State sues
Socialist
Party
paper
THE NEWSPAPER of the Swedish section of the Fourth International, Internationalen, has come under attack from the state for what it has written about the investigation of the Palme assassination. As we go to press, it is about to be taken to court on charges of aggravated libel of policemen.
The following interview about this case was given to Gerry Foley in Stockholm May 12 by Gunnar Wall, a member of the staff of Internationalen.
W HAT IS the charge
against Internationalen? Internationalen is being sued by the chancellor of justice, who is the highest state prosecutor in cases relating to the freedom of speech. He is accusing Internationalen of the graver variety of libel, which is called aggravated libel. This means that the publisher responsible for the paper could be sent to jail if we are convicted.
That has not happened in Sweden in a number of years, and it is rather unlikely. But in the related libel cases against two other left-wing papers, the prosecutor has argued that the publishers should be sent a For how long?
He never specified. The maximum is two years. No-one has been sentenced on such charges in Sweden for 25 years. In the 1970s, two journalists were sent to jail because they had exposed an illegal intelligence operation. Then, the publisher of the paper was not taken to court. Instead they sued the two journalists, who got sentenc-
SWEDEN es of a year. In fact, our publisher is facing the threat of a jail sentence because of what Internationalen has written. • Is the real threat jail or high fines?
There is also a danger of fines. Fines will not be any substantial amount in the chancellor for justice's suit]. The more serious problem is that the four cops that have sued us are asking for compensation [and whose suits have been taken under the chancellor's case]. Together, they are asking for 400,000 crowns [about $80,000]. Internationalen also faces the threat of having to pay the cops' court costs.
There is not a big risk of any jail sentence, or that we will have to pay the full amount that the cops have asked, because they have asked for a much higher amount of money than is ever paid out in libel cases. By way of example, the weekly newspaper of the KPML-r, Proletären, got its sentence yesterday. The cops asked them for a million and a half crowns. They got 165,000.
One of the articles in Proletären was declared aggravated libel. Some others were ruled libel, and more than half were exonerated. So, even if our two articles are ruled to be aggravated libel, such a sum is absolutely unrealistic. But still there is a threat, because even if we had to pay a smaller amount of money, that would effect our possibilities to publish a paper of the quality that we have now. • What exactly did you publish that is supposed to amount to aggravated libel?
We are supposed to have described four cops as accomplices in the Palme murder. We have written a number of articles on the Palme case, and two of these articles (in issue 49, 1987 and issue 2, 1988) have been sued. We have asked a number of questions about the authorities' investigation of the Palme case.
There are a number of things that seem more and more scandalous. One of these is the possible implication of members of the Stockholm police force in the murder, or in a cover-up, or helping the murderer get away. A number of witnesses' stories point to the possibility of some sort of police involvement.
All this has to be seen in relation to the background of the case — the scapegoating of a Kurdish organization and other scandalous things which give the impression that the authorities are not really interested in getting the true facts about what happened. • So you wrote about the bizarre aspects of the assassination and the investigation, not that these four cops were implicated?
Yes. Then the question about the cops began to come up during 1987, when more and more people were starting to have serious doubts about what was really going on 21 in the investigation. That was after the res-
SWEDEN ignation of Holmér, who was the chief of the investigation for the first year. He was the highest bureaucrat in the police in Stockholm at the time of the murder, and he took personal charge of the investigation. That was a rather an odd thing to do for a person who is not a professional investigator. He has a background as a chief of the security police and as an attorbeen a cop with investigative experience and so on. In Swedish law, it is the state attorneys who should lead major investigations, and the police should be their helpers, so to speak. But in fact, Holmér succeeded in taking the leadership over the heads of the attorneys. He handled the investigation totally for a whole year, and devoted most of the police forces to an effort to pin the murder on the Kurdish organization, the PKK.
This whole case went to pieces after a big raid in January 1987. After that, it was obvious that he had no evidence. It had only been a lot of very loose speculation. So, he had to resign, and from then on a lot of newspapers started to be critical of the whole investigation. A lot of indices that pointed to something being wrong were raised in the newspapers and on the radio. So, over 1987, more and more papers started to write about things happening in the investigation and also about witnesses who had seen cops doing things that did not look right.
witnesses wrote a book which came out at the end of 1987. And when it became known what he was writing, and that he was publishing the names of two of cops (who were later to sue us), the attorneys for the cops talked about trying to get the book withdrawn. His name was Lars Krantz. He was a TV producer, and he had been a witness to an episode during the night of the murder. Also some pictures of the cops were published in two other left-wing papers.
At Internationalen, we came to the conclusion that there was going to be an attempt to gag the press, and so we also published basic facts about what was called the "police trail." That was to help to make it impossible for the authorities to suppress information about this. We did not know if we would be sued, but we formulated the things we wrote in a very exact way, and we were careful not to say that these cops were involved or anything
We only pointed to a number of facts, and the lack of investigation of these facts. And that was in the first article that was sued later. The other article, ironically, was part of an interview with a member of parliament. In December 1987, after we had published the first article, a statement was published by a parliamentary commission charged with investigating the authorities' handling of the Palme case, the Eden Man Commission. 22 report at the end so spring suba nial The Commission submitted a substantial International Viewpoint #165 • June 12, 1989 already, in December 1987, it issued a smaller statement concerning the police hypothesis. They said that they had looked into that, and they had found no reason to believe that any policemen should be treat-
On the other hand, they said that they had no basis for excluding the police or anyone else who could be involved. But our hypothesis was that this statement from the commission was a political attempt to counter the debate in the press about the police hypothesis.
So, we interviewed one of the members of the commission, a member of the Swedish Communist Party, the VpK, Göran Svensson. He is no longer in parliament. He is a rather famous CP theoretician, and he had also signed this statement.
The interview was rather long, and we published it in two parts. We asked him why the Commission came to the conclusion that it did. In the interview, he gave more detailed arguments than any other paper has published. But still, ironically, this article was sued because we had mentioned the names of the policemen in it. That is the basis of the suit, so to • But now you consider that this is a question of freedom of the press. You are running a defence campaign that is not purely a legal one. What kind of support have you
Ourselves and the other two papers who have been sued agreed on a statement, and we asked people to sign it. We have got signatures from 500 well-known people — for example, the chief editor of the social democratic daily Arbetet in Malmö, Lars Enquist, the very famous Swedish actor and director, Hans Alfredsson, and a number of authors, such as Werner Aspen• What about support from journalists' organizations?
Not from the central journalists' union. But we have been supported by the former editor of Dagens Nyheter, Olof Lagercranz, who is also a well-known author and has a very high standing. • He is the one who wrote acclaimed biography of Strindberg?
Yes. And a number of other journalists signed. But most of them were not journalists in the daily press. I think this may be because most of the big media have been cautious on this for a number of reasons, and it is not easy for journalists to sign. So, most of the people who have signed are so-called free professionals, like artists, authors, actors and so on.
But also we have statements from the journalists' clubs on a number of papers, and from the executive board of one of the two big unions on the Swedish radio corporation, the SIF, which represents part of the journalists and all of the technical staff. It organizes white-collar workers in industry, everyone from typists to the bosses. Many of the TV journalists, on the other hand, are in the journalists' union. • Do you link the three cases?
The statement is a common one on the basis of defending freedom of speech and of the press. We thought that, even if we have differences with the other papers, the basis of the attacks was the same. It was an attempt to stop a free debate about this issue. We have no reason to dissociate ourselves from the other papers, even if we say that we wouldn't have handled the story the way they did. • But your legal case is different?
Yes. There are three trials, and not one. We don't have any responsibility for the • They did different things? They specific policemen of being implicated?
Norrskensflamman's case is rather similar to ours. Proletären, on the other hand, had a much more aggressive campaign, including describing the four cops as suspects — not as accomplices, but as suspects. They also had their pictures on the front page week after week. And they distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of a leaflet with the names and pictures of the policemen. They ran a headline on the front page of their magazine saying "Sue us or indict us if we are guilty, or if we are wrong." They were more or less asking for a suit against them, and to achieve that, they were openly provocative.
There were both good and bad sides to doing that. On the one hand, they succeeded in getting a lot of publicity; on the other, they took bigger risks. I am not necessarily saying that what they did was wrong. But we only take responsibility for the things that we have done.
It was only us and Proletären who were sued by the chancellor of justice. Norrskensflamman was sued by the cops as individuals. The chancellor for justice's position in our case and that of Proletären was that we should not be allowed to call any witnesses. He argued that we should not be allowed to demonstrate that the things that we were writing were true, because it was illegal from the start to say things like that, since an investigation of the crime was going on. He was defeated in the Proletären case, because they were permitted to call a number of witnesses, including Holmér himself. • Does that mean that you will also be able to call witnesses?
Well, we have not yet come to the point where that will be decided. The Proletären case was heard in Göteborg, and we are in Stockholm. We have indications that in Stockholm the court is more severe. They will allow us to have witnesses, but they may be more restrictive about it. *