Nepal, Sept. 23 -- The Dag Hammarskjold grave in Uppsala in Sweden is a quiet place, a long way from New York and from the wars the United Nations exists to prevent.

He died exactly 65 years ago on 18 September 1961 in an aircraft crash near Ndola, in what is now Zambia. He was 56 and 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.

Hammarskjold treated preventive diplomacy as a working method. He travelled repeatedly into crises, used the Secretary-General's office when local conflicts threatened to become arenas of great-power rivalry, and kept an independent United Nations presence where member states ...