Dag Hammarskjöld

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Dag Hammarskjöld
Image:Dag Hammarskjöld june 1959.jpg
Order: 2nd Secretary-General
Term of office: April 10, 1953–September 18, 1961
Predecessor: Trygve Lie
Successor: U Thant
Born: July 29, 1905
Place of birth: Jönköping, Sweden
Died: September 18, 1961
Place of death: Ndola, Northern Rhodesia

Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld ▶(?) (July 29, 1905 – September 18, 1961) was a Swedish diplomat who served as Secretary-General of the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September, 1961.

Contents

Early life

Dag Hammarskjöld (generally pronounced HAM-mer-shold in English) was born in Jönköping, in Sweden, although he lived most of childhood in Uppsala. He was the fourth and youngest son of Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, Prime Minister of Sweden (1914–1917), and Agnes Almquist. His ancestors had served the Swedish Crown since the 17th century. He studied at Uppsala University where he graduated with a Master's degree in political economy and a Bachelor of Law degree. He then moved to Stockholm.

In 1930–1934 he was a secretary of a governmental committee on unemployment. He also wrote his economics thesis Konjunkturspridningen (The Spread of the Business Cycle) and received his Doctorate from Stockholm University in 1933. In 1936 Hammarskjöld became a secretary in the Bank of Sweden and soon he was a undersecretary of finance. In 1941–1948 he served as a chairman of the Bank of Sweden.

Early in 1945, he was appointed an adviser to the cabinet on financial and economic problems, and coordinated, for example, government plans to alleviate the economic problems of the post-war period.

In 1947 Hammarskjöld was appointed to Sweden's Foreign Office, and in 1949 he became the Secretary General of the Foreign Office. He was a delegate in the Paris conference that established the Marshall Plan. In 1948 he was again in Paris to attend conference for the Organization for European Economic Cooperation. In 1950 he became a head of Sweden delegation to UNISCAN. In 1951, he became a cabinet minister without portfolio and in effect Deputy Foreign Minister. Although Hammarskjöld served with a cabinet dominated by the Social Democrats, he never officially joined any political party. On December 20 1954 he was elected to take his father's vacated seat in the Swedish Academy. In 1951 Hammarskjöld became vice chairman of Swedish delegation to the United Nations General Assembly in Paris. He became the chairman of the General Assembly in 1952 in New York.

UN Secretary General

When Trygve Lie resigned from his post as UN Secretary General in 1953, the Security Council decided to recommend Hammarskjöld to the post. It came as a surprise to him. He was selected in March 31 with the majority of 10 out of eleven states. The UN General Assembly elected him in the April 7–10 session, by 57 votes out of 60. In 1957 he was re-elected.

Hammarskjöld started his term by establishing his own secretariat of 4,000 administrators. He set up regulations that defined their responsibilities. He insisted that the secretary-general should be able to take emergency action without the prior approval of the Security Council or the General Assembly.

During his terms, Hammarskjöld tried to soothe relations between Israel and the Arab states. In 1956 he went to mainland China to negotiate the release of 15 US pilots who had served in the Korean War and been captured by the Chinese. In 1956 he established the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF). In 1957 he intervened in the Suez Crisis.

Image:Dag Hammarskjöld TIME.jpg

In 1960 the former Belgian colony and now newly-independent Congo asked for UN aid in defusing the escalating civil strife. Hammarskjöld made four trips to the Congo republic. However, his efforts towards the decolonisation of Africa were considered insufficient by the USSR. In September 1960 the Soviet Union denounced his decision to send a UN emergency force to keep the peace. They demanded his resignation, and the replacement of the office of secretary general by a three-man directorate with a built-in veto, the "troika". The objective was, citing the memoirs of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, to "equally represent interests of three groups of countries: capitalist, socialist and recently independent" [1].

Death

In September 1961 he found out about the fighting between non-combatant UN forces and Katanga troops of Moise Tshombe. He was en route to negotiate a cease-fire on the night of September 17-18 when his plane crashed near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). He and fifteen others perished. There is still speculation as to the cause of the crash.

On August 19, 1998, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), revealed that recently-uncovered letters had implicated South African agents in the 1961 crash-landing in Zambia of Dag Hammarskjöld's plane. One TRC letter said that a bomb in the aircraft's wheel-bay was set to detonate when the wheels came down for landing.[2]

On July 29, 2005, exactly 100 years after Hammarskjöld's birth, the Norwegian Major General Bjørn Egge gave an interview to the newspaper Aftenposten on the events surrounding his death. According to Egge, who was the first UN officer to see the body, Hammarskjöld had a hole in his forehead, and this hole was subsequently airbrushed from photos taken of the body. It appeared to Egge that Hammarskjöld had been thrown from the plane, and grass and leaves in his hands might indicate that he survived the crash, and had tried to scramble away from the wreckage. Egge’s statement does not however align with Archbishop Tutu's information.[3]

Hammarskjöld posthumously received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961. His only book Vägmärken (Markings) was published in 1963.

See also

External links

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Preceded by:
Trygve Lie 		UN Secretary-General
1953–1961 		Succeeded by:
U Thant
Retrieved from "http://en.freepedia.org/Dag_Hammarskj%C3%B6ld.html"


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