At Hammarskjöld’s Grave, Sixty-Five Years After Ndola

Late in August I stood at Dag Hammarskjöld’s grave in Uppsala. It is a quiet place, a long way from New York and from the wars the United Nations exists to prevent.He died sixty-five years ago this month, on 18 September 1961, in an aircraft crash near Ndola, in what is now Zambia. He was fifty-six, on his way to seek a ceasefire in the Congo, where the secession of the mineral-rich province of Katanga had drawn a newly independent country into conflict and great-power rivalry.Leaving the cemetery, I found myself thinking about the office he held and about a practice he helped build that the organisation has praised ever since but never full…