Each year, the Security Council holds a delocalized session for a friendly debate. The 15 ambassadors and the UN Secretary General have convened in a converted farm in Backåkra, in the South of Sweden, with a view to freely debating the war in Syria.
This summer house was the residence of the former UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, who was assassinated in 1961.
The Swedish diplomat and United Nations Secretary General died in a plane crash, on 18 September 1961, over Northern Rhodesia, Zambia today.
An international commission of retired judges, including South African judge Richard Goldstone, was established by the United Nations in February 2014 to re-examine the case. A third of the reports by the United Nations Commission of Investigation in 1962, said sabotage could not be ruled out.
The UN head’s mission had been regarded with suspicion by powerful mining interests in Britain, as well as permanent member of the Security Council, the United States. Hammarskjöld died while seeking peace in the newly independent Congo, a former Belgian colony rich with strategically vital minerals, including uranium.
Brand Fourie, South Africa’s ambassador to the United Nations and later Foreign Secretary at the time, gave a fascinating description of Hammarskjöld’s visit to South Africa shortly before his death and the good understanding there was between him and dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, also an enemy of mining interests in the country and Britain’s eternal role in exploiting it.
Verwoerd had had a huge share in planning the strategy followed by the South African legal team at the World Court in The Hague to leave the British Commonwealth. After the victory of the ANC in 1994, South Africa suddenly returned to the Commonwealth without a vote.
In 2015, a Swedish television and film documentary maker – Andreas Rocksen and Swedish aid worker Göran Björkdahl looked into possible links regarding the assassination of Hammarskjöld.
Secret UN cables between UN headquarters in New York and the UN mission in the Congo proved to be a mine of information. They revealed the growing frustration of Hammarskjöld and his officials over the tactics used by the powerful mining company Union Minière, owned mainly by British and American investors, to obstruct and undermine the UN mission in Congo.
One theory is that the DC-6 may have been attacked by a French-built Fouga Magister fighter jet operated by secessionist forces in the southern Congolese province of Katanga.
Seven months before the crash, three Fouga Magisters had been delivered to the secessionists aboard an American-owned cargo plane that was supposed to be delivering food, later reported to have been a CIA operation.
In 1975 Björkdahl’s father visited the spot where Hammarskjöld’s plane crashed. He talked about the crash to a local worker, who offered him a metal plate telling him it was a piece of the crashed DC6. There were five strange holes in it, that looked like bullet holes. Björkdahl’s father told the Swedish authorities about the plate, but they showed no interest.