Göran Björkdahl
 Göran Björkdahl    ( NGO employee) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Alma mater | Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Göran Björkdahl is an aid worker in Sweden's International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), stationed in Burkina Faso.[1] He featured in the 2019 film "Cold Case Hammarskjöld"[2]
Hammarskjöld murdered
On 17 August 2011, Göran Björkdahl wrote an article in The Guardian entitled "I have no doubt Dag Hammarskjöld's plane was brought down":
In 1975 my father, then working for the UN in Zambia, visited the spot where Dag Hammarskjöld's plane crashed outside Ndola. He talked about the crash to a worker there, Dickson Mwewa, who offered him a metal plate found buried at the site, telling him it was a piece of the crashed DC6. My father told the Swedish authorities about the plate at the time but they showed no interest.
I discovered the plate 32 years later while helping my parents to move house. There were five strange holes in the metal. A forensics expert later told me they were too small for bullet holes, but he could not account for them. I have not managed to find any explanation in the four years since, but I have since become absorbed in the case, which remains one of the last century's great unsolved mysteries.
While on a mission to Zambia in 2007 I visited Ndola and met an old charcoal burner, Moses Chimema, who claimed to have seen the crash. His story intrigued me and I started to search for other witnesses. Together with my Zambian friend Jacob Phiri I went around in the bush, on bicycle and by car, asking for people who could have been there in 1961. After three years we ended up with a dozen witnesses – whose stories all match Chimema's but are contrary to the official inquiry reports. I filmed interviews with them.
Archive documents in Stockholm, Lusaka and Oxford painted a picture not only of the crash but also the events in Katanga and the political machinations that led to Hammarskjöld's last journey. Interviewing the witnesses and reading the 50-year-old documents became a journey back to an era of Cold War, struggle for liberation and fights over mineral fortunes. The secret UN cables between UN headquarters in New York and the UN mission in Congo proved to be a mine of information. They reveal the growing frustration of Hammarskjöld and his officials over the tactics used by the powerful mining company Union Minière, owned mainly by Belgian, British and American investors, to obstruct and undermine the UN mission in Congo.
The documents show how the UN came to draw up a joint plan with the country's central government, Operation Morthor, aimed at ending the Katanga secession by force and the subsequent fury of US president John Kennedy and the British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who felt they had not been consulted. Hammarskjöld sent a robust reply and openly questioned the motives of the western powers in Congo. With Morthor failing, and under considerable pressure from Washington and London, Hammarskjöld apparently felt compelled to deny the original UN objective had been to end the Katanga secession by military means, and he deliberately misled the security council with a false account of the hostilities.
The cables have been available at Sweden's Royal Library since 1994, but have never been published in full. Brian Urquhart refers to them in his 1972 biography of Hammarskjöld, but misinterprets a critical cable on 10 September 1961, conveying Hammarskjöld's approval of Morthor. Urquhart says that Hammarskjöld had instructed his aides to consult him before taking any action. In fact, the secretary-general gives his men the green light. The Morthor fiasco was ultimately his responsibility. Hammarskjöld may have overstepped the UN's mandate in Congo, but he did so with the aim of preventing civil war and genocide. In Rwanda, the UN did the opposite, putting strict adherence to the legal mandate above the moral imperative to protect civilians, with disastrous results.
The cables and also Hammarskjöld's private letters depict a strong UN leader guided by the UN Charter, with a strong sympathy for the emerging new nations – as well as a dislike of the big powers' arrogance and hypocrisy. He won diplomatic victories over France and the UK in the Suez crisis in 1957 and over France in the Bizerte crisis in 1961 and he gave moral support to newly independent Guinea. After this, President Charles de Gaulle withdrew France's support for the UN Congo operation, boycotted the security council meetings and even encouraged French mercenaries to join the Katanga forces.
It is ironic that France and the UK were the ones who proposed Hammarskjöld's candidature to the UN secretary-general post in 1953, probably seeing him as a skilled bureaucrat but politically weak. It is clear that none of the big powers wanted such a forceful UN leader, guided by principles and impossible to control.
My own conclusion, after adding the new witnesses' statements and the archive information to previously published documents, is that Hammarskjöld's DC6 was brought down and that the motive was to maintain the West's control over Katanga minerals. It is significant that the UN, after Hammarskjöld's death, has become less of a challenge to the big powers.[3]
Related Document
| Title | Type | Publication date | Author(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document:More mysteries about the suspicious death of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld | Article | May 2024 | Christopher Nicholson | "The plot was successful as a report by agent 'Congo Red' details. ‘Report. Operation Celeste… 1. Device failed on take-off. 2. Despatched Eagle (illegible word) to follow and take (illegible words) 3. Device activated (illegible words) prior to landing. 4… 5. Mission accomplished: satisfactory." |
