash to pilot error, but suspicions of foul play multiplied in later years.
Some theories posited that colonial-era mining interests, most likely backed by Western intelligence agencies, had plotted to assassinate Hammarskjold, who was an avid promoter of African independence from colonial powers during a pivotal period of the Cold War.
The commission went back and interviewed local eyewitnesses, including John Ngongo, who described seeing “something in the sky … coming down in a tilted position. … Because of the sound you could tell it was a plane. … It had already caught fire. Within the inside of the plane [we] could see some fire, but what [I remember] is that the fire was on the wings and the engines”.
Ngongo, who was in the forest with a neighbour, said when they approached the plane’s wreckage, they could hear the sound of something that sounded like a jet.
Justice Othman, therefore, called on the UN to appoint an independent investigator to try to extract critical documents he believed had been withheld by South Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom that might help prove who was responsible.
In the absence of such evidence — including intelligence analysis and intercepts — conclusions “about the cause of the crash cannot yet be reached,” Othman wrote.
“Information that must exist but remains undisclosed only fuels conspiracy theories about what might have happened,” he added.
Placing historical events in proper perspective
In the interview with the Daily Graphic, Dr Williams pointed out that it was only right for the truth to be unveiled to place historical events in their proper perspective.
She was also of the view that unravelling the truth surrounding Hammarskjold’s death would also help assuage the pain of his family and, indeed, the families of those who died with him.
Dr Williams is currently in Ghana working on her new book entitled: “Black and Blue: Lumumba and Nkrumah’s Alliance in the Cold War”.
She holds the view that Dr Nkrumah was a visionary who had an extraordinarily bright perspective on the decolonisation of the African continent and was very instrumental in bringing the Cold War to an end in alliance with other major stakeholders, including Patrice Lumumba of Congo.