Word: hammarskjolds
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...World Health Organization technicians are at work in the Congo. The port of Matadi has been put back into operation under the supervision of U.S. General Raymond Wheeler, who cleared the Suez Canal for the U.N. Last week, obviously contemplating years of close U.N. involvement in Congo affairs, Hammarskjold produced a terse memorandum outlining the structure of a long-term U.N. civilian mission to the Congo which would supply the Congo's ill-educated, inexperienced Cabinet with experts in ten fields from finance to public health. It was too late now to blame Belgium for not training...
...Dissenters. Amidst the cheers Hammarskjold's Congo policy has won, there were voices of dissent. In London, Lord Beaverbrook's empire-minded Daily Express complained that U.N. intervention in the Congo "is an act of brigandage and oppression cloaked by sanctimoniousness . . . Every agitator in Africa looks with hope to Dag Hammarskjold." In Paris the right-wing L'Aurore asked: "Do we understand that in the Congo the first objective is to evict the Belgians and the second to re-establish on his cardboard throne this astonishing Lumumba?'' Paris-Jour, echoing the feeling of those Western...
...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...