Stieg Larsson, My Friend

by Kurdo Baksi

  “If you don’t reply to destructive people they will turn to destructive actions,” he used to say, looking up from writing one such letter. Then he would carry on, also answering the next one even though it was late at night.

  I don’t know when and where these ghosts and phantoms first attacked Stieg, perhaps around the mid-1980s. It is hard to imagine any other Swede being threatened more often than he was during the last twenty years of his life. Nevertheless, he was very good at hiding his worries. Presumably so as not to worry anybody else, least of all Eva.

  So what were his crimes, according to the racists? Obviously all the critical articles he wrote, his knack of seeing through their networks and activities. But his worst crime was probably that he was a blond-haired Swede who both supported and did his best to promote a “multicultural society”. It was as if he had betrayed the racists.

  The Swedish National Encyclopedia defines a traitor as “an individual who betrays a person or thing to which he or she is expected to be loyal”. Perhaps that is how the racists regarded Stieg. Some countries only resort to the death penalty in cases of one kind: treason. Vidkun Quisling is in many ways the perfect example of how a person can betray his country. The way in which Stieg so doggedly opposed people and organizations who spoke about their country under the influence of their twisted view of humankind – well, it is easy to understand how he became a symbol for them. A symbol and a quarry to be hunted down.

  I would even say that Stieg had a couple of bad habits. On the one hand, he was so considerate that he would often exaggerate threats aimed at people close to him. On the other hand, he would trivialize nearly all threats aimed at himself and did not take many precautions to protect himself from people who considered him to be dangerous.

  He was shadowed by neo-Nazis whenever he travelled on the underground; racists kept an eye on him when he walked around Stockholm. They knew exactly where they had him. “I get off a stop before the one I’m actually going to,” he would say diffidently. I sometimes felt like grabbing him by the shoulders and giving him a good shake. His unruffled behaviour, so typical of the north of Sweden, where he was born, could drive me up the wall. But he refused all suggestions – to keep changing his address (which I did at the time and still do), to accept free hotel passes (which I used to give him when things were especially threatening) or to go off on holiday when the situation became too tense (as I generally do when I don’t feel safe in my flat).

  “I get off a stop early.”

  In time our mutual enemies began to lump Stieg and me together. We had been in the business of fighting prejudice for a long time. We knew most of our tormentors. We were so experienced that we could tell from their handwriting if a person was dangerous or not. We regarded threats a bit like ordinary people examine the use-by date on a carton of milk. How current is this letter? This person has got tired by now, that’s obvious. Ah, this one has struck a new note, don’t you think?

  We kept the whole business of threats at arm’s length. Was that healthy? Probably not, but I think one’s mind works like that so that one has the will to get up in the morning. In our darkest moments we both felt that we were living on borrowed time. Sooner or later something would happen.

  Stieg was forty-five, I was thirty-four. We were grateful for the time we were being granted.

  All the letter writers were men. Without exception. Young men and very old men.

  The “November man” wrote threatening letters – but only in November. The “posh one” lived in Oskarshamn and wrote long, hate-filled rants, all in elegant Swedish. And then there was the “Thursday man”, a tormentor approaching seventy who lived in Helsingborg. We had mixed feeling about him. We had first got to know him when he was fifty-eight and writing articles for a regional racist magazine. Should we feel sorry for him or take him seriously? What drives a person like that? We could never quite make him out. On the other hand, we were reluctantly impressed by his inexhaustible commitment, even if he was a bit short of ideas and kept repeating himself. Every week he collected articles that in one way or another dealt with the costs of immigration, and statistics on assaults committed in Sweden by people born abroad. In the margins he would make unpleasant notes, usually threatening murder, in red ink and with lots of exclamation marks.

  It wasn’t enough for him to send these threatening letters just to us. He would make a hundred photocopies of the ten most negative articles, put them in a hundred envelopes, and every Thursday, as punctually as a Swiss clock, address them to the hundred currently most active anti-racists. After twelve years it was clear that he was suffering more and more from dementia, but still he refused to stop writing these letters. Then one day he made a mistake. Instead of putting stamps on the hundred letters to anti-racists, he put ninety-nine stamps in an envelope that he posted to me, but forgot to stick stamps on the remaining ninetynine letters. That meant that Stieg didn’t receive a threatening letter from Helsingborg that week. We had a good laugh at the Thursday man’s expense. And despite Stieg’s protests I immediately put the stamps in our own postal kitty.

  These tormentors have normal Swedish names, and often seem to be drunk, especially when they telephone. Sometimes they have threatening voices; sometimes they sound like Donald Duck. The worst are those with deep voices who sound like cold-blooded murderers at the other end of the line. They always phone from public call boxes or from withheld numbers.

  Both Stieg and I noticed that until January 1999, murder threats came almost exclusively after normal office closing time. Friday and Saturday evenings were especially popular. But then routines and methods started to change. The more serious callers threatening murder started to ring at about 9.00 in the morning. Presumably in order to disturb our working day more effectively.

  Naturally there were a lot of others besides Stieg and me who were threatened – not least on the hate-filled racist websites. Their favourite targets were journalists, politicians, police officers, Holocaust survivors, immigrants, homosexuals, antiracists, trade unionists and Swedes who had adopted non-white children.

  As early as the beginning of the 1990s the neo-Nazis began to create their own secret police force. The force’s remit was to identify anti-racist enemies and collect personal registration numbers, passport photographs and addresses of residences and workplaces. Thanks to the lax Swedish passport laws, these secret policemen had no difficulty in collecting passport photographs – all they had to do was to request passport information about the citizens in whom they were interested. There was not even any need to provide identification when they requested these sensitive details.

  This negative aspect of the transparency principle led to several people losing their lives. On 12 October, 1999, the young trade unionist Björn Söderberg was murdered outside his flat in Sätra in southern Stockholm. This was the first time that a trade union activist had been murdered in Sweden. It is also a clear example of the price of standing up for one’s beliefs. Söderberg was a syndicalist who refused to listen to racist music at his workplace and succeeded in getting a known neo-Nazi sacked. He would not accept the election of a neo-Nazi to the regional committee of the Commerce Employees’ Association in Stockholm. This last stand was the equivalent of signing his own death warrant. Certain reports claimed that the Swedish police were keeping watch on the neo-Nazis patrolling outside his home.

  Three days after Söderberg’s murder, Stieg burst into Svartvitt’s office, gasping for breath. The first thing I noticed was that it was 9.00 in the morning. I soon realized why he was so upset. Unlike me, who receives his threatening letters in a post office box, Stieg had found his lying on the mat in his front hall.

  “We have a lot to do,” he said, sitting down. “First of all we need to look into how the police handled the build-up to the murder of Björn Söderberg. It’s a scandal.”

  I made him a white coffee and watched him slump back in the light brown armchair, more or less exhausted.

  “I don’t understa
nd,” he said with a sigh, “why Söderberg received no practical advice from the police about how to go about your daily life when you’ve received murder threats. He ought to have known that he couldn’t just open the door without first checking who had rung the bell.”

  “Nor was he allocated a police mentor after the neo-Nazis had got hold of his passport photograph.”

  “The worst thing of all,” said Stieg, taking a swig of coffee, “is that the murder of Björn Söderberg could have been averted as easy as pie. The security police were shadowing the murderers as well as a third individual until half an hour before the murder.”

  Half an hour! We put that thought to the back of our minds. In other words, the security police were more or less on the spot when Björn Söderberg was shot dead.

  Apart from being sad and upset about the murder, we had received a reminder of how dodgy our own situation was. It was obvious that we needed to do something. As usual, Stieg picked up his pen. After scribbling a few thoughts, he sat down at the computer.

  A minute later, he had listed three points – or demands, as he called them.

  · When the police discover a private individual on the hate list compiled by neo-Nazis, that person must be informed, no matter what.

  · The police must be sensitive to the worry a threatened individual feels. He or she must be allocated a “mentor” from within the police.

  · In extreme cases, the authorities must be willing to make a temporary safe house available to the people being threatened.

  He handed me the printout to read. At the same time he opened his shoulder bag and produced a printout of an email.

  “This came today,” he said.

  I read it.

  Fuck fuck hooray! A nigger lover and traitor has been shot. We shall celebrate that this weekend, and demonstrate our support for our Aryan brothers who carried out this heroic deed. The armed campaign against those who betray their race and their country is only just beginning. Bullets have been reserved with your name on them. You will die, you nigger-loving swine.

  I let the sheet of paper float down on to the desk.

  “Why are you so agitated about this?” I wondered. “We get stuff like this all the time, and it’s not even addressed to you personally.”

  But we both knew why we were feeling the pressure. It had become increasingly clear that 1999 was the year of demons. The situation had deteriorated appreciably in a very short space of time.

  “It’s about time we did something,” Stieg said, leaning forward in the armchair. “We need to put this latest murder threat in the proper context. Two police officers have been killed by out-and-out racists. Two former colleagues have been carbombed after investigating the racist music industry. A local councillor in Nybro has had his car blown up. The neo-Nazis have good contacts in the police force, which means that they often escape criminal proceedings. And now the syndicalist Björn Söderberg has been murdered in his own home.”

  “You reckon we should link all those happenings with this latest threat?”

  “Exactly. Söderberg was murdered despite the fact that he had police protection. There are lots of people like us who have received murder threats. I’ve been investigating neo-Nazis for over twenty years, and I can say without hesitation that the situation today is more serious than it has ever been. There are those who think I’m a conspiracy theorist, but I think it’s time to get to grips with the rotten eggs inside the Swedish police force.”

  He was furious. I had never seen him so agitated and irritated. The murder of Björn Söderberg had hit him hard. One explanation might be that Söderberg had been active in the same union as Stieg’s mother, the Commerce Employees’ Association. Söderberg’s murder reminded Stieg of Vivianne, whom he had loved so much, so the cold-blooded execution became something personal.

  “I think I get excellent help from the security police,” I said, but he dismissed that statement with a wave of the hand.

  “That’s irrelevant. We must do something. Ring every journalist you know and tell them that the time has come when the government and the police must accept their responsibilities and act against racism. But just say that we and our colleagues are on the list, no more than that. I don’t want to attract too much attention. We mustn’t give the impression of being victims. It’s a question of influencing public opinion. I think you should request an interview with the prime minister and ask that an anti-racist centre be established in Sweden.”

  I immediately joined the awkward squad.

  “I’m fed up with telephoning journalists. But the idea of setting up a centre is good – very good.”

  “We need to get something in the newspapers.”

  “How about writing a polemical article and asking the editors of the biggest dailies – Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Expressen and Aftonbladet – to sign it and publish it the same day?”

  “That sounds like a terrific idea.”

  “And as you have no intention of signing it,” I said with a grin, “as a punishment you can write it.”

  He roared with laughter.

  “Well, I’ll be damned! Do you think they’ll play along?”

  “It’s worth trying, don’t you think?”

  I saw him eyeing the new computer my secretary, Luciana, had bought the previous day.

  “If you can get all the editors-in-chief on board,” he said, rising to his feet, “I’ll provide you with the best text I’ve ever written.”

  The very next minute I heard him tapping away at the keyboard as if his life depended on it.

  Even if Stieg was always most upset when somebody else had been threatened, there is no getting away from the fact that he himself was more vulnerable than anyone. The worst thing from his point of view was not how he was affected, but what effect his being affected had on his partner, Eva. When we heard that a woman with clear neo-Nazi links and her 23-year-old son had collected passport photographs of him, Eva and me, the situation became even more serious. The same people had acquired passport photographs of Peter and his partner, Katarina, before they had been car-bombed.

  We realized that we needed to take measures to increase our security. The problem for Stieg was that he had an ambivalent relationship with the police, which was not difficult to understand. He was forced to ask them for help, but at the same time he was always criticizing the way they carried out their duties.

  In all the conversations we had about the threats we received, he stressed that it was Eva he was concerned about. She was his lifeline, and he insisted that he would never forgive himself if she was affected by something that could be traced back to his anti-racist activities.

  I often suggested that they should go away for a holiday when things became too strained, but every time he just shook his head.

  I have a particular memory of our countless discussions about the threats we faced. We had been talking for an unusually long time and eventually came round to the same old conclusion: I had proposed that we should lie low for a while, and suggested yet again that he and Eva should go away for a week or two. This time he actually said that he would talk to her about the situation. He didn’t fancy it himself, but perhaps it would be good for her to get away.

  When we said goodbye on the stone steps down to the front door, Stieg turned to me and said, “If only you knew the danger you and I are in.”

  That was all. We nodded to each other and he vanished into the dark street.

  Two days later Stieg was guilty of professional misconduct at T.T. He wrote about the neo-Nazi threats aimed at himself and three colleagues at Expo.

  Obviously, Stieg knew all the rules governing news journalism like the back of his hand. Even so, his text lacked the neutrality, impartiality and relevance required of a professional journalist. He actually went so far as to interview his own editor at Expo. He was aware, of course, that it was wrong of him to write about threats aimed at himself and his colleagues.

  I was extremely upset. Obviously I k
new the pressure he was under – he had just resigned from T.T., and would soon receive two years’ salary. Moreover, nobody else had noticed his violation of the rules. But that is what it was and I thought it unworthy of him.

  I wept over my friend’s error.

  6

  The infiltrator

  Parties and party leaders can and should disagree about most factual matters in this world of ours. This is one of the rules of the game where democracy is concerned. Politics develops from these conflicting views.

  But there are exceptions. There are some questions fundamental to our communal values where there can and must be no differences of opinion in a democratic society.

  Among them is the struggle against racism, anti-Semitism and intolerance of minorities.

  Anti-democratic and extreme movements that call into question our open society and the equal status of all human beings must be opposed by all means at our disposal. This is a battle we must fight together.

  We party leaders represent different views and different values, which in combination represent an absolute majority of the Swedish people. We are all agreed on this. All people are of equal value, irrespective of skin colour, language, gender, religion, ethnic background or sexual orientation. This is the foundation on which the humanitarian and democratic principles of our society are based.

  In the last analysis, we all have a moral responsibility to stand up and be counted in support of these values whenever and wherever they are called into question – to fight against injustice, to protect the rights of the individual and to make a contribution to mutual understanding between all people.

  Tomorrow is 30 November – a date that has become something of an unofficial rallying day for Swedish racism. That is why we say today: We shall never submit to intolerance!

  Göran Persson (Prime Minister, Social Democrats), Bo Lundgren (leader, Conservatives), Lars Leijonborg (leader, Liberals), Alf Svensson (leader, Christian Democrats), Lennart Daléus (leader, Centre Party), Gudrun Schyman (leader, Left Communists), Lotta Hedström (spokeswoman, Green Party), Kurdo Baksi (editor-in-chief, Svartvitt with Expo)