Jehangir Hussain :
In 1953, at age 47, Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld, was elected as the 2nd secretary general of the United Nations. Swedish economist and diplomat Hammarskjöld was the youngest ever UN secretary general. He was born in 1905.
His tenure as the UN secretary general from April 10, 1953 to September 18, 1961, was characterized by efforts to strengthen the newly created United Nations internally and externally. He took initiatives to improve morale and efficiency of the UN to make it more responsive to international issues.
He chaired over the creation of the first UN peacekeeping forces for Egypt and the Congo, and personally intervened to defuse or resolve diplomatic crises. Hammarskjöld’s second term was cut short by his death in a plane crash on his way to take part in the cease-fire negotiations to resolve the Congo Crisis.
He is remembered as a capable diplomat and administrator for his efforts to resolve various global crises for which he remains the only person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, posthumously. He is considered one of the two best UN secretaries-general, along with his successor U Thant of Burma, now Myanmar.
Dag Hammarskjöld’s appointment was been hailed as one of the most notable successes for the UN. US president John F Kennedy called Hammarskjöld, ‘the greatest statesman of our century.’
Dag Hammarskjöld was born in Jonkoping to the noble Hammarskjold family. The 4th and youngest son Swedish Prime Minister Hjalmar, from 1914 to 1917, Hammarskjöld spent most of his childhood at his childhood home, Uppsala Castle in Uppsala.
In 1930, he obtained his Licentiate of Philosophy and Master of Law degrees from Uppsala University. Before finishing his law degree he had obtained a job as the Swedish government’s Assistant Secretary of the Unemployment Committee.
From 1930 to 1934, Hammarskjöld was Secretary of a Swedish governmental committee on unemployment. During this time he wrote his economics thesis, ‘The Spread of the Business Cycle’ and received a doctorate from Stockholm University.
In 1936, he became a secretary in Sweden’s central bank. From 1941 to 1948, he served as chairman of the central bank’s General Council. Hammarskjöld quickly developed a successful career as a Swedish public servant. He was state secretary in the Ministry of Finance 1936-1945. He was Sweden’s delegate to the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation, 1947-1953, cabinet secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1949-1951 and minister without portfolio from 1951-1953.
He helped coordinate government plans to alleviate the economic problems of the post-World War II period and was a delegate to the Paris conference that established the Marshall Plan. In 1950, he became head of the Swedish delegation to UNISCAN, a forum to promote economic cooperation between the United Kingdom and the Scandinavian countries.
Hammarskjöld served in a cabinet dominated by the Social Democrats, but he never joined any political party. In 1951, Hammarskjöld was vice chairman of the Swedish delegation to the UN General Assembly in Paris. He became the chairman of the Swedish delegation to the UN General Assembly in New York in 1952.
In 1954, he was elected to take the seat in the Swedish Academy his father had vacated. In 1952, the first UN secretary general Trygve Lie announced his resignation. Negotiations took place between the Western powers and the Soviet Union, without any agreement for a successor. On 13 and 19 March 1953, the Security Council voted on four candidates. Lester B Pearson of Canada was the only candidate to receive the required majority, but he was vetoed by the Soviet Union.
At a consultation of the permanent members on 30 March 1953, French ambassador Henri Hoppenot suggested four candidates, including Hammarskjöld, whom he had met at the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation. The superpowers were expecting the next secretary-general to pay attention to administrative issues and refrain from participating in political discussion.
Hammarskjöld’s reputation at the time was, in the words of biographer Emery Kelèn, ‘a brilliant economist, an unobtrusive technician, and an aristo-bureaucrat’. For this, he faced no controversy in getting elected as the 2nd UN secretary-general. The Soviet permanent representative, Valerian Zorin, found Hammarskjöld ‘harmless’. Zorin declared that he would be voting for Hammarskjöld, to the surprise of the Western powers, setting off a flurry of diplomatic activity.
British foreign secretary Eden was strongly in favour of Hammarskjöld and asked the United States to ‘take any appropriate action to induce the Nationalist China to abstain’.
Sweden recognized the People’s Republic of China and faced a potential veto from the Republic of China. The US State Department took Hammarskjöld’s nomination ‘as a complete surprise and started scrambling around to find out who Mr. Hammarskjold was and what his qualifications were’.
The State Department authorized US ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., to vote for Hammarskjöld, after he briefed the State Department that he ‘may be as good as we can get’. On April 1, 1953, when a Stockholm reporter informed Hammarskjöld, ‘We understand you’ve been designated secretary-general of the United Nations’, he replied ‘This April Fool’s Day joke is in extremely bad taste: it’s nonsense!’
On 31 March 1953, the UN Security Council voted 10-0-1 to recommend Hammarskjöld to the General Assembly, with Nationalist China abstaining. Shortly after midnight on April 1,1953, Hammarskjöld was awakened by a telephone call from a reporter with the news, which he dismissed as an April Fool’s Day joke.
But he believed the news after the third phone call from the Swedish mission in New York confirmed the nomination at 3 AM and a communique from the Security Council was soon thereafter delivered to him. After consulting with the Swedish cabinet and his father, Hammarskjöld decided to accept the nomination.
In his wire to the Security Council, he wrote:
‘With strong feeling personal insufficiency I hesitate to accept candidature but I do not feel I could refuse to assume the task imposed on me should the [UN General] Assembly follow the recommendation of the Security Council by which I feel deeply honoured.’
Later in the day Hammarskjöld held a press conference at the Swedish Foreign Ministry, where he displayed an intense interest and knowledge in the affairs of the UN. The UN General Assembly voted 57-1-1 on April 7, 1953 to appoint Dag Hammarskjöld as Secretary-General of the United Nations. Hammarskjöld was sworn in as Secretary-General on 10 April 1953.
He was unanimously re-elected on 26 September 1957 for the 2nd term, which began on April 10, 1958.
Immediately following the assumption of the Secretariat, Hammarskjöld attempted to establish a good rapport with his staff. He made a point of visiting every UN department to shake hands with as many workers as possible, eating in the cafeteria as often as possible, and relinquished the elevator for the secretary-general for general use.
He began his term by establishing his own secretariat of 4,000 administrators and setting up regulations that defined their responsibilities. He was also actively engaged in smaller projects relating to the UN working environment; for example, he took the initiative to build a meditation room at the UN headquarters, where people could withdraw and spend time in silence, regardless of their faith, creed, or religion. During his term, Hammarskjöld tried to improve relations between Israel and the Arab states.
Other highlights include a 1955 visit to China to negotiate the release of 11 captured US pilots who had served in the Korean War, in the establishment of the United Nations Emergency Force in 1956, and his intervention in the 1956 Suez Crisis.
He is credited for allowing participation of the Holy See in the United Nations in the same year. In 1960, the newly independent Congo sought UN aid in defusing the Congo Crisis. Hammarskjöld made four trips to Congo, but his efforts toward the decolonisation of Africa were considered insufficient by the Soviet Union.
In September 1960, the Soviet Union denounced his decision to send UN emergency force to keep the peace in Congo and demanded his resignation and replacement by a three-member directorate, the ‘Troika’ with a built-in veto. The objective was, according to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs, to ‘equally represent interests of three groups of countries: capitalist, socialist and recently independent’.
On 18 September 1961, Hammarskjöld was on his way to negotiate a cease-fire between the United Nations Operation in the Congo forces and Katangese troops under Moise Tshome. The Douglas DC-6 plane carrying him crashed near Nodla, near Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia.
Hammarskjöld died in the crash, as did all the 15 other passengers. His death set off a succession crisis in the United Nations. The circumstances of the crash are still an unresolved mystery.
Hammarskjöld’s only book, Vagmarken, Markings, or more literally Waymarks, was published in 1963, with a foreword written by his friend, poet WH Auden.
(Jehangir Hussain is a senior journalist. Email: [email protected]).
