WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 (UPI) -- Hundreds of U.N. workers have lost their lives in world trouble spots in the more than five decades since the world body was set up, but before the death of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the senior U.N. official in Iraq, in the blast that shattered the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad Tuesday, the most senior U.N. official to be killed by terrorists was Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish count who led the United Nation's first serious attempt at peacemaking in the post-World War II world.
As the pioneer U.N. Middle East mediator, Bernadotte's life was sacrificed for a struggle that is still going on today, despite a procession of mediators and a mountain of peace plans. Bernadotte was active in the area during the Arab-Jewish violence of 1948, leading up to the establishment of the Jewish State on May 14 of that year.
He was killed in an ambush on Sept 17, 1948, in Palmeh Street in Jerusalem by three gunmen from the underground movement Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel -- Fighters for the Freedom of Israel),better known as the Stern Gang.
According to contemporary reports, Bernadotte's three-car convoy had been stopped at an improvised roadblock: two of the assassins shot out the tires of the cars, while the third thrust his Schmeisser automatic pistol through the back window of Bernadotte's Chrysler. The 54-year-old diplomat, sitting on the right in the back, was hit by six bullets and died instantly. A French officer -- a U.N. observer -- sitting next to him was also killed.
Israel issued an official condemnation and promised quick arrests. However no one was ever brought to trial. The Stern Gang's leadership -- which included Yitzhak Shamir, later (1983) Israeli prime minister -- was not touched, though the Israeli government forcibly disbanded the organization shortly afterward. But Israel's failure to punish Bernadotte's assassins struck a hard blow against the fledgling United Nations.
The United Nations was probably too new to be able to take strong action, such as sanctions, and the ideal of the United Nations acting as the world's peacemaker and peacekeeper was badly wounded. After that, the world body never built up the sinew of an enforcing body, or as David Ben Gurion, one of the founders of the Jewish state, once put it, "UNO schmuno."
Bernadotte was killed because Jewish extremists saw his peace plan as a threat to Israel, and decided he had to go. So a distinguished diplomat who as an official in the International Red Cross in World War II, saved more than 20,000 people from Nazi concentration camps, including thousands of Jews, was put on the Stern Gang's hit list.
He had joined the United Nations at its foundation, and what was to become the Arab-Israeli conflict was his first assignment. The United Nations had recently voted to partition what was then Palestine into two states, one Arab, the other Jewish. Initially, Bernadotte had a broad mandate to "sell" the Partition, which had been rejected by both sides, and bring peace to the region.
When Israel found itself facing her four Arab neighbors on the battlefield, Bernadotte managed to arrange a truce on June 11. Then he put forward his own version of the peace plan in which Jerusalem would be placed under Jordanian control, but declared a demilitarized zone. This was because all the area around the city was designated to be the Arab state. The proposal sealed his fate.
