File:Doughty review of 'Who Killed Hammarskjöld'.pdf

Summary

In 2012, Howard A. Doughty, book review editor of The Innovation Journal, wrote this review of "Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa" by Susan Williams, Columbia University Press, 2011 (published in The Innovation Journal: The Public Sector Innovation Journal, Volume 17(2), 2012, article 8).

Extract

The following extract appears on Wikispooks here:

'Now, forty years later, Susan Williams has revisited the incident. A Senior Research Fellow at the University of London’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies, she has reexamined the evidence as it was available at the time, and brought to bear research techniques that were unavailable to the initial investigators—even if they had been in a mood to consider them.

'Her reexamination of the documentary and physical evidence—both previously produced and previously concealed—have led her to a new conclusion. Although it cannot be said exactly how the crash came about, it is all but certain that Dag Hammarskjöld was assassinated.

'Williams was particularly interested in the papers of Sir Roy Welensky. He was the colonial prime minister of the federation of Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland from 1957 to 1963. He was an active supporter of Katangan independence and maintained a close, if informal, relationship with Katanga’s president, Moise Tshombe. He had facilitated further external support from apartheid South Africa and the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, which had a complementary interest in the area with its own colonies of Angola and Mozambique.

'The Welensky papers convinced Williams that a tremendous amount of evidence had been concealed, censored and suppressed covered up, and much of the rest had been falsified. Also coming to light was the fact that, while the other passengers and crew of the airplane were incinerated, Hammarskjöld’s body was whole and intact except for a round hole in his forehead that had been airbrushed out before official photos were released. A host of other “anomalies” are reported including the dismissal of the words of the only crash survivor (a Hammarskjöld bodyguard who died a few days after the “accident” and reported events wholly inconsistent with the official reports).

'Particularly strange is the fact, although that the plane went down as it was about to land at Ndola airport and was found just eight miles away on its scheduled flight path, the airport was almost immediately closed, no search was begun for four hours and the wreckage was not discovered for fifteen hours, despite the fact that eye-witnesses report seeing paramilitary units at the crash site shortly after the plane went down.

'If, as seems clear, the UN Secretary-General was murdered, the relevant questions are the same as those lingering around the killing of John Kennedy just two years later: why, and by whom?'^[1]

Conclusion

These two concluding paragraphs appear on Howard Doughty's page:

'A final question remains. Why bring any of this up now? The pertinent personalities are long since dead. The Congo, Belgium and other parties to the disputes have long since moved on. Although Russia continues to be worrisome to many Western leaders, the Soviet menace is no longer apt to frighten children in their beds. So, what purpose can possibly be served, even if some distinguished panel of experts or an international judicial inquiry were able to exhume the truth?

'One answer is that the truth is worth pursuing regardless of the topic. It shall, as someone once said with confidence, set you free. Another is that the same sorts of events have occurred many times since and targeted assassinations of foreign nationals are everyday current events. (Iranian scientists seem to be the cible du jour.) By opening up the past and drawing parallels to the present, we may be able to contextualise contemporary debates about formal kill-lists generated by well-respected governments, rogue states and terrorist groups alike. There may be a risk insofar as illuminating past bad behaviour may encourage a blasé acceptance of continued bad acts, but I would like to believe that we have not become so intimidated by the national security state or made so hard-hearted by compounded atrocities that we can look with indifference upon such fundamental violations of human ethics. And, not to make light of it, we may regain an interest in some of the more heinous political murders of our era, even if it shows that the "conspiracy theorists" were right all along.'

References