Word: hammarskjolds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With a rare angry glint in his pale blue eyes, the U.N.'s Dag Hammarskjold last week went on the offensive against Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba. And well he might. The Congo's army was acting on its irresponsible own, the Congo's economy was stagnating, and its capital city chaotic and littered with trash. In such an hour, when he needed all the help he could get and his country needed all the stability it could muster, Lumumba jumped up and down in an insensate feud with the U.N. Compared with Lumumba, Hammarskjold confided to associates...
Chain of Letters. Lumumba seemed neither in effective control of his country nor of himself. He sent an irate note to Hammarskjold accusing him of ignoring the Congo's central government, of "acting in connivance" with the secessionist regime in the Congo's Katanga province, and of deliberately misinterpreting his instructions from the U.N. Security Council. Then, blithely ignoring the fact that the U.N. had already dispatched 2,000 African (Moroccan, Mali and Ethiopian) troops to Katanga. Lumumba accused Dag of sending in only units from Ireland (there were no Irish troops in Katanga) and from Sweden...
...Hammarskjold's reply is that the U.N. does not meddle in internal affairs, even if it runs them "on request." Its only mission in Katanga, he says, is to replace Belgian troops with U.N. troops. When the Belgians are gone, if Katanga still wishes to secede, Hammarskjold's U.N. troops will not interfere. Should Lumumba and his pulled-together Force Publique try to reconquer a secessionist Katanga, the U.N. force under its present directive from the Security Council would have to stand aside and let them fight it out. Hammarskjold has scrupulously refrained from backing Lumumba...
Certainly nothing was yet settled. The U.N. can legally remain in the Congo only at the invitation of the Congo government, and last week Premier Lumumba, growling ominously about the pressures on him, called on Hammarskjold to abandon his plans to garrison Katanga province with mixed black and white forces (Swedish, Moroccan and Ethiopian), demanded a totally black force instead. "African troops," he insisted, "are completely capable of carrying out the U.N. mission." In Accra, Ghana's Nkrumah was still talking up the formation of an "All-African" army composed of units from Ghana, Guinea, the U.A.R. and "volunteers...
Despite the critics, the doubters, and everyone's legitimate forebodings, Hammarskjold continued to push ahead from one limited, carefully chosen diplomatic objective to the next. At week's end, without ruckus, members of his Swedish bodyguard symbolically took over from the Belgians the guard duty at Elisabethville airfield, where they first put down. Belgian commanders in Katanga agreed to start pulling their 7,000 troops back to a single base as more U.N. forces flew in this week. The Congo may remain just one jump ahead of chaos for some time to come, but Dag Hammarskjold had established...