Dear all,

On September 18, 1961, United Nations Chief Dag Hammarskjold was killed when the plane he was flying on crashed in Eastern Congo. The incident in which the UN chief died, has long been rumoured as an assassination, but now a new documentary film features testimony that it was indeed a deliberate act of sabotage and a political assassination.

Cold Case Hammarskjold, which is premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, names a former RAF pilot, Jan van Risseghem, as the man who brought the UN chief’s plane down. The pilot died in 2007 but a friend of his recounts that van Risseghem once told him that it was he who had shot down the plane although at that time he had no idea who the target was.

Van Risseghem was a war hero, the son of a Belgian father and a British mother, who following his move to Belgium took up a job with a rebel group in Congo who had asked the Belgian government for help in training their troops.

Van Risseghem was, at the time of the crash, working for the rebel air force in the Congo’s eastern province of Katanga which had declared independence from Congo. The rebel leader, Moise Tshombe, had ‘covert military and technical backing’ from the country’s former colonial power Belgium as well as support from a number of western mining firms with interests in the area (Katanga is rich in minerals and has vast deposits of ore including uranium, copper and cobalt).

Hammarskjold, according to a Guardian report, was "a champion of decolonisation and… idealist who believed the UN should be protector and platform for small countries" and he had ordered military action to end the rebellion, something that had annoyed both Britain and the US.

Hammarskjold had been flying to a secret meeting with Tshombe to try and end the siege of UN troops in the area when his plane was shot down. With his death, the questioning of actions of Belgian and western businesses supported rebel army was almost neutralised. Even though the breakaway republic of Katanga was dissolved in 1963, following an invasion by the UN troops, the business and mining interests had by then been consolidated. Tshombe was later to become the prime minister of Congo.

The filmmakers of Cold Case Hammarskjold not only identify the actual person who brought the UN chief’s plane down, but, by doing so, they give us an idea of the different forces and lobbies involved in the assasination. Although US President Harry Truman clearly stated that Hammarskjold had been targeted when he said two days later that Hammarskjold "was on the point of getting something done when they killed him", it is perfectly feasible that the US was not that unhappy about getting him out of the way.

Apart from the various mining interests and other linkages, it is worth remembering that this all happened at the height of the Cold War and that it was also under Tshombe’s watch that the popular Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba’s government was overthrown, and Lumumba was arrested and then executed.

Lumumba was an influential figure in the region as he was a staunch anti-colonialist and advocate of pan-African unity; he was the first prime minister of the independent Republic of Congo but the Katanga rebellion and secession (known then as the ‘Congo Crisis’) was made to happen soon after he took power and prevented him from laying a solid base for the new nation and freeing it from colonial financial interests and exploitation. When the US and the UN did not initially respond to his appeal for help with putting down the rebellion, he had turned to the Soviet Union. He was killed shortly afterwards, his body dismembered and dissolved with sulfuric acid and his death not announced till three weeks later.

Clearly, the elimination of both Lumumba and Hammarskjold smoothed the way for the Katanga project -- their adversary Tshombe was propped up by Belgium and he served the political and economic interest of the US as well.

So in a way the murder trail leads all the way to the Americans: their collusion in the assassination of a United Nations is almost certain -- yet not totally shocking.

The reason it is not shocking is that assassination of Hammarskjold is just one of the stages of the politics and war games that snatched opportunity and empowerment from Africa’s newly-independent nations and undermined their development. Two decades after the Congo assassinations, Mozambique’s populist leader Samora Machel was killed in a plane crash which many believe was arranged by South Africa’s apartheid regime with the collusion of Israel and the US -- although various theories have been put forward vigorously about how actually it was Machel’s ally the Soviet Union who had arranged it…

Cold Case Hanmarskjold is not just about re-opening an investigation for the screen, it is a reminder that there is little morality in the way international politics is conducted.

Best wishes