Bernt Carlsson

For the next seven years, Carlsson was engaged in extending the SI's influence beyond Europe to Third World countries, channelling money and political support to the struggle for liberation in Southern Africa.

When there was a break-in at his London apartment, Carlsson confided to his Canadian SI colleague Robin Sears:[2] "They messed things up and pawed through my papers.

"Carlsson also pioneered moves towards Middle East peace using the SI's unique position of having Israel's governing Labor 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 10 April 1983.

[4] 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.

Ten years were to elapse until the Ronald Reagan/Mikhail Gorbachev summit of the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union in Moscow (29 May 1988 – 1 June 1988), finally secured the implementation of UNSCR 435, which would require South Africa to relinquish its control of Namibia.

[5] The delay was blamed by author and journalist Christopher Hitchens on Chester Crocker's 'procrastination' and on President Ronald Reagan's 'attempt to change the subject to the presence of Cuban forces in Angola' as well as the 'flagrant bias' in America's Namibia policy in favour of apartheid South Africa.

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.

"[7]In September 2009, former Labour Member of the European Parliament, Michael McGowan called for an urgent independent inquiry led by the United Nations into the Lockerbie bombing.

McGowan wrote that he was personally affected by the crash: "As President of the Development Committee of the European Parliament, I had invited Bernt Carlsson, the Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and UN Commissioner for Namibia, to call in at Brussels in December 1988.

It is unlikely that he was a target as the political scene in Southern Africa was moving inexorably towards its present state....I discounted the theory as being almost totally beyond the realms of feasibility.