Up to Themselves

U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold returned to his steel-and-glass international enclave on Manhattan Island last week. He came back from his mission to the Middle East reflecting, with the practiced restraint of a Swedish diplomat, a quiet satisfaction in having stopped the fighting on the Israeli-Egyptian border, but qualifying his guarded optimism for the future with a polite cautionary warning to nations outside the area.

"It is my feeling," said Hammarskjold, "that there is a general will to peace, and that this will should be fostered and encouraged, not by attempts to impose from outside solutions to problems of vital significance to everyone in the region," but by local initiative. "If we have previously experienced chain reactions leading to a continuous deterioration of the situation, we may now have the possibility of starting a chain of reactions in the opposite direction." He told reporters that he was "not willing" to recommend any next step himself. "I feel strongly that more than ever it is in the hands of the governments of the region."

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