International Peace and Security: Thoughts on the Twentieth Anniversary of Dag Hammarskjöld's Death

Brian Urquhart

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1981

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Summary:  In September this year, it will be 20 years since Dag Hammarskjöld?s plane crashed at Ndola?then in Northern Rhodesia, now in Zambia. The dramatic nature of his death, set against the somber violence of the Congo crisis and the loneliness and confrontation of his last months, have left a popular picture of Hammarskjöld which is, to some extent at least, oversimplified.

Brian Urquhart is Under Secretary-General of the United Nations for Special Political Affairs. He has worked in the United Nations Secretariat, either in or close to the office of the Secretary-General, since 1945, and is the author of Hammarskjold, a major biography published in 1972. The views expressed are purely personal opinions and have no official character.

In September this year, it will be 20 years since Dag Hammarskjöld's plane crashed at Ndola-then in Northern Rhodesia, now in Zambia. The dramatic nature of his death, set against the somber violence of the Congo crisis and the loneliness and confrontation of his last months, have left a popular picture of Hammarskjöld which is, to some extent at least, oversimplified.

Hammarskjöld is now sometimes recalled as a sort of superman before whom governments trembled and world problems magically dissolved. In fact he faced insoluble problems much as his successors have had to, doing his best to mitigate and contain them, offering solutions which governments could sometimes accept and often could not. His last year was darkened by a complete break in relations with Khrushchev and de Gaulle, a crippling impediment for a Secretary-General, who must be able to deal constructively with member governments and especially with the permanent members of the Security Council. The Congo melée, which was at its height when he met his death in September 1961, had already given rise to a fundamental constitutional crisis in the United Nations. It fell to Hammarskjöld's much underestimated successor, U Thant, to find the way out of these difficulties.

It is now widely believed that Hammarskjöld was admired and enthusiastically supported throughout by the majority of member governments, and especially by the Western countries. This is a considerable distortion of the truth. He had been proposed originally by the Western permanent members of the Security Council on the mistaken assumption that as Secretary-General he would be a safe, rather colorless, non-political technocrat. In the event, his single-minded internationalism and integrity were not particularly popular with Western governments, except rather grudgingly when he was resolving problems in which they had ensnared themselves-American prisoners in China, the 1956 Suez crisis, or Lebanon in 1958, for example. Often they found him too high-minded for their taste and doggedly ahead of his time.

They emphatically did not like Hammarskjöld's ideas for developing the United Nations as an organization with quasi-supranational possibilities. His public confrontation with Khrushchev over the Congo caused a surge of popularity in the West and distracted attention from his disagreements with Western governments, but by and large, though respected, he was often found to be a somewhat uncomfortable feature on the international scene. In the emerging, post-colonial Third World, which aroused his warm enthusiasm, he was more accepted, but even there, especially in Africa during the Congo crisis, he became a controversial figure, distrusted by some.

What does Hammarskjöld's glowing posthumous reputation signify? Is it perhaps that governments in principle want a strong and independent United Nations but in practice may find such an organization awkward to deal with? Does it mean that while they have ratified the Charter, most governments are still a long way from recognizing and living by the practical implications of that document?

Hammarskjöld's working view of the office of the Secretary-General and above all his long-term objectives for the United Nations call for renewed ...

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