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Bernt Wilmar Carlsson (born 1938 in Stockholm, Sweden) was United Nations Commissioner for Namibia from July 1987 until he died on Pan Am Flight 103 which was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988.[1]
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Evolution to international diplomacy
Bernt Carlsson joined the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League when he was sixteen, studied economics at Stockholm University and, upon graduation, went into Sweden's foreign ministry. Carlsson was assistant to the Minister of Commerce in 1967 and, three years later, was detached to become international secretary of the ruling Social Democratic Party of Sweden in 1970. Concurrent with his position in the party, Prime Minister, Olof Palme (assassinated on February 28, 1986), appointed him as special adviser. In 1976, he became Secretary-General of Socialist International (SI), based in London, at the same time as former Federal German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, assumed the SI presidency. For the next seven years, Carlsson was engaged in extending the SI's influence beyond Europe to Third World countries, and in pioneering moves towards Middle East peace using the SI's unique position of having Israel's governing Labour Party as a member, and at the same time retaining very good ties with Arab countries and Yasser Arafat's faction in the PLO. Carlsson developed a particularly close relationship with Arafat's right-hand man, Issam Sartawi, who was murdered (allegedly by the Abu Nidal Organization) during an SI conference in Portugal on April 10, 1983.[2] He returned home to Sweden in 1983 and, for two years, became the Prime Minister's special emissary to the Middle East and Africa. Palme entrusted him with an important Middle East role in delicate attempts to negotiate a peace agreement between Iran and Iraq. From 1985 to 1987 he was head of Nordic Affairs in the Swedish foreign ministry. On July 1, 1987 Carlsson was appointed United Nations Commissioner for Namibia. A year later, he convened a meeting in Stockholm between the SWAPO leadership (Sam Nujoma, Hage Geingob and Hidipo Hamutenya), and a delegation of "whites" from Namibia to discuss developments in the independence process.
UN Commissioner for Namibia
Following the Ronald Reagan/Mikhail Gorbachev summit of the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union in Moscow (May 29-June 1, 1988), implementation of Security Council resolution 435 began.[3] South Africa was thereby required finally to relinquish its control of Namibia. The UN Commissioner planned to fly direct from Brussels on December 20, 1988 (where Carlsson had a long-standing speaking engagement before a sub-committee of the European parliament) for the signing of the New York Accords at UN headquarters on December 22, 1988. But, according to Swedish newspaper iDAG of March 12, 1990, Carlsson had been pressured by De Beers to stopover in London to discuss Namibia's diamonds. Thus re-booked on PA 103, Bernt Carlsson became one of the 270 victims of the Lockerbie bombing.[4] South African foreign minister, Pik Botha, with a delegation of 22 negotiators – including defence minister, General Magnus Malan, and head of military intelligence, General C J Van Tonder – were also booked on PA 103 to attend the same signing ceremony at the UN. But, instead, Pik Botha and a smaller contingent of six took the Pan Am Flight 101 morning flight to New York.[5] The rest of the South African party cancelled the booking on PA 103 and returned to Johannesburg.
Conspiracy theory
According to one of the seven unsubstantiated theories, promoted by former British diplomat Patrick Haseldine, apartheid South Africa is alleged to have specifically targeted Bernt Carlsson in the Lockerbie bombing of December 21, 1988. Haseldine was dismissed for making this allegation, but he started a petition [6] in October 2007 calling for a United Nations Inquiry into the death of Bernt Carlsson. His petition failed to secure the required minimum 200 votes to be considered. On the day of the bombing, Carlsson arrived at Heathrow International Airport at 11:06 with a booking to travel onward to New York by PA 103 at 18:00. Carlsson was met at Heathrow by Bankole Timothy of De Beers and taken by car into central London. He was brought back to the airport at about 17:30. Carlsson's already checked-in luggage would have remained at Heathrow for some seven hours. That SAA were involved in unlawfully swapping baggage that day was confirmed by Pan Am security officer, Michael Jones, at the October 1990 Lockerbie fatal accident inquiry. And, neither Carlsson's girl friend Sanya Popovic nor his sister, Inger Carlsson-Musser, could identify a single shred of anything belonging to him at the property store in Lockerbie.[7] An editorial in The Guardian of December 23, 1988 reported:
Two days before Christmas, two tides flow strongly. One - the greater tide - is the tide of peace. More nagging, bloody conflicts have been settled in 1988 than in any year since the end of the Second World War. There are forces for good abroad in the world as seldom before. There is also a tide of evil, a force of destruction. By just one of those ironies which afflict the human condition, peace came to Namibia yesterday. Meanwhile, on a Scottish hillside, the body of the Swedish UN Commissioner for Namibia was one amongst hundreds strewn across square miles of debris: a victim - supposition, but strongly based - of a random terrorist bomb which had blown a 747 to bits at 31,000 feet."[8]
Memorial
The Bernt Carlsson Trust – otherwise known as One World Action – was founded by Glenys Kinnock on December 21, 1989 (the first anniversary of the Lockerbie air disaster) in memory of Carlsson. In Windhoek, Namibia a street in the Pionierpark Extension 1 township is named "Bernt Carlsson Road".
References
- ^ U.N. Officer on Flight 103 The New York Times December 22, 1988
- ^ Socialist International website
- ^ Namibia's independence process 1988-1990
- ^ Bernt Carlsson dies on Pan Am Flight 103
- ^ see 1994 documentary film The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie
- ^ http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/UNInquiry/
- ^ South Africa Luggage Swap theory
- ^ One view from a desolate hillside
See also
- Alternative theories of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103#South-West Africa (Namibia)
- Dag Hammarskjöld
- Hans Köchler's Lockerbie trial observer mission
- Olof Palme
