” “”A full-on civil servant”: this is the way the Swedish ambassador to Italy, Staffan Wrigstad, defined Dag Hammarskjöld (1905-1961), UN Secretary and Nobel Prize for Peace in 1961, during a meeting which took place in Turin yesterday on the occasion of the centenary of the diplomat’s birth. By freeing some US pilots which had been taken prisoners by China in the Korean war, “in 1955 Hammarskjöld landed his first great diplomatic victory”, commented historian Massimo Salvadori, who also recalled his firm stance in front of the request for his resignation from former USRR president Kruscev: “I am accountable to all the member states for which the UN are indispensable was Hammarskjöld’s reply in front of the UN General Assembly-. It would be very easy to resign, to bow one’s head before a great power, but it takes lots of courage to hold on”. According to father Guido Dotti, who edited his diary, Hammarskjöld was “a man who never shook off a deep loneliness, which was sometimes dark and sometimes bright, but still open to dialogue”, and “an ever-waiting man, faithful to his loneliness but ready to mission”. “All his life concluded Franco Giampiccoli, author of a recent biography is imbued with the longing for meaning in his own existence”. According to the speaker, “he was a man who walked behind Christ, although he was aware that road would take him to sacrifice “.
