Word: dag
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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From the start, U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold had handled the troubles of the Congo with brisk diplomatic skill, using them, among other things, to enhance the U.N.'s prestige and authority. But as always, Hammarskjold and the U.N. were crippled by one overriding weakness: the U.N.'s inability to counter the threat of force with threatened force of its own. When one defiant man-Premier Moise Tshombe of the Congo's rebellious Katanga province-threatened resistance to the U.N. forces, all Hammarskjold's carefully laid plans went agley...
...Security Council, Hammarskjold presented two clear choices as to what to do next. The Council could authorize him to send U.N. forces into Katanga ready to shoot. Or, as Dag plainly favored, the Council could offer Tshombe assurance that the presence of U.N. troops would not be used to force Katanga to submit to the Congo government...
Louder & Louder. While his blue-helmeted men stood bored guard duty on sweltering street corners and dusty village lanes. Dag Hammarskjold dickered endlessly with the Congo's erratic politicians. Encouraged by the mercurial remarks of Premier Patrice Lumumba as he wended his way home from the U.S., the Congo government became more and more insistent on the departure of Belgian troops from their bastion in Katanga...
...Belgium with a blunt appeal: Remove your forces from Katanga so the U.N. can take over. Within hours, the envoy flashed back word of Belgian acceptance and Hammarskjold happily went on the air with an announcement that U.N. troops would move into Katanga at week's end. Dag then sent the U.S.'s Ralph Bunche flying off to the Katanga capital of Elisabethville as his advance emissary...
This is the sort of annoyance that Dag Hammarskjold cannot soothe, and the sort that can transform Khrushchev into something remarkably like a Cheshire Cat. Even if all the unrest of the Congo were to disappear, Belgian resentment would still be the stuff of which rifts in NATO are all too easily made...