Remembering Dag Hammarskjold

 Remembering Dag Hammarskjold

Fifty-nine years today, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold died in a plane crash while flying to a peace conference in Ndola in the Congo, hoping to end the conflict called the Congo Crisis by negotiating a peace settlement. He died a hero's death, a martyr for peace and freedom. Today, on the anniversary of his death, I want to honor Dag Hammarskjold.

Dag was the youngest son of Hjalmar Hammarskjold and Agnes Almquist Hammarskjold, part of the noble family Hammarskjold. At that time Hjalmar Hammarskjold was the governor of Uppsala County, so Dag, alongside his brothers, grew up in Uppsala Castle. Dag considered the beautiful castle to be his childhood home. But though he was born and raised in an illustrious family, Dag was no beneficiary of nepotism. From the beginning, it was clear that Dag was intelligent, compassionate, sensitive, and spiritual.

At eighteen, Dag Hammarskjold enrolled in Uppsala University, majoring in Linguistics, Literature, and History. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree and honors, then going on to pursue a degree in economics and a law degree. Dag's talents were obvious, and before he had finished his law degree he had gained a job as Assistant Secretary of the Unemployment Committee. He soon became a full Secretary on the committee on unemployment, meanwhile writing his economic thesis The Spread of the Business Cycle and receiving a doctorate from Stockholm University. Dag's career as a civil servant blossomed. He became the state secretary in the Swedish Ministry of Finance at only thirty-one. Then he was chairman of the General Council of the Riksbank (Sweden's central bank), Swedish delegate to the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, cabinet secretary for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He coordinated government plans to heal the economics problems of the post-World-War-Two era, he was a delegate to the Paris conference that established the Marshall Plan, he was the head of the Swedish delegation at a forum to promote economic cooperation between Britain and the nations of Scandinavia. At last Dag Hammarskjold became involved in the United Nations, first vice chair of the Swedish delegation to the UN general assembly and then chair of the Swedish delegation to the UN general assembly.

After the first Secretary-General of the United Nations Trygve Lie resigned, there was a great dispute between the United States and her allies against the Soviet Union and her allies over who should be the next Secretary-General. Eventually, Dag Hammarskjold was selected. The superpowers, blue America and her NATO and red Russia and her Warsaw Pact alike, thought Dag Hammarskjold would be a Secretary-General who would focus on administration and refrain from political discussion. They thought he would be weak and not willing to challenge the existing order. They were wrong.

Dag Hammarskjold set about his work as Secretary-General energetically. Dag had a passion for peace, and he would walk through fire to achieve it. "Preventative diplomacy" he called it, his habit of bravely entering crises to resolve them. He valiantly tried to improve relations between Israel and the Arab states. He negotiated the release of eleven captured fighter pilots being held prisoner in China after the end of the Korean War. He resolved the Suez Crisis, allowing General Nasser to continue his reforming campaigns in Egypt while letting Britain and France escape humiliated but not harmed. He convinced America and Britain to withdraw the troops that they were using to occupy Lebanon and Jordan. He established the United Nations Emergency Force and made it clear that he intended the Emergency Force to be an army for protecting and peacekeeping.

But Dag Hammarskjold also showed his integrity closer to home. Dag sought a close relationship with his staff at the UN. He would go into every UN department to shake hands with as many workers as possible and he made sure to eat in the UN cafeteria with the workers at the UN as often as possible. He pursued small but telling projects for the benefit of workers at the UN as well. He relinquished the Secretary-General's private elevator for general use. He planned and supervised the creation of the meditation room at the UN headquarters, a place dedicated to silence and and reflections for people of all faiths, ethics, and religions.

Then the Congo Crisis broke out. This conflict caused widespread violence and chaos throughout the Congo over who would rule the newly independent country. The situation was made more complex by the fact that the Congo Crisis was also an instance of proxy fighting, with the United States and the Soviet Union backing opposing armed forces. Dag Hammarskjold refused to let the fighting evolve into full scale civil role. He sent UN peacekeepers to prevent the fighting from worsening. The Soviet Union was outraged. They wanted the UN to stand by and leave the situation alone. They didn't want any outside forces to interfere with their plans to push the partisans they supported into power. The Soviet government demanded that Dag resign and that the Secretary-General be replaced by a directorate of three people. One man listening to his conscience was too much of a threat to the superpowers being able to do whatever they wanted. But Dag Hammarskjold refused to change his position. Soon after sending in the peacekeepers, he flew to Leopoldville in the Congo to personally address the crisis. Though war seemed imminent, Dag Hammarskjold succeeded in convincing the leaders of the opposing sides of the fighting to discuss the ceasefire. Dag would personally lead the meetings in the city of Ndola. But going to Ndola would require flying over dangerous territory. Courageously, Dag Hammarskjold and sixteen other people boarded the plane, willing to risk their lives to pursue peace. Tragically, the plane crashed killing everyone onboard except for a security guard, who died soon after. Dag Hammarskjold, the champion of peace and liberty, was slain.

Dag Hammarskjold's death shocked the world and broke thousands of hearts. People across the Earth mourned Dag's death, grieving not only this noble man but the ideals and hopes that died with him as well. An investigation of the crash declared it an accident, the result of pilot error, but there was also evidence that suggested that the plane may have been shot down. Accusations of assassinations flew. Blue America said the KGB killed him. Red Russia said the CIA killed him. But while there have been many analyses over the decades of the crash that killed Dag Hammarskjold and the other sixteen people on the plane, none of them have been definitive. To this day, no one knows whether the crash was really an accident or an assassination; and if it was an assassination, who the murderers were.

Dag Hammarskjold was not only a man of external greatness, but of internal greatness as well. From the time he was a teenager up until just before he died, Dag wrote a spiritual journal reflecting what he called his "negotiations with [himself] - and with God". Soon his death, his associates found the manuscript accompanied by a note giving them permission to publish it. The journal was published as Vagmarken, which translates to Waymarkings in English. In Waymarkings, Dag Hammarskjold describes his inner emotional and spiritual life.

Waymarkings goes to some rather dark places. Despite all his great achievements, Dag Hammarskjold was a very lonely man. This was most dramatic with regards to romantic love. When Dag was a young man, he fell wildly in love with a woman who then left him for another man. This was the only time in his life Dag Hammarskjold ever pursued romantic and sexual intimacy. Though he longed deeply to find and marry a woman that he could love and connect with powerfully, he came to accept that this dream would never happen. Instead, Dag Hammarskjold decided to dedicate his love to the world. He describes his feelings in Waymarkings like this: “As a husband embraces his wife’s body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high, light of the morning. I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no - but refreshed, rested - while waiting.” 

The melancholy in Waymarkings continues outside of this romantic isolation. Dag also wrote about his determination to find his place in the world as well as his fear that he would fail to achieve the greatness that he knew he was capable of. He wrote poignantly about death in Waymarkings. Mortality weighed heavy on Dag Hammarskjold's mind, and death is something he thought about often. Perhaps darkest of all, many of Dag's writings hint at a desire for annihilation, a masochistic hope of being subsumed into something greater than himself.

But there is not only dark in Dag Hammarskjold's Waymarkings, there is light, too. He wrote of kindness towards others and the importance of friendship. He wrote of the importance of morality and conscience in politics. He wrote of determination and bravery. He wrote of connecting with God and the spiritual value of nature - Dag was both a devout Protestant who valued the classic Protestant values of truth, right behavior, and personal moral transformation and a mystic who could sense God's voice within himself. And he wrote of beauty. Dag Hammarskjold wrote poetry in Waymarkings as a way of expressing himself and his emotions. Dag's poetry in Waymarkings shows how he was inspired by and yearned for beauty. 

Rest In Peace, Dag Hammarskjold.

For his compassion, for his courage, for his intelligence, for his integrity, for his sensitivity, for his spirituality, Dag Hammarskjold stands as a true modern hero and someone who should be remembered. As John Keats wrote, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever", and that is most true of all of a person with a beautiful soul. Rest In Peace, Dag Hammarskjold. Your beautiful soul is a joy forever.