U Thant

Biography

Thant was born in 1909 in Pantanaw, in British Burma, the eldest son of a landowning family. His father died when he was fourteen, and the family's inheritance was lost in court disputes, so Thant took a two-year teaching certificate at Rangoon University, where he became a close friend of the future prime minister U Nu. He returned to teach at the National High School in Pantanaw, became its headmaster, and wrote for newspapers and magazines.

After Burma's independence in 1948 Nu made him director of broadcasting, and he went on to serve in the Ministry of Information and, from 1951 to 1957, as secretary to the prime minister, writing Nu's speeches and acting as his closest adviser. He was secretary of the 1955 Bandung Conference and from 1957 Burma's permanent representative to the United Nations.

When Dag Hammarskjold died in 1961, Thant was appointed acting Secretary-General as the candidate both superpowers could accept, the first Asian in the post. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 he mediated between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and in December he ordered the UN operation that ended Katanga's secession in the Congo. Reappointed unanimously in 1966, he oversaw the admission of many new African and Asian states, created several UN development and environmental bodies, criticised American conduct of the Vietnam War, and was blamed in Israel and the United States for withdrawing UN peacekeepers from Sinai before the 1967 war.

Thant refused a third term and retired at the end of 1971. He died of lung cancer in New York in 1974. When his body was returned to Rangoon without official honours, students seized his coffin before the burial, setting off protests and riots that troops put down in December 1974.