De Wet Potgieter

It was shortly after midnight on Monday September 18, 1961, that a DC-6B aircraft crashed near the airport of Ndola, a town in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) not far from the Congo border.

The plane had flown from Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) and was taking the Swedish United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld and his entourage on a mission to try to bring peace to the Congo. It was reported that only one of the 16 passengers was found alive – Harold Julien, chief of security, who died six days later.

While Hammarskjöld was trying to broker peace in the Congo, Moise Tshombe was the secessionist leader in the mineral-rich Katanga province. He led his breakaway in 1960 with the help of Belgian businessmen and also had the moral support of the South African government.

Three years after his death, 300 South African mercenaries under command of Col “Mad” Mike Hoare were flown into Katanga to bolster Tshombe and fight on his side, against a rebel group called the Simbas.

Later Hoare and his men also worked in concert with Belgian paratroopers, Cuban exile pilots and CIA-hired mercenaries to save 1600 civilians from the rebels in Operation Dragon Rouge. Legendary French mercenary Bob Denard was also part of that operation.

Strangely enough, the same sinister South African-based organisation, SAIMR, implicated by Susan Williams in her book on the death of Hammarskjöld, was in cahoots with Hoare and his so-called Wild Geese in the abortive coup in the Seychelles years later.

In her book, Who Killed Dag Hammarskjöld?, Williams writes that questions were asked as the strange details of the crash emerged.

Given that Ndola air traffic control had seen the plane flying overhead and had granted the pilot permission to land, why did the airport manager close down the airport? Why did Lord Alport, the British high commissioner in Salisbury (today Harare), who was at the airport, insist that Hammarskjöld must have decided “to go elsewhere”?

“Why did it take until four hours after daybreak to start a search, even though local residents, policemen and soldiers reported seeing a great flash of light in the sky shortly after

midnight?” Williams also asks why the wreckage of the aircraft was found only15 hours later even though it was just 12km from the airport.

In the book (Jacaranda, 2011), Williams also notes that it’s strange the survivor mentioned an explosion before the crash.

Hammarskjöld’s body was found with no burns, while the other victims were badly charred and 80% of the fuselage was destroyed by the intense blaze.

“If Dag Hammarskjöld had landed safely at Ndola airport on September 17, 1961, he would have found a world not unlike apartheid South Africa: for the British colonial territory of the Central African Federation was also organised on the basis of racial inequality and segregation,” writes Williams.

dewetp@thenewage.co.za