Dag Hammarskjold: Was his death a crash or a conspiracy? (BBC) {Interesting history}

[eppur_se_muova]

By Stephanie Hegarty
BBC World Service

Exactly 50 years ago, UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold died in a plane crash on a mission to prevent civil war in newly-independent Congo. Suspicions that the plane was shot down, never fully laid to rest, are now again on the rise.

After his death, Mr Hammarskjold was described by US President John F Kennedy as the "greatest statesman of our century". He was a man with a vision of the UN as a "dynamic instrument" organising the world community, a protector of small nations, independent of the major powers, acting only in the interests of peace.

The only person to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize after his death, he established the first armed UN peacekeeping mission following the crisis in Suez.

Just after midnight on 18 September 1961, he was heading to negotiate a ceasefire in a mineral-rich breakaway region of Congo, where another of his peacekeeping missions was getting bogged down in the complex politics of decolonisation and Cold War rivalry.

But his DC6 aircraft crashed in darkness shortly before landing, in a forest near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia - now Zambia.
***
more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14913456

[n2doc]

1. The great ones die young n/t

[villager]

4. Not accidentally, perhaps...

n/t

[virgogal]

2. God,50 years. It seems like just few years ago.

[hlthe2b]

3. One of the rare, truly memorable UN Secretary Generals...

When world history and events was actually taught in even "average" public schools (sigh), I remember becoming quite interested in him, though he was long dead. His death was quite the loss...

[starroute]

5. I was devastated by his death

People do the whole "do you remember where you were when" thing about 9/11 or the death of JFK. But I can also remember exactly where I was and even what I was wearing when I heard that Dag Hammarskjold had died.

The weather had been unusually warm that September, and I hadn't been able to wear my new fall skirt on the first day of school, as I normally would have, so I was wearing it for the first time that day. It was a kind of golden plaid and was fairly heavy wool and not all that comfortable -- skirts started slimming down a lot after 1961 -- so I didn't wear it all that much afterward, either.

My mother came out to the elevator to tell me what had happened -- she had a way of dramatizing bad news that could make it harder to take than if she had delivered it more casually -- and at this point I can't say how much of my reaction was my own and how much was picked up from her distress. But I do know that I felt as though I'd been punched in the stomach and that the world was falling apart.

That, the Cuban missile crisis a year later, and Kennedy's death a year after that were the three great shocks of that period. When I first saw speculation a few years ago that his death might not have been accidental, it seemed to click into a pattern -- the first step in that history of the last fifty years where the good guys keep losing -- and I'm glad to see that the possibility of a conspiracy is being taken seriously.

[Politicalboi]

6. Wouldn't be surprised

To see Poppy Bush's prints all over this too.

[BlueMTexpat]

7. Hammarskjold's death was not the only one in that area of the world

during that tumultuous era. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination

Perhaps his going there was making TPTB nervous.