Dag Hammarskjöld was born in Jönköping, although he lived most of his childhood in Uppsala. He was the fourth and youngest son of Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, Prime Minister of Sweden (1914–1917), and Agnes Almquist. His ancestors had served the Swedish Crown since the 17th century. He studied at Uppsala University where he graduated with a Master's degree in political economy and a Bachelor of Law degree. He then moved to Stockholm.

From 1930 to 1934, he was a secretary of a governmental committee on unemployment. He also wrote his economics thesis Konjunkturspridningen (The Spread of the Business Cycle) and received his Doctorate from Stockholm University in 1933. In 1936, Hammarskjöld became a secretary in the Bank of Sweden and soon he was an undersecretary of finance. From 1941 to 1948, he served as a chairman of the Bank of Sweden.

Early in 1945, he was appointed as adviser to the cabinet on financial and economic problems, and coordinated government plans to alleviate the economic problems of the post-war period.

In 1947, Hammarskjöld was appointed to Sweden’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and in 1949 he became the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He was a delegate in the Paris conference that established the Marshall Plan. In 1948, he was again in Paris to attend conference for the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation. In 1950, he became a head of Sweden delegation to UNISCAN. In 1951, he became a cabinet minister without portfolio and in effect Deputy Foreign Minister. Although Hammarskjöld served with a cabinet dominated by the Social Democrats, he never officially joined any political party. On December 20, 1954, he was elected to take his father's vacated seat in the Swedish Academy. In 1951, Hammarskjöld became vice chairman of the Swedish delegation to the United Nations General Assembly in Paris. He became the chairman of the Swedish delegation to the General Assembly in New York in 1952.

UN Secretary General

When Trygve Lie resigned from his post as UN Secretary General in 1953, the Security Council decided to recommend Hammarskjöld to the post. It came as a surprise to him. He was selected on March 31 with the majority of 10 out of eleven states. The UN General Assembly elected him in the April 7–10 session, by 57 votes out of 60. In 1957, he was re-elected.

Hammarskjöld started his term by establishing his own secretariat of 4,000 administrators. He set up regulations that defined their responsibilities. He insisted that the secretary-general be able to take emergency action without the prior approval of either the Security Council or General Assembly.

During his term, Hammarskjöld tried to soothe relations between Israel and the Arab states. In 1955, he went to mainland China to negotiate the release of 15 US pilots who had served in the Korean War and been captured by the Chinese. In 1956, he established the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF). In 1957, he intervened in the Suez Crisis.

In 1960, the former Belgian colony and now newly-independent Congo asked for UN aid in defusing the escalating civil strife. (See Congo Crisis). Hammarskjöld made four trips to the Congo. His efforts towards the decolonisation of Africa were considered insufficient by the USSR; in September 1960, they denounced his decision to send a UN emergency force to keep the peace. They demanded his resignation, and the replacement of the office of secretary-general by a three-man directorate with a built-in veto, the “troika”. The objective was, citing the memoirs of the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to “equally represent interests of three groups of countries: capitalist, socialist and recently independent.”[2] Hammarskjöld denied Patrice Lumumba's request to help force Katanga to rejoin the Congo, causing Lumumba to turn to the Soviets for help

Death

In September 1961, Hammarskjöld found out about the fighting between non-combatant UN forces and Katanga troops of Moise Tshombe. He was en route to negotiate a cease-fire on the night of September 17-18 when his DC-6B plane (SE-BDY) crashed near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). The crew had filed no flight plan (for security reasons), and a decoy aircraft went (via a different route) ahead of Hammarskjöld's aircraft. He and fifteen others perished.


[edit] Official inquiry
Following the death of Hammarskjöld, Nepalese diplomat Rishikesh Shaha was elected by the UN General Assembly to head an inquiry into the death of Hammarskjöld.[3]

The explanation of investigators at the time is that Hammarskjöld's aircraft descended too low on its approach to Ndola's airport in clear weather at night. No evidence of a bomb, surface-to-air missile, or hijacking has ever been presented, even though, following the crash, 180 men searched a six square kilometre area of the last sector of the aircraft's flightpath, looking for such evidence. Neither was any evidence of foul play found in the wreckage of the aircraft. The sole survivor, one of three bodyguards on board, recalled nothing that would indicate anything other than a controlled flight into terrain crash in the interviews he gave before he died of his injuries.[4]


[edit] Conspiracy theories
On August 19, 1998, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), stated that recently-uncovered letters had implicated British MI5, American CIA and South African intelligence services in the crash. One TRC letter said that a bomb in the aircraft's wheel-bay was set to detonate when the wheels came down for landing. Tutu said that the veracity of the letters was unclear; the British Foreign Office suggested that they may have been created as Soviet misinformation.[5]

On July 29, 2005, 100 years after Hammarskjöld's birth, the Norwegian Major General, Bjørn Egge, gave an interview to the newspaper Aftenposten on the events surrounding his death. According to Egge, who was the first UN officer to see the body, Hammarskjöld had a hole in his forehead, and this hole was subsequently airbrushed from photos taken of the body. It appeared to Egge that Hammarskjöld had been thrown from the plane, and grass and leaves in his hands might indicate that he survived the crash, and had tried to scramble away from the wreckage. Egge does not claim directly that the wound was a gunshot wound, and his statement does not align with Archbishop Tutu's information or with the findings of the official inquiry.[6] In an interview on March 24, 2007 on the Norwegian TV channel NRK, an anonymous retired mercenary claimed to have shared a room with an unnamed South African mercenary who claimed to have shot Hammarskjöld. The alleged killer was claimed to have died in the late 1990s. [7]