UNITED NATIONS: Quiet Man in a Hot Spot

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From the edge of the Elisabethville airport, black, handsome Moise Tshombe, president of the rebellious Congo province of Katanga, watched somberly as a white Convair circled slowly over his capital. At last the Elisabethville control tower gave the Convair permission to land but first warned that the seven troop-laden transports behind it must turn away. Back from the Convair crackled a curt message: Unless all eight planes were allowed to land, the entire flight would return to Leopoldville. Toying with a tourist booklet entitled “Elisabethville Welcomes You,” Tshombe (pronounced Chombay) hesitated briefly, then gave clearance to all the planes and stepped out onto the field to greet Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary-General of the United Nations.

As the slim, sandy-haired Hammarskjold marched past a Katanga honor guard, a crowd of several hundred Belgians and Africans set up a cry of “Down with the United Nations.” At the sight of the 240 Swedish troops,* the U.N. advance guard who, Dag said, were under “my exclusive, personal authority,” the crowd jeered again.

But as Katanga jeered and Belgians fretted, most of the rest of the world cheered. New York Times Reporter James Reston called Hammarskjold “one of the great natural resources in the world today.” A Netherlands editorialist saw him as a “supranational figure,” Italy as “a world-famed arbitrator . . . who imposes his own will,” Japan as “the bridge between the reality of the world situation and the ideal of world peace.”

Behind most of these cheers lay the sense of relief expressed by a British diplomat who asked, “Can you imagine what the situation would be in the Congo now if it had not been for the U.N. ?” and promptly answered himself: “Intervention by the two superpowers and a dangerous clash between them.” Along with the relief ran pleased surprise at Hammarskjold’s positive achievements in the Congo and some concern over what he had let himself and the U.N. in for. In a month of swirling diplomatic maneuver, Hammarskjold had sometimes seemed to falter but in the end prevailed. He steadily pressured the Belgians toward renouncing their angry reoccupation of the Congo that they had so recently freed. He had kept the Congo’s erratic politicians, at least for the moment, from plunging their infant nation into civil war, and checked the threatened intervention of such pan-African adventurers as Ghana’s Nkrumah and Guinea’s Sekou Toure. In the process he had stretched the U.N. Charter into shapes undreamed of by its authors and established the precedents for vastly in creased U.N. authority over member nations suffering from internal convulsions.

Eighty-Two Obligations. The quiet man who has done all of this is a 55-year-old bachelor who was born in a lakeside castle in Sweden of a long line of aristocrats and intellectuals. Despite his athleticism (mountain climbing, cycling), slope-shouldered Dag Hammarskjold has a mild and even frail appearance. He converses sedately in four languages (excellent Swedish, English and French, adequate German), and when he sees a listener has got his drift, will often finish up, “and so forth and so on.”

But for all his apparent mildness, Hammarskjold can operate with finality and surefootedness. Soviet delegates realize that Hammarskjold is by origin, instinct and inclination firmly of the West and passionately democratic, but they also know him as a man who strives for objectivity and takes seriously his obligation to each of the 82 U.N. states. Because Hammarskjold does not give away secrets —his own or other people’s—contending parties are often willing to tell him privately how much or how little they will settle for. The Communists frequently attack him; yet Russia and her satellites voted for his election as Secretary-General in 1953 and his re-election in 1957. His term has 2½ years to go, and Hammarskjold is not afraid to put his prestige on the line. His unique quality is that he presses for greater authority without seeming to. If it is Britain’s political gift to conceal major changes in substance behind continuity of form, it is this Swede’s talent to act restrainedly in revolutionary ways.

“Those Tribes.” In the Congo, Hammarskjold’s tenacity has been tested as never before. The nation that he seeks to save from chaos is not, according to many of its own citizens, a nation at all. In Katanga, despite reluctant submission to the U.N., Moise Tshombe last week was busy training his newly raised “army” and flying his homemade flag—sometimes upside down. (Asked one of Tshombe’s new soldiers, just in from a bush village: “Tell me why the United Nations wants to come to Katanga? Do those tribes want to make us trouble?”) In Manhattan, assorted Congolese “delegations” were earnestly pressing on anyone who would listen their claim that four of the Congo’s six provinces should be given either total independence or home rule. In Léopoldville even the Congo’s paunchy President Joseph Kasavubu—who nervously divides authority with Premier Patrice Lumumba —has argued that the Congo should abandon centralized rule in favor of a loose confederation that would grant near autonomy to his own political stronghold of Lower Congo.

Reluctantly returning to his capital—he has spent less than half his time there since he took office seven weeks ago—goateed Premier Lumumba, who has been booed by his own troops and denounced by his own Senate, suffered fresh indignities. In trying to break up a political riot in Léopoldville last week, Lumumba was slapped, stoned and chased back to his car. The riot, said Senate President Joseph Ileo, an old Lumumba enemy, had saved him from arrest on the Premier’s orders. “But things have changed,” said Ileo, referring to Lumumba’s increasingly shaky power. He added cheerfully: “In Africa things are always changing from hour to hour.”

Shrugging off his reverses, the unpredictable Lumumba went right on issuing fiery decrees, closing down newspapers, seizing Belgian assets, and threatening arrest for traitors, saboteurs, and “anyone who declares any independence or goes against the state.” He saw plotters everywhere—in Katanga, in the Abako Party, in the neighboring French Congo and in the Roman Catholic Church. Ordering the Belgian ambassador to leave the Congo, Lumumba also ordered all Congolese students in Belgium to come home because they were “held against their will” and indoctrinated “in convents.” Is this the kind of statesman the U.N. is intervening to uphold? Hammarskjold does not conceive his task that way.

Adrift. As the week began, Hammarskjold appeared to be checked in trying to bring order out of such chaos, confusion and catcalls. He had successfully pushed through the Security Council two resolutions calling for withdrawal of Belgian forces and had whisked 11,000 soldiers from eight nations into the Congo in a whirlwind, improvised airlift. But he had made one important miscalculation. Hammarskjold had accepted Lumumba’s line that Katanga’s Tshombe was simply a Belgian stooge, eager to keep the Congo’s wealthiest province in Belgian hands. Having won Belgium’s agreement, Hammarskjold expected Tshombe to go along. Instead, with the support of local Belgian businessmen, Tshombe loudly proclaimed himself the ruler of an independent republic and, as such, unaffected by any U.N. resolutions on the Congo.

Hurriedly, Hammarskjold dispatched to Katanga his top African adviser, the U.S.’s Dr. Ralph Bunche, who has been having a rough time of it ever since he arrived for the Congo’s June 30 independence ceremonies. In the stormy weeks of rape, arson and tribal murder that followed independence, Bunche was imprisoned in his hotel room by mutineers of the Congolese Force Publique, then elbowed out of the way by swaggering Belgian paratroopers at Léopoldville’s Ndjili airport. In Elisabethville he ran into still more humiliation. Flatly announcing that if U.N. troops entered Katanga, they would be forcibly resisted, Tshombe sent Bunche off under an escort of guards who kept their Tommy guns pointed at the small of his back until he was aboard his plane.

At this point, Hammarskjold abruptly called off the scheduled U.N. advance into Katanga and cabled New York demanding an emergency meeting of the Security

Council—the Congo crisis marks the first time a U.N. Secretary-General has ever done so on his own initiative. Dag found himself adrift on a sea of conflicting legalities and hazy precedents. Nothing in his original mandate from the Security Council authorized him to intervene in the Congo’s domestic politics. Moving U.N. troops into Katanga to replace the Belgians would lessen Tshombe’s chances of defying Lumumba. Tshombe demanded guarantees. This was getting pretty close to involvement in a local quarrel, and Hammarskjold is skilled in never getting too far out on a limb, without the overwhelming majority of U.N. members out there with him.

Thunder on the Left. He flew back to Manhattan, raced to the green glass slab of the U.N. building for a 7 p.m. meeting with his staff. At 9, he was closeted with the four small-nation members (currently Ceylon, Tunisia, Argentina, Ecuador) of the eleven-man Security Council. Tunisia’s dapper Mongi Slim assumed the role of floor leader in the fight for the resolution Hammarskjold wanted—one which would press the Belgians to withdraw “immediately” from Katanga but would promise Tshombe that their replacement by U.N. forces would not compromise Katanga’s secession effort.

By 10 p.m., the representatives of nine African states had joined Hammarskjold in his 38th floor dining room looking out over the thrusting towers of midtown Manhattan. Some of the Africans angrily demanded that the U.N. fight its way into Katanga. Trading on his status as a fellow Afro-Asian, Tunisia’s Slim forcefully argued the Hammarskjold line that an appeal to force would lead to a Security

Council veto by Britain or France, might well bring Soviet troops into the heart of Africa.

By now, thunderous noises could be heard offstage. The Russian press and radio breathed fire and rattled rockets, accusing the U.S. and the “imperialist West” of closing ranks behind Belgium in a plot to steal rich Katanga from the Congo. In Ghana, President Kwame Nkrumah lashed out with a threat to join with Guinea’s Sekou Toure as allies of Lumumba in a march on Katanga.

Memories of Korea. Dag talked with U.S. Representative Henry Cabot Lodge in his suite. The U.S. was sympathetic to the Belgian position but not ready to side with it, sobered by the risk that Congo might become another Korea. The U.S. thought that the Belgians should get out of Katanga fast. That viewpoint was forcefully expressed to the British, French, Italians and South Americans.

The same morning Hammarskjold also had a long conversation with Russia’s Vasily Kuznetsov, who was strongly urging armed entry into Katanga, hoping thereby to drive a wedge into the NATO powers, who would have to line up on different sides of such a resolution. Ham marskjold gambled that the Russians would extract every possible drop of propaganda advantage from their bluster but that they would not oppose the African states in a showdown—and perhaps he got a wink that told him so.

At Dawn. When he finally entered the wide blue and gold council chamber, Dag Hammarskjold looked, as always, calm and cool. But there was a strain in his tired voice, and his words, usually oblique and professional, this time were plain and full of passion. The Congo, said Hammarskjold with chilling precision, is “a question of peace or war, and when saying peace or war, I do not limit my perspective to the Congo.” Bluntly he portioned out blame to Belgium for dragging its feet, to the Congo for its impatience, and strongly criticized governments—unnamed—which threatened to take matters into their own hands by “breaking away from the U.N. force and pursuing a unilateral policy.” When Russia’s Kuznetsov heavily denounced Hammarskjold for not ordering the U.N. to fight its way into Katanga, Hammarskjold answered: “I do not personally believe we help the Congolese by actions in which Africans kill Africans or Congolese kill Congolese.”

As dawn lightened the sky over the warehouses and factories of Long Island City across the river, the Council listened intently while the Congo’s Justin Bomboko urged: “We should leave aside our rancor and our feelings; we should try together to find a solution.” Tunisia’s Mongi Slim closed the debate. With an apologetic bow to Italy’s Egidio Ortona for what he was about to say, Slim brought up a 24-year-old ghost: the fateful day in 1936 when the League of Nations failed its biggest test, the day when Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie vainly appealed for help against Mussolini’s invading Fascist legions. “Sanctions were not imposed,” said Slim, “and it was not long before it was seen that many countries of Europe, one after the other, were becoming the Ethiopias of the future.”

At 4 a.m., with France and Italy abstaining, the U.N. Security Council by a vote of 9-0 gave Dag Hammarskjold the resolution he wanted.

Preventive Diplomacy. That vote was a logical culmination of Hammarskjold’s whole career as U.N. Secretary-General. When he took over in 1953 from Norway’s forthright and flamboyant Trygve Lie, U.N. members contentedly thought they were switching from hot to cool. Dag seemed safely competent and colorless. He still speaks with caution, but on accepting his second term as Secretary-General, he gave full notice that he was prepared, without a specific mandate, “to fill any vacuum” and provide for the “safeguarding of peace and security.” Last year he explained candidly that the limitations of the U.N. made it necessary “to create a new executive responsibility somewhere.” Clearly, Hammarskjold himself is it.

In 1958, cautiously flexing his new muscles, he independently decided to enlarge the U.N. observer corps in revolt-torn Lebanon—despite Soviet vetoes of two resolutions asking just that. Russia did not like but swallowed his decision, and the U.N. found practical as well as theoretical acceptance for its acting as arbiter in internal disputes that might threaten peace. It edged even closer last year when, again over Russian objections, Dag established the U.N. presence in Laos after revival of the Communist Pathet Lao rebellion.

Already Hammarskjold was turning what one aide describes as “his Renaissance mind, fast and flexible,” to the disasters he thought might occur as Africa’s once-colonial states gained independent nationhood. Back in 1956 he had strongly urged the creation of a U.N. international professional and technical civil service for new nations that lacked competent officials. The idea was part of Hammarskjold’s pet theory of “preventive diplomacy,” which he defines as “smelling conflict in the air before it is on your table.” Sniffing the troubled air, Hammarskjold last winter took a six-week tour of Africa, including a thoughtful stay in the Congo.

Nothing Succeeds . .. When the Congo broke last month all the devices needed to cope with the situation were already a part of Dag’s experience or thinking. From the beginning, the instructions that the Security Council gave Hammarskjold were, in fact, ones that he had written himself.

Most international lawyers agree that the action which Hammarskjold persuaded the council to take is legally—if only broadly—justified under the umbrella ‘clause of the U.N. Charter giving the council “primary responsibility for the maintenance of peace.” Where he has broken ground is in the area that lawyers call “case law.” Though the U.N. ever since the Suez war has had an “army” in Egypt’s Gaza Strip, it has never before sent troops to a nation to keep internal security when local forces proved unable to do so. Notes Andrew Cordier, Hammarskjold’s rotund executive assistant: “If, pragmatically, such actions are successful, they then become part of the interpretation of the U.N. Charter.”

Pax Pygmica. Also unparalleled is the immense authority that Dag Hammarskjold has won for the U.N. in his own person. Ultimately, the outer limits of Hammarskjold’s authority are set by the five permanent members of the Security

Council (the U.S., Russia, Britain, France and Nationalist China); a veto from any of them reduces him to impotence. But as long as the U.S. and Russia cannot agree, a vacuum of world leadership is created, and paradoxically the rivalry between the great powers has strengthened Dag’s hand.

Fearful of being dominated in one way or another either by the U.S. or Russia, the new nations of Asia and Africa often combine in the U.N. with like-minded small nations to move between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in areas where they might clash. Trading on this tendency, Hammarskjold—an instinctive small-nation neutral by his Swedish origins—has relied heavily on such U.N. diplomats as Tunisia’s Slim, Canada’s Lester Pearson, Norway’s Hans Engen and India’s Arthur Lall.

In the Congo, all these factors worked to Hammarskjold’s advantage. For Russia and the U.S. the stakes in the Congo are simply not high enough to warrant the risks of war. Characteristically, he did not call on either of them for troops, though it was the round-the-clock U.S. expertness that made the U.N. airlift a success.

The U.N. troops sent in to keep the Congo’s peace are drawn from such nations as Ireland, Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana, Guinea and Ethiopia. Even Nikita Khrushchev, though delighted at the chance to muddy international waters and pose as a protector of Africa, would hesitate to send his armed divisions against an Irish or Swedish battalion, or to fire on blacks. For the moment, guided by Hammarskjold, the smaller U.N. nations have established what might be called a peace of the Lilliputians, a kind of Pax Pygmica in the Congo.

If the Pax Pygmica works, Hammarskjold plans to do more than merely shift troops about from one Congo trouble spot to another. The U.N. will have to run the place without offending the touchy

Lumumba, who can be expected to holler about help even while accepting and needing it. Already nearly 400 U.N. and World Health Organization technicians are at work in the Congo. The port of Matadi has been put back into operation under the supervision of U.S. General Raymond Wheeler, who cleared the Suez Canal for the U.N. Last week, obviously contemplating years of close U.N. involvement in Congo affairs, Hammarskjold produced a terse memorandum outlining the structure of a long-term U.N. civilian mission to the Congo which would supply the Congo’s ill-educated, inexperienced Cabinet with experts in ten fields from finance to public health. It was too late now to blame Belgium for not training the men, to blame Congolese for incompetence, or to blame the climate of the times for giving the Congo its independence before it was ready. To pay for all his operations, Hammarskjold has $5 million in cash on hand, plans to solicit contributions from the U.N. members including Russia —which, since it voted for all three resolutions that took the U.N. into the Con go, should be hard put to refuse some financial support.

The Dissenters. Amidst the cheers Hammarskjold’s Congo policy has won, there were voices of dissent. In London, Lord Beaverbrook’s empire-minded Daily Express complained that U.N. intervention in the Congo “is an act of brigandage and oppression cloaked by sanctimoniousness . . . Every agitator in Africa looks with hope to Dag Hammarskjold.” In Paris the right-wing L’Aurore asked: “Do we understand that in the Congo the first objective is to evict the Belgians and the second to re-establish on his cardboard throne this astonishing Lumumba?” Paris-Jour, echoing the feeling of those Western Europeans who see Europeans in Africa raped, robbed and murdered by what they regard as ungrateful subjects, sneered at Hammarskjold as the “chief of an international supergovernment exclusively at the service of the Afro-Asian countries that have sworn to humiliate and humble Westerners.” One wing of French opinion regards Katanga as a dangerous precedent. What if Algeria got its independence, and the European colons set up a secessionist state along the Algerian coast? Would U.N. troops fly in to guarantee all Algeria to the Moslems?

Hammarskjold’s reply is that the U.N. does not meddle in internal affairs, even if it runs them “on request.” Its only mission in Katanga, he says, is to replace Belgian troops with U.N. troops. When the Belgians are gone, if Katanga still wishes to secede, Hammarskjold’s U.N. troops will not interfere. Should Lumumba and his pulled-together Force Publique try to reconquer a secessionist Katanga, the U.N. force under its present directive from the Security Council would have to stand aside and let them fight it out. Hammarskjold has scrupulously refrained from backing Lumumba’s regime. The U.N. may find itself bogged in a tropical rain forest for years to come.

Certainly nothing was yet settled. The U.N. can legally remain in the Congo only at the invitation of the Congo government, and last week Premier Lumumba, growling ominously about the pressures on him, called on Hammarskjold to abandon his plans to garrison Katanga province with mixed black and white forces (Swedish, Moroccan and Ethiopian), demanded a totally black force instead. “African troops,” he insisted, “are completely capable of carrying out the U.N. mission.” In Accra, Ghana’s Nkrumah was still talking up the formation of an “All-African” army composed of units from Ghana, Guinea, the U.A.R. and “volunteers” from all the continent.

Despite the critics, the doubters, and everyone’s legitimate forebodings, Hammarskjold continued to push ahead from one limited, carefully chosen diplomatic objective to the next. At week’s end, without ruckus, members of his Swedish bodyguard symbolically took over from the Belgians the guard duty at Elisabethville airfield, where they first put down. Belgian commanders in Katanga agreed to start pulling their 7,000 troops back to a single base as more U.N. forces flew in this week. The Congo may remain just one jump ahead of chaos for some time to come, but Dag Hammarskjold had established there a principle that may help in other African troubles to come. His was one more brave try in the 20th century’s hopeful, if often frustrated, effort to substitute for the bloody consequences of untrammeled nationalism the security of an international order.

*It has been 146 years since Swedish troops last went into battle in the nearly bloodless 1814 war with Norway. A derisive jingle commemorates their prowess: “Ten thousand Swedes marched through the weeds, to kill one poor Norwegian.”