Olof Palme (help·info) Sven Joachim (January 30, 1927 – February 28, 1986) was a Swedish politician. He was the leader of the Social Democratic Party from 1969 to 1986 and was Prime Minister of Sweden with a Privy Council Government from 1969 to 1976 and a cabinet government from 1982 until his death by assassination. The murder was the first of its kind in modern Swedish history and was a severe national and political trauma.
Early life and education
Palme was born in Östermalm, Stockholm, Sweden. He came from an upper-class background. However, his political orientation came to be influenced by Social Democratic ideas and ideals. This was mainly the effect of his travels in developing countries as a student leader (see below).
On a scholarship, he studied at Kenyon College, Ohio 1947-1948, graduating with a B.A. in less than a year. Inspired by the radical debate in the student community, he wrote a critical essay on Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. After hitchhiking through the U.S., he returned to Sweden to study law at Stockholm University. During his time at university, Palme became involved in student politics, working with the Swedish National Union of Students. In 1951, he became a member of the social democratic student association in Stockholm, although it seems he did not attend their political meetings at the time. The following year he was elected President of the Swedish National Union of Students, a position making it necessary to tone down party loyalties.
Palme himself stated that he had had three revelations that together had made him become a socialist.
- The time he spent in the US in the 1940s had made him realize the huge class differences in America and the racism against blacks.
Political career
In 1953, Palme was recruited by social democratic Prime Minister Tage Erlander to work in his secretariat. From 1955 he was a board member of the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League. In 1958 he was elected Member of Parliament.
Olof Palme held several cabinet posts from 1963 and onwards. In 1967 he became Minister of Education, and the following year he was the target of fierce criticism from left-wing students protesting against the government's plans for university reform. When party leader Tage Erlander stepped down in 1969, Palme was unanimously elected as the new leader by the Social Democratic party congress and succeeded Erlander as Prime Minister.
Palme's subsequent 125-month tenure as Prime Minister, and his untimely death, made him the most internationally-known Swedish politician of the 20th century (with the possible exception of the two "humanitarians" Raoul Wallenberg and Dag Hammarskjöld).
His protégé and political ally, Bernt Carlsson, who was appointed UN Commissioner for Namibia in July 1987, also suffered an untimely death. Carlsson was killed in the Pan Am Flight 103 crash on December 21, 1988 en route to the UN signing ceremony in New York, whereby South Africa granted a much-delayed independence to Namibia.
Controversy
Palme was a controversial political figure on the international scene: his trenchant criticism of the United States for the Vietnam war; campaigning against nuclear weapons proliferation; condemnation of apartheid and advocating economic sanctions against South Africa; his support—both political and financial—for the African National Congress (ANC) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); meeting with Fidel Castro of Cuba, all ensured that Palme had no shortage of enemies abroad.
Domestically, too, his left-wing views engendered a great deal of hostility among Sweden's right-wingers, especially the Social Democrat drive to expand the Labour Union influence over businesses on behalf of private ownership. At the time of his death, Palme had been accused of being pro-Soviet and not safeguarding Sweden's interests. Arrangements had therefore been made for him to go to Moscow to discuss a number of contentious issues, including alleged Soviet submarine incursions into Swedish waters.
From the other side, he and the Social Democrats also was accused by the far-left to be too ”capitalist” and market oriented – especially after Palme's dealing with the 1968 student occupation of a building at the campus of Stockholm University.
Assassination
Street corner at which Palme was shot
Olof Palme could often be seen without any bodyguard protection, and the night of his murder was one such occasion. Walking home from a movie theatre with his wife Lisbet on the central Stockholm street Sveavägen, close to midnight on February 28, 1986, the couple was attacked by a lone gunman. Palme was shot in the back from just a foot's distance, the bullet went through the 5th vertebra, trachea, esophagus and disrupted a major artery, a directly fatal wound. A second shot was fired at about a meter range, aimed at Lisbet. Olof Palme was taken to hospital and was pronounced dead at 00:06 CET on March 1, 1986, although it was believed that he had died right away when the bullet hit.
Police said that a taxi-driver used his mobile radio to raise the alarm. Two young girls sitting in a car close to the scene of the shooting tried to help the Prime Minister. He was rushed to hospital but was dead on arrival; Mrs. Palme's wound was treated and she recovered. The attacker escaped eastwards on the crossing Tunnelgatan and disappeared.
Deputy Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson immediately assumed the duties as Prime Minister and as new leader of the Social Democratic Party.
Conspiracy theories
Palme's assassination remains unsolved, with a number of conspiracy theories surrounding the murder.
Right-wing extremists
A Swedish right-wing extremist, Victor Gunnarsson, was quickly arrested for the murder but was soon released, after a dispute between the police and prosecuting attorneys. Gunnarsson had connections to various rightwing extremist groups, among these the European Workers Party, the Swedish branch of the LaRouche Movement.
John Ausonius, in those days named John Stannerman, was also one of the police's suspects for the murder. However, Stannerman could not be linked to the murder because he was locked up in prison the night Palme was shot.
Kurdish connection
Hans Holmér, the Stockholm police commissioner, followed up an intelligence lead passed to him (supposedly by Bertil Wedin) and arrested a number of Kurds living in Sweden, after allegations that one of their organisations, the PKK, was responsible for the murder. The lead proved inconclusive however and ultimately led to Holmér's removal from the Palme murder investigation. Fifteen years later, in April 2001, a team of Swedish police officers went to interview Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan in a Turkish prison about Ocalan's allegations that a dissident Kurdish group, led by his ex-wife, murdered Palme. The police team's visit proved futile.
Christer Pettersson
More than a year and a half after Palme's death Christer Pettersson, a small-time criminal, drug user and alcoholic, was arrested for the murder in December 1988. Identified by Mrs Palme as the killer, Pettersson was tried and convicted of the murder, but was later acquitted on appeal to the High Court. The appeal succeeded mainly because the murder weapon had not been found.
Additional evidence against Pettersson surfaced in the late 1990s, mostly stemming from various petty criminals who had altered their stories but also from a confession made by Pettersson. The chief prosecutor, Agneta Blidberg, considered re-opening the case. But she acknowledged that a confession alone would not be sufficient, saying: "He must say something about the weapon because the appeals court set that condition in its ruling. That is the only technical evidence that could be cited as a reason to re-open the case." While the legal case against Pettersson therefore remains closed, the police file on the investigation cannot be closed until both murder weapon and murderer are found. Christer Pettersson died on September 29, 2004.
New evidence?
New facts showed up in February 2006, when a documentary aired on Swedish channel SVT. Associates of Petterson explained that he had confessed to them his role in the murder, but with the explanation that it was a case of mistaken identity. Petterson intended to kill a drug distributor who happened to walk, in similar clothing, on the same street in the middle of the night.
The program also suggested greater police awareness than acknowledged, due to surveillance of Petterson or other drug activity in the area. The police had several agents in apartments and cars along those few blocks of Sveavägen, but 45 minutes before the murder they had all gone home.
Police promised a re-examination of the case in light of these revelations.
But according to an article published in Dagens Nyheter , February 28, 2006, this film is not to be considered as evidence at all, and the filmmaker is accused of having fabricated statements and left out sources that contradicts the point he wants to make in his film. [1]
Historian, Jan Bondeson has also re-examined much of the evidence that led to Petterson being charged and casts doubts over whether Mrs Palme correctly identified Petterson as the killer. Her memories from the crime scene appear disjointed and it is possible that she did not actually see the killer's face. Importantly, before Mrs Palme saw the police line-up in which she identified Petterson, she was informed by one of the prosecutors that the man they were looking for was a down-and-out alcoholic in his forties. Mrs Palme's words when she saw Petterson, 'Well, you can see who is the alcoholic', do not suggest instant recognition but rather identification based on reasoning. It would not have been difficult for Mrs Palme to pick out Petterson given the fact that she was a professional psychologist trained to recognise the symptoms of alcoholism.
South Africa connection
Cuban poster by Rafael Enriquez. 1986.
On February 21, 1986–a week before he was murdered–Palme made the keynote address to the Swedish People's Parliament Against Apartheid held in Stockholm, attended by hundreds of anti-apartheid sympathizers as well as leaders and officials from the ANC and the Anti-Apartheid Movement such as Oliver Tambo. Cuban artist Rafael Enriquez depicted Palme on a poster with an extract from that 1986 speech:
- "Apartheid cannot be reformed, it has to be eliminated."
Ten years later, towards the end of September 1996, Colonel Eugene de Kock, a former South African police officer, gave evidence to the Supreme Court in Pretoria alleging that Palme had been shot and killed in 1986 because he "strongly opposed the apartheid regime and Sweden made substantial contributions to the ANC". De Kock went on to claim he knew the person responsible for Palme's murder. He alleged it was Craig Williamson, a former police colleague and a South African superspy. A few days later, Brigadier Johannes Coetzee, who used to be Williamson's boss, identified Anthony White, a former Rhodesian Selous Scout with links to the South African security services, as Palme's actual murderer. Then a third person, Swedish mercenary Bertil Wedin, living in Northern Cyprus since 1985, was named as the killer by Peter Caselton, a member of Coetzee's assassination squad which was known as Operation Longreach.[2]The following month, in October 1996, Swedish police investigators visited South Africa but were unable to uncover the evidence to substantiate de Kock's claims.
In 1999, Coetzee, Williamson, de Kock and Caselton were all granted amnesty by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission for having been involved in bombing the ANC's offices in London on March 14, 1982. There were no fatalities but it was widely rumored that the ANC's Oliver Tambo, who was to have attended a meeting there at the time of the bombing, was the intended target.[3]
According to controversial American political activist and conspiracy theorist, Lyndon LaRouche, Olof Palme's murder was related to this arms-trade operation: "The earlier discovery of documents in the police search of the Malmö premises of Karl-Erik Schmitz, and Prime Minister Palme's concern with those arms-trafficking matters, were among the prime known evidences of motive for what must have been a carefully prearranged insertion of an assassin at the relevant moment of opportunity." [4]
Italian magazine Panorama revealed that president Francesco Cossiga had sent a letter to prime minister Giulio Andreotti after having reviewed the content of interviews between RAI journalist Ennio Remondino and former CIA agents Richard Brenneke and Ibrahim Razin. President Cossiga was concerned by the statements, and said: "If the government were to think that the information had any basis, I think that it should inform the judiciary authority and the Parliamentary Commission on Massacres and, at the level of the bilateral relations, the relevant authorities in the U.S.A. and in Sweden." Otherwise, the journalists who published the information without previously thoroughly checking its validity, should be punished.
According to those sources, three days before Olof Palme's death, Licio Gelli, member of P2 freemasonic lodge, had sent a telegram to Philip Guarino, at that time an important member of the Republican circle around George H.W. Bush. This telegram said: "Tell our friend that the Swedish palm will be felled." CIA agent Razin claims that the National Security Archives have the text of the telegram. According to him, P2 would have been interested by Olof Palme's murder because "Sweden was one of the main protagonists of the illegal weapons traffic at the time of the Iran-Iraq war when Palme was prime minister and thus Palme was surely aware of what was happening." [5]. According to an interview of Gene "Chip" Tatum by "Free Republic", Palme was assassinated because he refused an arms-trade [6]. The arms trade would have been part of the agreement reached during the October Surprise.
Ibrahim Razin also told that DINA agent Michael Townley, who has been convicted for Chilean former minister Orlando Letelier's assassination, was in Stockholm a week before Olof Palme's murder.
Indian connection
According to historian Jan Bondeson, it is possible than Palme's murder is linked with arms trades to India. Bondeson suggests that Palme believed he had used his good friendship with Rajiv Gandhi to secure the Swedish armaments company Bofors an 8.4 billion Swedish Kroner deal to supply the Indian Army with howitzers. However, Palme did not realise that behind his back Bofors was selling arms to countries at war and had, through using middlemen from a shady company called AE Services, nominally based in Guildford,secured the Indian deal through bribery.
Bondeson suggests that on the morning he was assassinated Palme had met with the Iraqi Ambassador to Sweden, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, (the man who would later go on to become notorious as Saddam Hussein's Information Minister during the 2003 Iraq War and become known as 'Baghdad Bob' or 'Comical Ali'). The two discussed the Bofors corporation, an organisation which Muhammed Saeed al-Sahhaf had expert knowledge in due to the company's involvement in arms dealing in the Iran-Iraq War. Bondeson suggests that Muhammed Saeed al-Sahhaf informed Palme of the corporation's various wrongdoings which Palme was furious about. Bondeson wonders if Muhammed Saeed al-Sahhaf inadvertently triggered Palme's murder if it was the case that either the Bofors dealers or the middlemen working through AE Services had a preconceived plan to silence the Prime Minister should he ever discover the truth and the deal was threatened. According to Bondeson, vital MI6 intelligence about a Bofors/AE Services deal was supressed by the Swedish police.
Memorials
Plaque commemorating exact spot of Palme's murder
- On April 23, 1986, a part of the street Tunnelgatan in Stockholm was renamed Olof Palmes gata.
- Olof Palme sétány (lit. "esplanade") is one of the central streets in the Budapest City Park. It also has a memorial stone for Anna Lindh.
- In central Berlin there is a small square named Olof Palmes Platz.
- Nicaragua National Conventions Center is called "Olof Palme".
- In south New Delhi there is a road called Olof Palme Marg
- In Hiddenhausen, Germany is a school named after Olof Palme.
The Olof-Palme-Gesamtschule
See also
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Trivia
- The cost of the investigation stands at SEK 350 million, EUR 38 million or USD 45 million as of February 25 2006.
- The total number of pages accumulated during the investigation is around 700,000
- The reward for solving the murder is SEK 50 million.
External links
Politics
On the Murder
