The UN's Top Job: A Review

Lucia Mouat, who was the UN correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor when I first met her, has a new book out on the eight men who have been Secretary-General. [The United Nations’ Top Job: A close look at the work of eight Secretaries-General.ISBN 978-1484806197 519 pages]

Her timing is excellent, for an increasing number of people will want the essential background the book provides as the UN prepares to pick a new head before the end of 2016.

The book begins with a chapter providing a conceptual overview of the job of Secretary-General, often referred to as “the world’s top diplomat” and less grandly described by its first incumbent as “the most impossible job in the world.”

Both descriptions are accurate, for the Secretary-General must moderate the never-ending global dialogue at the UN while trying to herd its multitude of cats into effective action.

In both roles, the Secretary-General is at the mercy of an unforgiving process entirely owned by a handful of powerful governments and he (perhaps she after the next selection) has little leeway.

The book’s review of the track record of the eight Secretaries-General is extremely kind to the member States most responsible for the widely perceived failures of the organization, especially the five Permanent Members of the Security Council (Britain, China, France, Russian Federation, United States). A corrective account might look at some of the following problems:

Trygvie Lie (pronounced Lee), a Labour politician from Norway, never knew what hit him after Britain engineered a “special relationship” with the American military-industrial complex and launched the Cold War months after the creation of the UN. His firm support of the Korean War won instant Soviet disapproval while the McCarthy-era inquisition of American staff made a mockery of UN independence. After the United States side-stepped a Soviet veto to get Lie a second term through action in the General Assembly, no Eastern Bloc diplomat would even shake the Secretary-General’s hand at social functions. He endured it for a while and then resigned.

Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjold succeeded Lie because the Permanent Members of the Security Council thought he was a quiet, unassertive bureaucrat who could be controlled easily. Instead, they got a man with a powerful moral conscience and sense of mission. When Hammarskjold went to bat for the newly won independence of the Democratic Republic of the Congo he entered the “license to kill” zone of the European imperial Powers; while on a peace mission to the region his aircraft crashed, killing all on board. There was immediate talk of a conspiracy engineered by Britain but no conclusive evidence; new findings indicating the craft was shot down has led the UN to reopen the investigation in 2015.

U. Thant of Burma got the UN top job with American support that overrode imperial Europe’s dislike of his role in the UN Committee on Decolonization and a Soviet bid to replace a single Secretary-General with an ideological “Troika.” However, when the Secretary-General began speaking out on the escalating Viet Nam War, the Johnson administration came down on him like a ton of bricks. The Secretary-General declined a second term and accepted it only after a written assurance from the United States that he could speak his mind. The freedom to do so was curtailed by mouth cancer that was diagnosed during Thant’s second term.

The Big Powers ensured that the next incumbent would be incapable of causing any trouble by selecting Kurt Waldheim of Austria, a Nazi SS officer accused of war crimes during World War II. Only an overt conspiracy among the major Cold War intelligence agencies can have allowed him to lie about that record, and they exacted a heavy institutional price from the UN. Under Waldheim spies and informers proliferated throughout the Secretariat and its appointments and promotions bodies became incapable of enforcing the “highest standard of integrity” ideal set by the Staff Rules. Waldheim would have got an unprecedented third term if Beijing, newly on the Security Council, had not vetoed him.

Javier Perez de Cuellar of Peru is perhaps the most successful Secretary-General to date because he had the integrity and diplomatic skill to take advantage of the winding down of the Cold War to negotiate and oversee the end of long-running proxy conflicts in Namibia, Cambodia and Central America. He did little on crises where the UN had no purchase (Middle East, African resource wars and the Balkans). Despite his success the organization came close to bankruptcy as the Reagan administration pushing for “reforms” withheld ever larger chunks of its mandatory contributions to the organization’s budget.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt had a disastrous one-term stint as Secretary-General marked by messy UN involvements in the Rwanda, Iraq and the Balkans. He was followed by UN insider Kofi Annan who parlayed his role as head of peacekeeping operations into the top job. His most significant success was getting the United States to return to full funding of the UN budget. However, relations with Washington suffered after the 2003 suicide bombing of the UN office in Baghdad. Things became irreparable after Annan told the BBC in 2004 that the American-led war on Iraq was “illegal” under the UN Charter.

Ban ki-moon of South Korea, the incumbent Secretary-General, is generally regarded in UN circles as a bit of a buffoon, an impression reinforced by his irrepressibly corny sense of humour. (At his first meeting with the UN Press corps he sang “Ban ki-moon is coming to town” to the tune of the Santa Claus ditty.) According to John Bolton, the temporary American Ambassador at the UN when the Security Council picked Ban, his best quality was low wattage.

Mouat’s book rakes up little of this muck, for it is very much in the American liberal mainstream that sees support of the UN as a moral duty.

I do too, but my loyalty is to the ideal of peace for which the UN stands; to go beyond that and turn a blind eye to what has been happening to the organization does it no service, especially when the fading elites of the old world order are maneuvering desperately to turn the clock back to their imperial heyday.  

MacUrquhart and Hammarskjold's Restless Ghost

I just came across an interview of former United Nations Under-Secretary-General Brian Urquhart on the UN News Centre web site. It was supposedly conducted in 2011 to mark the 50th anniversary of Dag Hammarskjold’s death in September 1961. How I missed seeing it for over a year is a mystery, but it’s never too late to comment on what Urquhart said. But before I do, here’s a bit of necessary background:

Hammarskjold was a little known Swedish diplomat who was appointed Secretary-General of the United Nations primarily because of expectations that he would not rock the boat at a time of high Cold War tensions. His predecessor, Trygve Lie, had thrown the organization into a crisis by alienating the Soviet Union with his too fervent support of UN intervention in Korea.

In an understated Swedish way, Hammarskjold turned out to be a spectacular surprise. Among his historically important achievements were the negotiations in China for the release of 17 imprisoned American airmen; the fielding of a UN peacekeeping force that helped resolve the messy crisis created by the British-French-Israeli attempt to take back control of the Suez Canal; and beginning the UN Secretariat’s involvement in opposing apartheid in South Africa.

His last, fateful achievement was to defend the newly independent Republic of the Congo after that enormously mineral rich country was thrown into chaos by Belgium, its former ruler.

As a UN peacekeeping force battled Belgian mercenaries in the breakaway province of Katanga, Hammarskjold went on a peace mission to the region and was killed when his aircraft crashed near Ndola in what was then the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

A British-Rhodesian commission of inquiry ruled that pilot error had caused the crash. A UN investigation could neither confirm nor deny that finding and left on the table the suspicion that Hammarskjold’s plane had been shot down.

In 2011, a Swedish aid worker in Africa stirred up those suspicions when he published a report recounting eyewitness accounts of people in Ndola who remembered the crash.

The Urquhart interview is clearly meant as a rebuttal but it has the effect of heightening and broadening suspicions. This is the relevant part of the interview:

“UN News Centre: Over the years, you’ve been very firm in your belief that the plane crash that killed Hammarskjöld was an accident. What do you make of claims that his aircraft was deliberately shot down due to foreign mineral interests in Katanga?

Brian Urquhart: You know, the older I get the more absolutely convinced I am that the conspiracy theories don’t hold out at all. There are about 50 of them and if one’s right, all the others are wrong for a start. That puts out 49 of 50.

The present so-called revelations, which come from interviewing 86-year-old charcoal burners in Zambia, are not new at all. These same people, when they were much, much younger 50 years ago, were interviewed by the Commission of Inquiry for five days on the ground where they’d been when the crash took place.

This new theory is based on the charcoal burners believing they saw a small plane following steadily behind the big plane when it crashed. Well, the Commission of Inquiry were not stupid. They came to the conclusion that what the charcoal burners had seen was the navigation beacon on the high tail-fin of the DC-6, which was a great feature of that aircraft. And of course it was following steadily – it was part of the aeroplane!

People seem to assume that you just jump into an aeroplane in the middle of Africa in the dark and say “’bye chaps, I’m going to shoot down Dag Hammarskjöld, see you in the morning!” It’s nonsense. There were no aircraft in that part of the world with night-flying control, no aircraft with proper ground control, and finding an aeroplane in the middle of Africa at midnight is not something you just do.

At the point the plane crashed, it was in the landing mode. It had its wheels down, it had its air-brakes on, and it was exactly ten feet too low to clear the trees on the top of a little mound which was on the run-in path and it hit them. Frankly, I don’t really think that the conspiracy theories help very much.

UN News Centre: Why do you think there is this fascination about his death?

Brian Urquhart: Well, there is about everybody who dies a violent death, particularly if they’re famous. Look at JFK or anybody you can think of. And people who like to see their names in the paper can do it easily now, particularly on anniversaries, by saying they’ve got new evidence.

I would be the first to wish to discover someone who had murdered Dag Hammarskjöld. I think the world lost an incredibly valuable citizen in that disaster. But I’ve been thinking about it for 50 years and I’ve never been able to see the smallest evidence of this at all, or indeed that it was possible.

Incidentally, he wasn’t flying in his own aircraft. He changed aircraft two hours before he took off so that Lord Lansdowne, who was the undersecretary for the colonies, I think, for the British Government, could go to Ndola, which was then in northern Rhodesia [now Zambia], to prepare a reception for Hammarskjöld. So if they were going to shoot the plane down, they would have shot down the one with Lord Lansdowne in it.”

There are a number of significant omissions and distortions in what Urquhart said.

Perhaps the most important omission is Urquhart’s failure to mention that he was in the Congo at the time and that he had been a British Intelligence operative. If I remember rightly the research done many years ago, the notes of which are not with me, he was also involved in arranging the logistics of Hammarskjold’s travel.

The most serious of his distortions is the assertion that the UN Commission of Inquiry interviewed the men whose testimony Göran Björkdahl recorded in his 2011 report. As The Guardian reported in August of that year, it did not.

Urquhart’s attempt to palm off their testimony as ignorant is contemptible. There is no way that what they thought was an attacking aircraft could have been the rear beacon of Hammarskjold’s own aircraft. This is what the reporters from The Guardian wrote about the eyewitnesses they interviewed in verifying Björkdahl’s report:

“Dickson Mbewe, now aged 84, was sitting outside his house in Chifubu compound west of Ndola with a group of friends on the night of the crash. ‘We saw a plane fly over Chifubu but did not pay any attention to it the first time,’ Mbewe told the Guardian. ‘When we saw it a second and third time, we thought that this plane was denied landing permission at the airport. Suddenly, we saw another aircraft approach the bigger aircraft at greater speed and release fire which appeared as a bright light.’

‘The plane on the top turned and went in another direction. We sensed the change in sound of the bigger plane. It went down and disappeared.’

“In the morning at about 5am, Mbewe went to his charcoal kiln close to the crash site, where he found soldiers and policemen already dispersing people from the area. According to the official report the wreckage was only discovered at 3pm that afternoon.

“‘There was a group of white soldiers carrying a body, two in front and two behind,’ he said. ‘I heard people saying there was a man who was found alive and should be taken to hospital. Nobody was allowed to stay there.’

“Mbewe never came forward with that information earlier because he was never asked to, he said. ‘The atmosphere was not peaceful, we were chased away. I was afraid to go to the police because they might put me in prison.’

“Another witness, Custon Chipoya, a 75-year-old charcoal maker, also claims to have seen a second plane in the sky that night. ‘I saw a plane turning, it had clear lights and I could hear the roaring sound of the engine,’ he said. ‘It wasn't very high. In my opinion, it was at the height that planes are when they are going to land.

"’It came back a second time which made us look and the third time, when it was turning towards the airport, I saw a smaller plane approaching behind the bigger one. The lighter aircraft, a smaller jet type of plane, was trailing behind and had a flash light. Then it released some fire onto the bigger plane below and went in the opposite direction.

"’The bigger aircraft caught fire and started exploding, crashing towards us. We thought it was following us as it chopped off branches and tree trunks. We thought it was war so we ran away.’

“Chipoya said he returned to the site the next morning at about 6am and found the area cordoned off by police and army officers. He didn't mention what he had seen because: ‘It was impossible to talk to a police officer then. We just understood that we had to go away,’ he said.

“Safeli Mulenga, 83, also in Chifubu on the night of the crash, did not see a second plane but witnessed an explosion.

"’I saw the plane circle twice,’ he said. ‘The third time fire came from somewhere above the plane, it glowed so bright. It couldn't have been the plane exploding because the fire was coming onto it,’ he said.

“There was no announcement for people to come forward with information following the crash, and the federal government didn't want people to talk about it, he said. ‘There were some who witnessed the crash and they were taken away and imprisoned.’

“John Ngongo, now 75, out in the bush with a friend to learn how to make charcoal on the night of the crash, did not see another plane but he definitely heard one, he said.

"’Suddenly, we saw a plane with fire on one side coming towards us. It was on fire before it hit the trees. The plane was not alone. I heard another plane at high speed disappearing into the distance but I didn't see it,’ he said.”

The Guardian story also mentioned an important element completely missing from the UN News Centre interview: “At the time of his death Hammarskjöld suspected British diplomats secretly supported the Katanga rebellion and had obstructed a bid to arrange a truce.”

That element casts a new light on Urquhart’s role in managing the memory of Hammarskjold, for after the assassination he was given the job, as the UN News Centre puts it, of helping “organize his private papers.” Urquhart subsequently wrote what has become standard biography of the Secretary-General.

Asked about the experience, Urquhart told the UN News Centre: “In the first place, his papers were quite exiguous. It wasn’t just 285 boxes or anything like that. He had kept everything like his library. It was sort of pruned every year and everything essential was kept and all the froth and everything had gone – at least I think that must be the case – so that it was a very intensive business to go into his papers. But you weren’t overwhelmed at the sheer bulk, and I think that was deliberate on his part.”

We are left to wonder if the papers contained any “froth” about Hammarskjold’s suspicions about the British role in Katanga. Were they organized into oblivion?

Hammarskjold's Ghost

Newly discovered eyewitnesses to the plane crash that killed UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold in 1961 say it was not an accident. They remember the aircraft being shot down.

The eyewitnesses, men in their 80s who still live in and around Ndola in Zambia where the crash occurred, spoke to Göran Björkdahl, a Swedish aid worker based in Africa. Björkdahl became interested in Hammarskjold's death because his father had a piece of metal from the wreck; when his work took him to Africa a few years ago he began probing the rumours surrounding the end of the most effective of UN leaders. A British investigation had declared the crash of Hammarskjold's chartered DC-6 an accident due to pilot error.

Björkdahl says the witnesses also remember the authorities (of what was then the British colony of Rhodesia) sealing off the site of the wreckage hours before they announced its discovery. Some charcoal-makers who came upon the wreckage before the official announcement were told to go away; British investigators did not interview those witnesses, and Björkdahl's findings implicate them, at the very least, in a cover-up of a political assassination.

Hammarskjold was on a mission to negotiate an end to the secession of Katanga province from the Congo, a former Belgian colony enormously rich in natural resources. The Congo had become independent in June 1960 and, with considerable help from Belgium, plunged immediately into political crisis, armed conflict and chaos. The secession of Katanga was engineered by white mercenaries in the pay of Union Miniere du Haut Katanga, a politically well connected Belgian company with major investments in the province; fronting the operation was Moise Tshombe, with whom Hammarskjold was scheduled to meet in Ndola.

Local UN officials had informed Hammarskjold that the British Consul in Katanga was sympathetic to the secessionists and might even be sheltering Tshombe from UN peacekeeping forces. However, that did not stop the Secretary-General from asking the man to arrange the meeting with the secessionist leader. It was set for 18 September, in Ndola, in Rhodesia, a country then in the control of a rabidly anti-UN white-supremacist leader, Roy Welensky.

There was much speculation after Hammarskjold’s death about a conspiracy involving Tshombe, the British and Rhodesian authorities, but nothing could be proved. The official United Nations inquiry found “no evidence to support any of the particular theories that have been advanced,” but was also unable to exclude any of the possible causes it had considered, including “sabotage and attack from the ground or air.”

The Commission raised a number of unanswered questions which Björkdahl’s new evidence clarifies. One of the unanswered questions about the crash was why it took Rhodesian authorities 15 hours to find the wreckage; the DC-6 had passed over Ndola airport with its landing lights on, and local police reported hearing it crash in the jungle nine miles away.

The new evidence makes clear the delay in reporting the crash site was deliberate. Hammarskjold had survived the impact but with massive injuries, including a broken spine; the delay prevented any medical help to the stricken man. It also reduced the chances of survival of the only other victim to be found alive, a badly burned UN Security Guard; he could have been saved with proper medical care, but he was left in a poorly equipped local hospital and died five days later.

Björkdahl also found telegrams sent in the days before Hammarskjöld's death that reflect British anger at UN efforts to end the secession of Katanga.To understand that anger it is necessary to recall that the imperial Powers of Europe were engaged in a broad and violent effort to subvert decolonization. The United Nations, with strong support from the United States, stood in the way, most openly during the 1956 British-French effort to take the Suez Canal from Egypt.

In Africa, the British were under mounting stress. After the March 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, the Security Council, for the first time, asked the Secretary-General to get involved in the campaign against apartheid. Hammarskjold had visited Pretoria in January 1961, and hopes were high that he would emerge as a strong voice against the country's criminally racist system. (Posthumously, he shared the 1961 Nobel Peace Prize with Albert Luthuli of South Africa.)

Hammarskjold knew that he was in a no-win situation in the Congo; he told a colleague in New York before leaving on his last trip that if he failed in that effort to resolve the Katanga problem, he would resign. That probably added to the urgency to kill him, for a resignation would have been hugely embarrassing for Britain.

The British government has not responded to Björkdahl's findings, which have been reported in some English newspapers. Even if it acknowledges the story it is unlikely to make any admissions. It seems to me the only way to get at the truth is to have an International Commission look into its works. Among the topics that need investigation are the British roles in:

1. The WW-I era genocide of Armenians in Turkey.
2. The communal riots preceding the Partition of India and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.
3. The creation of the civil war in Cyprus.
4. The Sri Lankan civil war and support of the Tamil Tigers.
5. The sponsorship of a number of terrorist movements in Asia and Africa.
6. International drug trafficking and management of the global black market.

Ideally, the primary support for such an examination should come from the people of Britain who have also been victims of a ruling elite as vile in its greed and lust for power as it has been brutal in the pursuit of its "interests."