21. The Nobel Peace Prize 1961 - Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld (1905-1961)


 

Portrait of Mr. Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations. UN Photo/JO

Dag Hammarskjöld, second Secretary-General of the United Nations, was born into Sweden's political elite. Both his training and his civil service career were in keeping with family traditions. He distinguished himself in languages, literature, philosophy and law before getting a PhD in economics in 1933. He obtained a number of senior appointments in the Ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs, and in the early postwar years was one of Sweden's leading diplomats.

The Nobel Committee lauded Hammarskjöld for having built up an efficient and independent UN Secretariat, and for having taken an independent line towards the great powers. He was also praised for having organized a peacekeeping force in the Middle East after the Suez crisis, and for his commitment to peace during the civil war in the Congo.

Hammarskjöld died, under suspicious circumstances, in an airplane crash in Northern Rhodesia in September 1961. He is the only Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to have been awarded the distinction posthumously.

Prize motivation: “for developing the UN into an effective and constructive international organization, capable of giving life to the principles and aims expressed in the UN Charter”

Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1961/hammarskjold/facts/

Two days after the tragic crash at Ndola when Dag Hammarskjöld lost his life in what was then Northern Rhodesia, a small, informal meeting was held at the highest level in the Swedish government discussing different ways in which Dag Hammarskjöld’s contributions to international politics and development could be acknowledged and remembered.

Six months later, in March 1962, The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation was officially formed. It would be an autonomous non-governmental organisation, carrying out its own programmes, governed by an international Board. 

You can read more at https://www.daghammarskjold.se/about-us/history/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

3. ‘The Martyrdom of Agnes Prest' (1909) by Harry Hems (1842-1916), with some East Budleigh history

Image
The bronze panel seen above shows the burning of the Cornishwoman Agnes Prest, executed on 15 August 1557 at Southernhay, Exeter during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor.   It is one of four panels on the Protestant Martyrs' Memorial in St Leonard’s, Exeter, which was erected as the result of a public subscription. Another panel shows Thomas Benet, executed at Livery Dole, Exeter, in 1531.  The Memorial was unveiled by the MP for Honiton Sir John Kennaway on 20 October 1909, following a service in the now demolished Bedford Chapel in Bedford Circus, Exeter.     A page from the first edition of Actes and Monuments , also known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, published in 1563. Image credit: Wikipedia According to John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs   Agnes Prest was taken by her husband and neighbours to the local priest and imprisoned in Launceston, before being transferred to Exeter. There she was charged with the crime of ‘Heresy chiefly aga...
Read more

1. East Budleigh’s Salem Chapel: a place for Peace (2022)

Image
       The Lady Chapel in St Andrew’s Church, Colaton A number of churches in Britain now have Peace Chapels, especially since the war in Ukraine.   In the East Devon town of Colyton, the parish church has used its Lady Chapel to emphasise the need for peace and reconciliation in the hope of ending the conflict in that country. The colours of the Ukrainian and Russian flags have been used to decorate the screen, as seen above. Next to the blue and yellow drapes of Ukraine’s flag are printed posters displaying a prayer composed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and another by the Rev Dr Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London.    In East Budleigh, 40 minutes' walk from where I live, there’s already a Peace Chapel.    But fewer people now will ever know about Salem Chapel. Picking up speed along the B3178 as they pass East Budleigh most drivers barely notice the two cream coloured old buildings on the lane which l...
Read more

11. ‘Gassed’ (1919) by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)

Image
Image credit: Wikipedia ‘Gassed’, from the collection of the Imperial War Museums, was a star attraction in the National Portrait Gallery’s WW1 centenary 2014 exhibition The Great War in Portraits. For the exhibition’s curator, Paul Moorhouse, the painting is, in his words, ‘this harrowing image’ showing the ‘terrible consequence’ of a gas attack. In 2010 the British journalist and television presenter Jon Snow hailed it as one of the ‘10 Best British Artworks About War’. But how effective is the anti-war message of the painting, I wondered, when I first saw it. Like Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, another celebrated masterpiece with a war theme, ‘Gassed’ is a very large work of art. Measuring 231.0 by 611.1 centimetres (7 ft 6.9 in × 20 ft 0.6 in), it shows a line of ten wounded soldiers walking towards a dressing station while a similar train of eight wounded, escorted by two orderlies, advances in the background. Sargeant’s work was voted picture of the year by the Royal Academy of Ar...
Read more