A new book suggests that a South African mercenary may have assassinated a former UN secretary general Nawaal Deane
A new biography of former United Nations secretary general Dag Hammarskjld has rekindled suspicions of South African involvement in his death.
Hammarskjld was killed in an airplane crash on September 18 1961 near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, while on a peace mission to president Moise Tshombe of the Congolese province of Katanga.
The new book, Palace of Dreams by Norwegian author Bodil Katarina Naevdal, bolsters the theory that Hammarskjld did not die in a plane crash, but was murdered in a planned assassination.
The book reveals that Hammarskjld’s autopsy was classified in Sweden until last year, and that there are suggestions that it and Hammarskjld’s corpse have been tampered with. The book also details discussions with a Norwegian mercenary who claims to have shared a house with a South African mercenary who says he pulled off the assassination.
It is not the first time South Africans have been linked to the death of Hammarskjld. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission threw up documents last year, on letterheads from a mysterious South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR), suggesting Pretoria had been involved. The “top secret” documents talked of “Operation Celeste” the plan to get rid of “troublesome” Hammarskjld in a series of messages between two South Africans, a commodore and a captain.
Researchers have subsequently suggested that the SAIMR documents, adorned with a strikingly kitsch logo of what appears to be a mermaid, have been concocted. Among the other “secret” documents with the SAIMR logo that have been doing the rounds for some years are bizarre plans to recruit mercenaries to reinstate Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin.
A former researcher for the truth commission, Piers Pigou, says the SAIMR existed but it is unclear precisely what it did.
But Naevdal effectively endorses the SAIMR documents. In a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who has written the foreward to the book, she says that eight letters written by the members of the SAIMR spelled out the liquidation of Hammarskjld.
The chapters in the book chronologically detail the events surrounding Hammarskjld’s death. In the days before his death the author tells how one of Hammarskjld’s friends, Bo Beskowa, a famous Swedish artist, felt that he had a certain feeling he might not come back from this tour. Hammarskjld had his will mailed to Stockholm two days before the Africa tour.
One of the more intriguing findings of the book is that a Norwegian general, Bjorn Egge, who was then the UN security officer in Kinshasa, says Hammarskjld was found near the crash site with a hole in his forehead. It has also emerged that the Swedish state police were not allowed to perform any observations close to the wreckage.
The conclusion of the UN report on the crash was that it was an accident no more, no less.
The book raises doubts about the veracity of the autopsy report, which has been kept secret since 1962. Tor Jacob Eide, professor of pathology at Rikshospitalet (the Main Norwegian state hospital), says it is possibly false and certainly unprofessional.
According to Norwegian photo expert Ask Rohan, photographs of the dead secretary general in his coffin in Ndola were also manipulated, including a retouch of his forehead where, according to Egge, there should have been a hole. These photos have not been seen since 1961, and were accessed only after a court order. Building on the suspicion that Hammarskjld was murdered, Naevdal spoke several times with one of Tshombe’s soldiers, a South African-born British citizen who was under house arrest in Lubumbashi with a South African mercenary named Swanepoel, who claimed to have shot Hammarskjld.
According to Naevdal’s source, mercenaries were on duty through the night at Ndola airport and in the woods around the crash site. Hammarskjld was the only person on the plane who was not burned, and the book asserts that he was alive for some time after the crash.
To complicate matters, the book also suggests that in the run-up to the accident Hammarskjld was suicidal because of loneliness and overwork.
All that therefore remains certain about the mysterious incident is that, along with the crashes of Samora Machel’s jet in 1986 and the Helderberg in 1987, it will go down as one of Africa’s most controversial aviation incidents. One thing all three incidents have in common is that they were probed by the late South African judge Cecil Margo, who died in November.