More scandals follow sabotage.
Fighting the attacks
Palme investigation on democratic rights
But this is not what has been done. On the contrary, it is obvious that the social democrats led their "investigation"
LAST WEEK, Anna-Greta Leijon, minister of justice and a central member of the social-democratic leadership, was forced to resign. The reason was the discovery that the social-democratic party had led a parallel, secret investigation into the murder of Swedish premier Olof Palme
MARIA SUNDVALL
HIS DISCOVERY was not an iso-
T lated event, but only the latest in a long series of scandals and revelations. It thus became symbolic of the increasingly corrupt legal practices and of the degradation of democratic institutions in Sweden.
To be sure, there have always been cases of corruption and legal scandals, but in the two years that have passed
Palme was shot in the street it seems that there has been an explosion of revelations.
Among many Swedish workers, this has caused demoralization and a loss of confidence in state institutions. All this has contributed to changing the political climate.
Among the scandals there have been cases of personal corruption among top civil servants. There have been financial scandals, such as the revelation that 450 million crowns (about $75m) had been gambled away by employees in Stockholm's town hall buying shares and options. The Bofors arms scandal was another. Bofors is a big armaments company that was caught smuggling weapons to countries prohibited by
Swedish law - but probably with the knowledge of the Swedish government.
Another factor contributing to the weakening of democratic institutions has been the introduction of new laws and legal practices threatening democratic rights. For instance, nine Kurds are being held under
"municipal arrest" without any possibility of a public trial. They have not been convicted of any crime, but are being held simply because they are sympathizers of the suspected in two Swedish murder cases. In sharp contradiction to the law, today a third of refugees coming to Sweden for asylum are being turned away at the border. Now new laws are being prepared that will make it even more difficult for refugees to come into the country.
But the most important and glaring example of the changed situation is the Palme investigation itself.
First, the police hunted down the PKK for a year, without a shadow of proof against the Kurdish organization. This culminated in a big raid and the arrest of 50 Kurds in Stockholm — a raid that was condemned by the prosecutors as an attempt to "construct a Chile stadium in Sweden"! After this, the Kurdish lead was officially dropped. It is becoming increasingly obvious that extremely serious evidence pointing to the state apparatus - and in particular to sections of the police with well-known right extremist sympathies -are not being investigated.
The statements made by a number of people who witnessed policemen acting strangely at or near the place of Palme's murder have been dismissed or "forgotorder to continue the favourite theme of the security police and sections of the regular police force: the Kurdish connection. The theory that has been investigated is that the PKK murdered Palme, following orders from Iran. Apart from not being very credible, there is absolutely no evidence to back up this theory. Furthermore, the social democrats worked very closely with sections of the security police and police in this investigation.
This new scandal has broken at a time of general demoralization, when it is clear that the result of the yearly negotiations on work contracts will result in a loss in real wages for most workers, and when the accumulated effects of years of public service cuts is leading to an acute crisis of healthcare and childcare this summer. It cumes at a time when the political vacuum is growing, with the social democrats doing their best to tone down the differences between left and right before the coming national
It comes at a time when the Eurocommunist party, the VPK, after years of compromises and acceptance of social-democratic austerity policies runs a real risk of losing all its posts in parliament. At the same time, there is still no strong and credible alternative on the left. The Socialist Party, which is running candidates for the national, municipal and regional elections, is working to
In this work, the fight against the attacks on democratic rights and against increasing corruption is essential. The Socialist Party has raised a number of immediate demands after the Leijon scandal:
Make all the material relating to the Palme investigation public! Stop the prosecutions of those who have questioned police investigation! Release the nine Kurds from municipal arrest and give them a fair and open trial! * July 11, 1988 • #145 International Viewpoint
----- pull-quotes on this page -----
DENMARK • SWEDEN ten". And those who have insisted on pur- suing the truth have been prosecuted, as in the case of a TV producer who wrote a
----- panel printed with this article -----
book about what he had seen. International- en, the paper of the Socialist Party (Swed- ish section of the Fourth International), has also been prosecuted for "slander" simply because it reported on all the unanswered questions and dubious details of police leads. Given all this, it would have been legiti- mate enough for the social democrats to in- vestigate the police lead, distrusting the ability right-wing extremists of the police and the security police to investigate them- selves. It might even have been reasonable for the social democratic party to start their own investigation to stop right-wing