A few minutes to midnight. The radio signal of the Dc-6 Albertina is lost in the jungle. The four-engine plane crashes a few kilometres from the runway of the airport in Ndola, a town in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). It is 18 September 1961. On board, along with 15 other people, is the Secretary General of the United Nations, Swede Dag Hammarskjöld. We still wonder today whether it was a fatality or an assassination attempt, in the midst of the Cold War, while the Swedish diplomat was busy finding a way to peace between the newly independent Congo and the secessionist Katanga supported by the Belgian mining company Union minière du Haut Katanga and its mercenaries.
"I don't want to anticipate the ending, but at one point, while writing, I had the impression that I was going in the wrong direction," observes Ravi Somaiya, former New York Times correspondent, now author of The golden thread: the cold war and the mysterious death of Dag Hammarskjöld (The Golden Thread: The Cold War and the Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjöld, released in July 2020 by US publisher Twelve). Following a 'golden thread' of documents, clues and testimonies, the book brings us closer to a solution to the mystery. "We now have not only evidence of a crime," says Somaiya, "but also the astonishing demonstration of the enormous efforts that continue to be made for that crime to remain buried in history."
It is dawn. The search for the wreckage of the plane starts ten hours late, while the control tower records disappear, never to be found again. Strange coincidences begin to be talked about immediately, as soon as the fog clears from the jungle. It is just after eleven o'clock in the morning in Kansas City, and near a modernist building with a white colonnade, a ceremony is taking place. The speaker is former US President Harry Truman (1945-1953). He thanks the soldiers of the 35th Infantry Division who have donated almost seven thousand dollars to the library in his town, the same one where he studied when he was a boy. When the speech is over, however, Truman looks grave. Some journalists have already left and he almost whispers: 'Hammarskjöld was about to get something when they killed him. Note well, I said 'they killed him'." He turns his back on the reporter who is asking him a question and leaves.
The next day in the local newspaper Independence Examiner there is not a line. And in the launches of the United Press International agency that sentence does not deserve the headline but only the last paragraph of the news. In 1953 Truman's support had been decisive for Hammarskjöld to be elected as the second Secretary General in the history of the United Nations. "An economist by training, he spoke five languages and was also a poet and photographer," Somaiya recalls. "He really seemed to be a person of principles and was ready to sacrifice himself in their name: he wanted Congo to be able to have its own government, without being hostage to foreign powers, and he dreamed of a stronger and more independent UN organisation.
At the centre of a geopolitical clash
The golden thread picks up where the last UN investigation left off, concluded in September 2019 by Tanzanian prosecutor Mohamed Chande Othmanand does not shy away from the need to make a historical judgement. Among the decisive passages are some unpublished papers unearthed in Zimbabwe and the overcoming of obstacles placed in the way by the US government, with all due respect for freedom of information. The thesis is that there was more than a desire to conceal clues or evidentiary documents. Governments would have been afraid of revealing unseemly modes of operation, which return over time, particularly with regard to intelligence services and their dangerous relationships.
In 1961 the Congo was at the centre of a geopolitical clash with global repercussions. Eight months before the Albertina caught fire - 'in the sky I saw sparks', said the sole survivor, who later died in hospital - there had been the murder of Patrice Lumumba. Soul of the Mouvement national congolais party, anti-colonialist and pan-Africanist, Lumumba had been elected prime minister a few days before the proclamation of independence from Belgium, on 30 June 1960. The fear of the Americans and the British was that he might seek a foothold in the Soviet Union to get out of the grip of the former colonisers, who with their Union minière controlled the uranium deposits in Katanga and hindered a national solution to the crisis. In the capital Léopoldville (today Kinshasa) there had been a coup d'état, while in Élisabethville (today Lubumbashi), the city from where the Albertina would take off for the last time, a secessionist government had been installed. The now former prime minister was arrested and handed over to the rebels and the European mercenaries who supported them.
It is still being talked about sixty years later, even in courtrooms, in a perhaps surprising way. Recently, in a symbolic gesture, the Federal Prosecutor's Office in Brussels ordered the return of a tooth of Lumumba to his family. It was one of the daughters who asked for it, after a Belgian policeman had admitted of having taken possession of some remains of his father's body while dissolving it in acid.
Against Lumumba had already been planned assassination attempts. One of these was revealed in 1975 by a US Senate investigative committee: the CIA was supposed to have killed him by poisoning his toothpaste. Plots that make The golden thread as gripping as a spy novel. Here then is the description of the blue Citroën 2-horse Citroën of Daphne Park, secret agent of the British Mi6 in Léopoldville. 'It roared and accelerated as if it was driven only by enthusiasm,' Somaiya notes, telling of a chaotic and fascinating city where anything was possible. Some reports and information are cited from Parkalthough those relating to the days of the plane crash have disappeared. One sentence, however, remains, which Park uttered while sipping tea with an English lord a few days before his death. 'We did it', she replied to a question about Lumumba's murder. A modus operandi, to believe those words, that could also shed light on the Hammarskjöld case.
A disastrous blitz
The Congolese mission of the UN Secretary General had started five days earlier, on 13 September 1961. Its aim was to put an end to the uprising in Katanga, forcing the mercenaries, enemies of peace by definition, to withdraw. On the same day that Hammarskjöld arrived in Congo, soldiers from the UN peacekeeping contingent launched a military operation in Élisabethville. Two units surrounded the radio communications headquarters and the house of Godefroid Munongo, Minister of the Interior in the secessionist government led by Moïse Tshombe, but above all a liaison figure with the mercenaries (today Munongo is also protagonist of a comic strip).
The blue helmets had Congolese flags to wave as a sign of victory, but the raid turned into a battle. The death toll was estimated at between 30 and 200, mostly Katangais, but also blue helmets. "Either Hammarskjöld made a mistake or his men acted on their own," reads a report delivered on the desk of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan the next day. "If we do not take decisive action together with the Americans in a single week all the work done over the past year will be wiped out: the Congo will be handed over to Russia, the Union minière properties will be nationalised and run by the Russian communists, and a very dangerous situation will be created in Africa".ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT
It is unclear whether, and under what terms, Hammarskjöld authorised the raid against the secessionists. In Congo he made no comment. But he wanted to go to Rhodesia, where Tshombe and Munongo had taken refuge. He wanted to reach a cease-fire that included the departure of the mercenaries from Katanga. An appointment was set with Tshombe for the morning of 18 September in Ndola 'in the small and dingy office of the colonial airport director', Somaiya notes. The meeting never took place.
The rest is an open investigation, with still many question marks but also some fixed points. He recalled them a year ago, the current UN Secretary General, António Guterres, again called on states to desecrate and make available all information on the case. "On the possible causes of the crash", wrote, 'new elements were acquired in particular with respect to interception of relevant communications by governments, the ability of the Katanga armed forces and others to undertake an attack against the aircraft, and the presence in the area of foreign paramilitaries, including pilots, and intelligence agents'.
The investigation coordinated by prosecutor Othman confirms the hypothesis that there were at least two Fouga Magister fighters of French origin on the runway of Kolwezi, a fiefdom of the Union minière and the secessionists. One of the pilots, a Belgian mercenary identified as De Beukels, had already spoken to Hammarskjöld's former personal assistant in 1967. It would have been he who fired 75 millimetre cannons, hitting the DC-6 'by mistake' in an attempt to flank it and divert it to a rebel base. But it is not only the judicial truth that interests Somaiya. According to him, 'it is right to pay tribute to a political leader very different from those of today, who are often convinced that their interest is to divide rather than unite'.
History repeats itself
Divisions and injustices are still being talked about in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). On 1 October it will be ten years since the Rapport mappinga United Nations study that reconstructs day by day ten years of rebel incursions, foreign interference and war crimes against the civilian population committed between 1993 and 2013, mainly in eastern DRC. According to Arnold Nyaluma, spokesperson for the network of associations in South Kivu - another province rich in mineral resources, including uranium, coltan and cobalt - 'the aim of the report was to help the Congolese government to identify and punish those responsible, to ensure reparations for the victims, and to ensure that such crimes are never repeated'.
The argument is that the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu, like Katanga was, are also hostage to rebels in the pay of foreign powers and their allied multinationals. "In ten years, these recommendations have not been followed up," Nyaluma denounces. "Now we must support Nobel Peace Prize laureate Denis Mukwege's call for the creation of an international court for Congo, which must not remain a bastion of impunity."
Thirty years ago, former Katanga minister Godefroid Munongo promised truth and justice regarding the murder of Lumumba and the death of Hammarskjöld. It would have been the first time. It was 28 May 1992. He had woken up at half past four in the morning and asked his wife to prepare chicken and sweet potatoes for a festive evening. Munongo had taken his seat at the Conférence nationale souveraine (a major national debate on the future of the country that went on for a year and a half), hosted by the Congolese parliament. He was supposed to give his speech at five o'clock in the afternoon, but had been accosted by some protesters, who had thrown newspapers in front of him accusing him of Lumumba's assassination. He felt sick and began to choke. He died a few hours later in hospital, without having said a word. His family claims he was poisoned with karuho powder, a poison obtained from a local plant. The lawyer Padelli is following the case for the family.
source: https://www.internazionale.it/notizie/vincenzo-giardina/2020/09/29/inchiesta-morte-dag-hammarskjold
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