Word: hammarskjolds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Last week brought a harsh and sudden intensification of events. In Laos, the Pathet Lao guerrillas advanced toward Luangprabang, the royal capital. In the United Nations, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko truculently renewed the Communist offensive against Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold. In Geneva, when U.S., British and Russian delegates to the nuclear-test-ban conference met again after a 3½-month recess, the Soviet delegate started off with a belligerence that appeared to rip apart the fragile little structure of agreement slowly pieced together since the talks began in October 1958 (see THE WORLD). Soviet diplomats spread the word...
Then he wanted the Assembly to recognize the "legitimate government" of Antoine Gizenga, Red-backed boss of Eastern Province. This was not all. Gromyko went on to denounce Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold as a "murderer" and a "stooge" who must be fired forthwith...
...delegates listened in silence as the big nations lobbed angry rhetoric back and forth. But the U.S.'s Adlai Stevenson plainly had widespread support when he characterized Gromyko's speech as "in the worst and most destructive traditions of the cold war.'' As for Hammarskjold. said Stevenson, the U.S. would support him "with all our strength." Through it all, Hammarskjold himself sat impassively, looking like a man who had other problems to worry about. He had. One of them is the future of the U.N. operations boss in the Congo. Indian Diplomat Rajeshwar Dayal, whose inflexible...
...Hammarskjold's men already had got a taste of bitter Congolese defiance. In Matadi, the Congo's major port, Congolese troops turned on the 135-man Sudanese U.N. garrison with rifles, machine guns, mortars and 37-mm. cannon in a two-day battle that left two Sudanese dead, 13 wounded. The rest piled their blue U.N. helmets in one pile, their weapons in another, then marched out to be shipped back to Leopoldville in humiliating surrender...
...week's end Dayal flew back to Manhattan for urgent talks. Having lost the confidence of virtually all the Congolese, Dayal might not return. But whoever Hammarskjold chose as his successor would find a new spirit in the battered heart of Africa. Having insisted on diversity, the Congo's leaders now saw the usefulness of unity. And if from this, peace came, that after all was the U.N.'s goal in the first place...