The Congo, Indonesia, 1961. An Accident? [Film]
A UN plane crashes in Africa. A Secretary-General dies. Truman says “they killed him.” Sixty years on, we still don’t know the truth.
In September 1961, a UN plane came down in a wooded area near Ndola, Rhodesia. Among the dead was Dag Hammarskjöld — the most powerful peacekeeper the world had ever seen. Officially, pilot error. But the official story never quite held together.
This film follows the threads that connect Hammarskjöld’s death to two of the Cold War’s bloodiest chapters: the Congo, where the CIA backed the overthrow and murder of the country’s first elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba — and Indonesia, where a US-supported coup brought a genocide that killed up to 3 million people, almost entirely unknown in the West.
Hammarskjöld stood in the way of all of it. He believed newly independent nations had the right to govern themselves, free from outside interference. That made him dangerous to the people who preferred chaos and foreign control to self-determination.
Harry Truman put it plainly: “He was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him’.”