By Otto Spijkers

Last week, I spent a few days in Stockholm and surroundings. One thing I did was visit the grave of one of UN’s big heroes: the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold (on the picture you see me at his grave in Uppsala, a small town close to Stockholm where Hammarskjold spent his student days). This visit inspired me to write a few posts about the illustrious Swede. I will start with a short description of the famous clash between him and Nikita Khrushchev, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The clash was about the Congo peacekeeping operation (ONUC), which was essentially run by the Secretary-General (at least according to Khrushchev). In following posts, I will write about peacekeeping (Post II) and Article 99 of the UN Charter (Post III). I will also write about his mysterious death (Post IV). Khrushchev proposed, during a meeting of the General Assembly in 1960, that ‘the post of Secretary-General, who alone directs the staff and alone interprets and executes the decisions of the Security Council and the sessions of the General Assembly, should be abolished’. The reason for this suggestion is, in the words of the USSR chairman, that ‘they [the colonialists] set out to secure the establishment of a puppet government, a government which, though ostensibly ‘independent’, would in fact carry out the wishes of the colonialists. The colonialists tried to bring this about by crude methods and direct interference, as they always do. It is deplorable that they have been doing their dirty work in the Congo through the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and his staff’ (Source: Paragraph 141-142 of the Official Records of the 869th meeting, 23 September 1960). When replying to the critique that in the Congo the SG was merely an aid to the ‘colonialists’, Dag Hammarskjold lists all Security Council and General Assembly resolutions related to the Congo, claiming that he was only following orders. In short: ‘it is your operation, gentlemen’ (Paragraph 10 of the Official Records of the 871st meeting, 26 September 1960). Khrushchev was not amused: he responded ‘by thumping the table enigmatically with his brawny fists while gazing around with a mischievous, almost pixie-like smile’ (James Morris in the Manchester Guardian of 27 September 1960). A few days later, on Saturday 1 October, 1960, it is again time for Khrushchev. He says, among many other things , that ‘[the SG] knows that he is the faithful servant of monopolistic capital and represents in the United Nations the interests of states which are carrying out a piratical, imperialistic, colonialist policy’ (Paragraph 100 of the Official Records of the 881st meeting, 1 October 1960). And finally, on the 3rd of October, Khrushchev ends another personal attack on Mr. Hammarskjold with the following conclusion: ‘[W]e do not, and cannot, place confidence in Mr. Hammarskjold. If he himself cannot muster the courage to resign, in, let us say, a chivalrous way, we shall draw the inevitable conclusions from the situation’ (Paragraph 30 of the Official Records of the 882nd meeting, 3 October 1960; the minutes of this classic meeting are available here). So what are the inevitable conclusions Khrushchev is talking about? Khrushchev does not really answer this question. The final word is for SG Hammarskjold. According to Brian Urquhart, the SG was so infuriated while Khrushchev was holding his speech on Monday morning that he asked the Chairman of the General Assembly to immediately give him the floor as soon as Khrushchev was finished. The Chairman refused; he suggested – wisely – that Hammarskjold go home, calm down, draft a reply, let other people read it first, and then ask for the floor during the second session of the day. This is exactly what the SG did. And this is what Hammarskjold said in the afternoon, in a very famous statement:

[Khrushchev’s] statement this morning seems to indicate that the Soviet Union finds it impossible to work with the present Secretary-General. This may seem to provide a strong reason why I should resign. However, the Soviet Union has also made it clear that if the present Secretary-General were to resign now, it would not wish to select a new incumbent but insist on an arrangement which – and this is my firm conviction based on broad experience – would make it impossible to maintain an effective executive. By resigning I would, therefore, at the present difficult and dangerous juncture throw the Organization to the winds. I have no right to do so because I have a responsibility to all those Member States for which the Organization is of decisive importance – a responsibility which overrides all other considerations. (Source: Paragraph 10 of the Official Records of the 883rd meeting, 3 October 1960.)

Again, Hammarskjold answers to no one but to the Organization itself. When Hammarskjold finished his speech, the General Assembly gave him a standing ovation that lasted several minutes. Only Khrushchev and his advisors did not join in: ‘[they] remained seated, and throughout the uproar pounded their table with a circular motion of their fists, with broad grins on their faces’ (p. 465 of ‘Hammarskjold’ by Urquhart).

When Rolf Edberg, Swedish Ambassador to Norway and friend of the Hammarskjold family, received the Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to Dag Hammarskjöld posthumously in 1961, he said about Hammarskjold’s clash with Khrushchev:

It was impossible to witness that scene at the stormy session of last year’s General Assembly without recalling some words that [Dag Hammarskjold] once wrote about his own father. "A man of firm convictions does not ask, and does not receive, understanding from those with whom he comes into conflict", he wrote about Hjalmar Hammarskjöld. "A mature man is his own judge. In the end, his only firm support is being faithful to his own convictions." How aptly these words applied to himself when he rose unhesitatingly to defend the idea of a truly international body of civil servants or to uphold the principles of the Charter in the Congo operation!

To qualify what happened in the General Assembly as a personal squabble between two very stubborn men may not be all that far from the truth, but it doesn’t do justice to the fact that these two stubborn characters were debating the future of nothing less than the one and only global organization: the United Nations (which was only fifteen years old at that time and thus in its adolescence and very vulnerable to an attack). Just before Khrushchev left New York at the end of the General Assembly meetings of 1960, he invited Hammarskjold to attend a Soviet reception, and the SG accepted the invitation. But this was not an offer of reconciliation; as soon as Hammarskjold arrived, Khrushchev noted that he once took the Secretary-General around the Black Sea in a rowboat and that the SG had never done such thing for him. In any case, the UN and the SG survived the Soviet attacks, and the public had seen one of the most exciting debates in the history of the General Assembly. With an undisputed winner: the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold. – Otto