Stieg Larsson, My Friend

by Kurdo Baksi

  I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and got up to fetch the list. It did occur to me that the book would be an excellent introduction to the partnership between Svartvitt and Expo.

  In other words, I found myself becoming the publisher of a book I had never read. This was a reflection of how much confidence I had in Stieg. If he said that the book was important and there were no potential legal problems, I trusted him. The first thing I saw on my desk after his death was a copy of the jacket blurb for that book. It reminded me of the meeting I have just described. Stieg had written the text himself:

  In the 1998 elections the Sweden Democrats polled twenty thousand votes and won eight local council seats. That meant they were the third-largest party with no representation in the national parliament, and now they are setting their sights on the 1999 E.U. elections. They hope to hoover up votes from New Democracy, which has collapsed, and from other protest parties. The keyword in the Sweden Democrats’ campaign is “respectability”. This spruced-up façade is in stark contrast with the party’s history, and its membership of the international movements Nord-Nat and Euro-Nat.

  There was undeniably something electric about Stieg’s presence. If you managed to interpret the signals he sent out correctly, your whole environment was lit up. But if you misunderstood his intentions, he could burn everything that got in his way – including himself. So he was both a dream and a nightmare to work with. He was not merely seriously involved, but rather obsessed with the struggle to overcome intolerance. And he always acted spontaneously. When one least expected it, he was apt to come out with long quotations in order to illustrate his arguments. A lot of people called him un-Swedish, but I have never been able to accept that. It simply doesn’t fit comfortably with his view of the world.

  Every time I think about our meetings, it strikes me that some people might think that our contact was always linked with the work we did together. I have never seen it like that. It was about as far away from a working relationship as it’s possible to get. It would be truer to say that our work was a part of our friendship.

  On 30 November, 1998, T.T. issued a newsflash. The anti-racist journal Expo had been resurrected, thanks to a merger with the magazine Svartvitt.

  I was quoted: “Expo has been outstandingly good at investigating racism, but they have never grasped how to make money. That is where I can help them.”

  According to the newsflash, the new version of Expo hoped to sell four thousand copies to start with and eventually nine thousand. Stieg was the main protagonist at the press conference held at the Swedish W.E.A. that same day. He was wearing his now legendary grey jacket and shirt with a dark blue tie. But the resulting news item didn’t even mention his name: although he did most of the talking at the press conference, I was the one who was quoted. There again, I was the one at whom several people laughed when they heard the number of copies Expo hoped to sell. Nobody thought it was possible to achieve that ambition.

  It was not only because of his shyness that Stieg maintained such a modest profile. His relationship with T.T. had reached a new low and he felt stymied. Because of his permanent post there, he was not free to be interviewed as an expert on matters involving racism or neo-Nazism. Nor was he allowed to write on these subjects. He was always being approached for articles that would have been right up his street. Sometimes he paid no attention to what his superiors said and wrote them. But that only made his position even more awkward.

  You can’t serve two masters, Stieg!

  You simply can’t do this.

  You can’t publish a journal about right-wing extremism in your spare time and also produce credible articles on the same questions for a news agency.

  You have to choose one or the other!

  Over and over again he came up against the same arguments, and I could see how it was getting him down.

  It soon became clear that Stieg was working day and night. We used to say that he worked from 9.00 till 5.00 – 9.00 in the morning till 5.00 the next morning. There seemed to be no limit to what he needed to do: write articles; do research; coordinate editorial activities; buy coffee, loo rolls, bookcases, computers and toners for the printer . . . I didn’t envy him, but I ought to have supported him more. My only consolation is that I know his pride would have prevented him from accepting more help than I gave him.

  Every weekday at 1.30 he would turn up at the editorial office of either Expo or Svartvitt. He would bring a litre of milk for coffee, take a seat and talk before returning to his day job at T.T. He was back in the editorial office by 4.00. He told me that he often went to bed at about 5.00 in the morning. The last thing he always did was to switch off his mobile, which he both loved and hated.

  We could see that he was pushing himself to the limit. His bloodshot eyes often betrayed his exhaustion. But I also remember the energy he radiated. Our collaboration was going well; we could look ahead with confidence and spent hours analysing the current state of democracy, or the latest move by some person or organization we both hated.

  Then the day dawned when Stieg’s book on Euro-Nat arrived from the printer’s. Two weeks later we celebrated the publication of the first issue of the combined Svartvitt and Expo journals in my office. It was a memorable day. A lot of people called it a mad project. Perhaps they were right. But no matter; it was an act of madness that I shall never regret.

  I remember clearly Stieg’s pride when we sat in the editorial office with the new issue in our hands. How his voice boomed: “It’s our obligation, damn it, to comment on and analyse and take the pulse of the new Sweden.”

  And then, when somebody produced a camera, how he displayed great agility in slipping off to one side and managing to avoid being in the picture. He was happy to take on work and share praise with others. But he made sure he didn’t appear in any photographs if at all possible.

  I sometimes wonder if Stieg had the same working habits when he was younger. If he only had one gear: full steam ahead. Or whether the frenzy gathered pace later in his life. I would have loved to have seen him as an eighteen-year-old, doing his project on racism and political extremism. That assignment must have awakened something extraordinary in his frail teenage body. Perhaps that was a starting point for all that he came to stand for in adulthood as a journalist, author and lecturer.

  “Kill your darlings,” I used to tell Stieg when he was having trouble restricting himself. I often thought he was rather too fond of his own texts, and also those of others. It made no difference if it was a news article, a leaflet, a preface, a press release, a cultural article, a polemical essay or a chapter in a textbook.

  I succeeded in becoming one of the very few people who were allowed to edit his texts ruthlessly. Not without him protesting loudly, of course. Quite early on, I hit upon a trick that seemed to work: cut half the text but allow the first four or five hundred words to stand unchanged, and find an appropriate way of summing up as the last sentence but one.

  I don’t suppose I shall ever see again anything like the driving force generated by Stieg when he was writing. I have never come across anybody who could write so easily and quickly the draft of a press release, a polemical article or a petition. And he seemed to be so happy as he did it. He could be hunched over and dog-tired, but when asked to write a press release, his whole body would straighten and his eyes light up.

  Once as we were sitting in the Café Latte, he talked about his travels to Africa.

  “Did you know I suffered from malaria while I was out there?”

  “I had no idea.”

  He shrugged, and we spoke no more about it. But shortly afterwards we touched on the situation in Algeria.

  “I once had a job there as a dishwasher. That was after a failed trip and I’d run out of money.”

  “You’ve done quite a lot of travelling.”

  “So have you,” he said.

  “That’s true, that’s one thing we have in common.”

  “‘A woman’s relationship to a man
is like the slave’s to the master, the manual labourer to the intellectual, the barbarian to the Hellene. A woman is an undeveloped man.’”

  “Eh?”

  “Who said that?”

  “It must be some Greek philosopher,” I said hesitantly, “in view of the word ‘Hellene’.”

  “Aristotle.”

  How can one not miss conversations like that?

  The period following our first joint issue was fantastic. Not least because we were proud of it, and of how well we had worked together. Then several things happened that shocked us deeply.

  It started with the Malexander murders, one of the most discussed crimes of the 1990s in Sweden. In the course of a police chase following a bank robbery on 28 May 1999, two officers were shot dead with their own service revolvers. It seemed more like an out-and-out execution than anything else.

  Only a few weeks later we received another horrific piece of news. Stieg and I were in the editorial office when the telephone rang on 28 June. A former member of the Expo staff, Peter Karlsson, his partner, Katarina Larsson, and their eight-year-old son had been victims of a car-bomb attack in the suburb of Nacka on 18 June. They had been rushed to hospital by helicopter, and we heard later that Peter had serious leg injuries. It came like a punch in the solar plexus to both Stieg and me. Threats were a normal part of our everyday life, but this was the nearest they had come to us personally.

  Luckily Peter survived. What worried us most was that it ought not to have happened because Peter and his partner both carried alarm devices, but they hadn’t gone off until a second before the explosion.

  We could only interpret the assassination attempt on Peter and Katarina as a direct attack on Expo. Both of them had worked for the journal until quite recently. Their exposé in Aftonbladet, Expressen and Dagens Nyheter concerning so-called White Power music attracted a lot of attention, and seemingly was the reason for the outrage.

  It was merely minutes after we’d heard the news ourselves that we began to receive a deluge of calls from the press. I sat with the receiver pressed to my ear; Stieg sat beside me writing a series of statements on Post-it notes. “Democracy cannot be taken for granted”, “Every day and at every level of society we must fight for democracy, tolerance and respect”. I read out what he had written, and could hear the reporters noting it down.

  They asked how often we received death threats ourselves.

  “All the time,” I replied.

  They wondered if it reminded me of my life in Kurdistan.

  “That’s an absurd comparison,” I said as politely as I could.

  Then a photographer arrived. He had been assigned to take pictures of the threats directed at Svartvitt and Expo. I produced an entire file full of threatening letters. He picked out examples that he considered to be “real threats” and was particularly interested in those decorated with swastikas.

  Stieg, who had hidden himself away behind a computer screen, was grinning broadly and shaking his head. We both knew that news of this sort during the so-called silly season was a goldmine for hard-pressed editors. I would very much have liked to have passed them over to Stieg directly, but all I could do was get him to answer the telephone. He refused point blank to be photographed. As soon as he had a minute to spare, he wrote out new statements on our joint behalf. It was obvious how agitated he was.

  “We can’t just sit at home and allow the anti-democrats to take over the streets,” he swore. He explained how far-right groups were associated especially with letter bombs. Moreover, he had heard that two neo-Nazis wanted by the police in Austria had gone to ground in Sweden and were being protected by people in Helsingborg linked with the far-right international organization Blood & Honour.

  “There is a risk that they will take the opportunity to give Swedish neo-Nazis tips on how to make letter bombs,” he said, lighting another cigarette.

  Everybody in the editorial office was worried. How bad was the situation in reality? Was the attack on Peter an isolated event, or was it the first in a series? The mood was not improved when Stieg related in detail how a Danish neo-Nazi from the Blood & Honour network in Malmö had posted three letter bombs addressed to targets in England. We all knew that a Nazi sympathizer had been arrested the previous year at Stockholm-Arlanda Airport in possession of explosives.

  Never before had we been in such complete agreement that we needed to mobilize as much opposition as possible.

  “We must write a forceful manifesto. It’s important that all well-known homosexuals, immigrants and women sign it,” said Stieg, looking hard at me. “You can fix that. You know them.”

  “In that case I must have the final version as soon as possible so I can read it out to them. Damn it, it’s the middle of summer – it won’t be easy to get everything sorted at short notice.”

  That was all Stieg needed to hear. He raced over to my blue Apple Mac and seven minutes later he had finished our first joint petition.

  All the celebrities we managed to get hold of signed it and on 7 July, 1999, the “Stop the Neo-Nazi and Racist Violence” petition was published in Aftonbladet:

  A neo-Nazi terrorist movement has grown up stealthily in Sweden. The worst fears seem to have been confirmed by the attempted assassination of the journalists Peter Karlsson and Katarina Larsson. Nevertheless, the recent car-bomb attack is only the tip of the iceberg. According to Säpo [the Swedish Security Service] 327 cases of assault on racist grounds took place in 1997.

  Peter Karlsson and Katarina Larsson are among the few who have blown the whistle on right-wing extremism in our society, which is becoming increasingly unsafe. And now, if not before, it is clear that it is not sufficient to talk about “drunken misbehaviour”, “youthful folly” or “routine criminality”, as we often hear from the police and authorities.

  We, the signatories to this petition, therefore demand:

  • That the security services finally acknowledge and prioritize the neo-Nazi terror and support the police in their work.

  • That the police give adequate protection to people who are threatened by right-wing extremists.

  • That the Minister of Justice draws up an action programme to get neo-Nazi and racist violence under control.

  • That a crisis centre is established to assist the victims of racism.

  Break the silence! We all have a responsibility to combat racism and neo-Nazism.

  Everyone who wishes to live in a tolerant, democratic, humane and multicultural Sweden is urged to sign this petition . . .

  Within twenty-four hours over a thousand signatures of ordinary Swedes were added to the petition. I asked Stieg to accompany me to Rosenbad, the prime minister’s office, the following morning in order to hand over the list.

  “A quarter to nine is too early for me. Besides, it would be better for a man and a woman born in different countries to go to the ministry.”

  I realized that it was a waste of time trying to persuade him and asked the journalist Bella Frank of the syndicalist newspaper Arbetaren to accompany me to hand the petition to Deputy Prime Minister Lena Hjelm-Wallén.

  What none of us knew at the time was that it was already fiftysix days since a group of known neo-Nazis had ordered passport photographs and “current addresses” of Stieg, his partner, Eva, and me.

  5

  Living under threat

  In the mid-1930s a terrifying and brutal gang of thugs ruled the roost in Syria. These five hundred dangerous men were led by the unpredictable Amo (Uncle). Every time they raided a restaurant they would instruct all the customers not to move. Then Amo would inspect all present and decide on punishments for them, each and every one. It was usually a question of how many gold coins each individual should pay. Anybody who refused was murdered on the spot.

  The story goes that this notorious gang once forced its way into a nightclub in Aleppo that was very popular with well-heeled men in the early hours: they were all entranced by a beautiful belly dancer. But the moment Amo’s gang en
tered the premises the four-man band stopped playing and everybody froze – including the belly dancer. To everyone’s surprise Amo immediately ordered more music and more belly-dancing. The band struck up again and the belly dancer did her best to satisfy the customers.

  When the performance had finished, Amo applauded and announced, “Today I shall only punish the musicians. The band will pay me one gold coin each – apart from the drummer, who will pay me three gold coins!” The poor drummer burst into tears and wondered why he had to pay more than the rest of the band. “You must pay more because I’ve noticed for a long time now that when the rest of the band is silent, the drums keep on disturbing the peace!”

  Every time Stieg wondered why he was the one receiving death threats, I would tell him that story. It was an attempt to liven things up in a totally absurd situation. His vulnerability made him receptive to an anecdote that few Swedes would understand.

  Stieg was the anti-racist musician who beat the drum whenever nobody spoke up concerning the principle that everybody had equal worth. Whenever silence fell – society so loves to sweep unpleasant phenomena under the carpet – he would be there, drumming away for all he was worth. The fact is that as early as the 1970s he had seen the danger of xenophobic, racist and neo-Nazi groups becoming organized in Sweden and the other Nordic countries. But nobody rewards you with bouquets of flowers for observations like that!

  So his question about why he was being singled out for threats was purely rhetorical. Of course he knew the reason for the many long hate letters, and the way in which he was hung out to dry in racist magazines and on Internet sites. What is more difficult to explain, however, is why he replied to every single neo-Nazi, racist and xenophobic lunatic who sent him letters or issued threats. I simply could not understand why he spent hours replying to those people.