Word: hammarskjolds
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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...
...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...
Since they met last, the Congo had come unstuck, and the U.N. had shown its helplessness there. Nikita Khrushchev was not coming this time (he sent Gromyko instead), but the Soviet Union's vituperative attacks on Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, and its near refusal to recognize his existence, demoralized everyone. Said one staffer: "Everybody here from Executive Assistant Andrew Cordier on down wants to resign. The Congo has done...
Adlai's Try. In such a disillusioned moment, U.S. Delegate Adlai Stevenson made a forceful speech in Manhattan. To African states, whose jockeying for immediate advantage has helped to undermine Hammarskjold's authority, he suggested that the U.N. "is of first interest above all to the weaker states, since without it they have no ultimate protection...