The Assassination of Olof Palme & Apartheid
Inside the old high ceilinged building, the coffin that bore Olof Palme was the color of snow. Dozens of red roses lay on it. A wreath of yellow daisies with a blue slash leaned heavy against the foot. Like a gold thread rising up into the heavens, a voice, singing Gracias a la Vida, rose toward the ceiling. A young blonde woman with blue-framed glasses stood up to speak. Anna Lindh was the first female president of the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League.
Our gratitude to you shall not stay in the past but shall look to the future. For a person can be murdered but not ideas. Your ideas live on through us. And we will continue the struggle for peace and international solidarity. The struggle for an open, free Sweden without racism and xenophobia. This is our moral obligation.
Outside it was cold and the slate-gray clouds were filled with rain. Close to two hundred thousand Swedes, many carrying red roses or the red flag of the Social Democratic Party, lined the streets to say goodbye to their beloved prime minister. Some cried openly, a few sobbed uncontrollably but most looked numb.
As the funeral procession approached the church, the bells pealed furiously as if to give voice to the anger and grief of a nation that had lost its innocence.
Twenty years before, at the age of forty-two, when elected Prime Minister, Olof Palme was Sweden’s JFK. He was handsome, boyish-looking and filled with heroic idealism. To many of his opponents he was too emotional, even tyrannical, and a “a threat to Swedish neutrality.” To his admirers he was a brilliant visionary.
But there was no doubt about his deep belief in the equality of all human beings, and it was this passionate conviction of Palme’s that made everyone who met him want to become better human beings themselves.
Palme was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but his mother’s life as a refugee hunted out of Latvia played an important role in his socialist outlook.
At the age of twenty, after graduating from Kenyon College in Ohio, he hitchhiked across the United States, travelling through thirty-four states before moving on to Eastern Europe, South East Asia and India. On his return to Sweden, Olof Palme was a different man.
Years later, when challenged about being a socialist, he replied,
I am proud and glad to be a democratic socialist. I became that when I travelled around India and saw the appalling poverty, contrasted with the immense wealth of a few; when I travelled around the United States and saw what in some ways was even more degrading poverty; when as a young man I saw at first hand the lack of freedom and the oppression and persecution in the Communist states; when I visited Nazi concentration camps and saw death lists with the names of social democrats and trade unionists.
As Prime Minister, Palme was the most vocal head of state in Europe. He didn’t hesitate to condemn atrocities by both Western and Communist nations.
In 1972, a week before Christmas, President Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, met in the White House. Kissinger voiced his frustration with the Vietnamese, and then went on to recommend, “We bomb the bejesus out of them.”
On the eighteenth of December, a hundred and twenty nine B-52 bombers droned in the skies above Hanoi. On the ground the sirens sounded and the terrified residents ran for shelter. Flying in close-knit groups of three, the planes dropped their deadly payload. Over a period of ten days, Operation Linebacker II, better known as the Christmas Bombings, was the biggest air blitz since WWII. It killed close to two thousand Vietnamese. The bombing was condemned worldwide. In an interview Olof Palme compared the Christmas bombing of Hanoi to Nazi and apartheid atrocities. This so enraged the White House it recalled the US ambassador to Sweden immediately. The freeze lasted a year.
In October 1976, after forty years of dominance by the Social Democrats and seven years of having a mercurial leader like Olof Palme, the Swedish people were ready for a change. Disappointed at losing the elections, but unbowed, Palme threw himself into promoting democracy at home and in the world.
The struggle against apartheid had always been close to his heart, ever since his student days when he donated blood to raise money for black students who had been expelled from white universities in South Africa.
In June 1976, in Soweto, outside Johannesburg, South Africa, riot police of the apartheid government open fire on middle and high school students protesting for an equal education. Over a period of a few months hundreds of school children were killed and thousands injured, with many thousands more arrested and tortured.
In his speech to the United Nations Security Council, Palme said,
We now know what really happened in Soweto in June last year. According to police inspector Gerber more than 16,000 bullets were fired in Soweto alone from June 16, when the protests started, to September 16. These bullets killed and wounded 1,611 persons, while another 1,229 were killed and wounded by other causes. Eighty percent of those killed were shot in the back. A doctor at the Peninsula Maternity Hospital in Cape Town states that in his hospital alone seventy infants died from teargas poisoning.
He concluded with a passionate call for an arms and trade embargo and support for the liberation movements, amongst other suggestions.
On February 21, 1986, Olof Palme stood up to speak in the great hall of the Swedish parliament. He was again Prime Minister, having won the elections in 1982. He turned to the gallery and nodded toward Oliver Tambo, the president of the African National Congress, friend and law partner of Nelson Mandela. Palme and Tambo had been friends now for more than two decades and for all that time the two men had dedicated themselves to the struggle to end apartheid.
It is a great pleasure for me to speak at this, the Swedish People’s Parliament Against Apartheid.
Thus began Olof Palme’s all-out attack on apartheid. He was determined, more than ever before, to end it.
A system like apartheid cannot be reformed. It can only be abolished.
Palme’s gift was to find the humanity in every situation, and then to show that humanity to others. He would use simple examples that people could relate to. On this day he described how the apartheid government claimed it was reforming by repealing the law that prevented marriage across the color bar.
But where would the mixed race couple live if black people were still not allowed to live in mixed areas? Where would their mixed race children go to school if white schools were still exclusive? The government has unleashed violence that is unequal even in South Africa’s history.
He looked around the hall and launched into a list of reasons why he believed the apartheid government was far from any significant change. In the past year more than a thousand people had been killed, mostly from police bullets, a state of emergency was in place, the army was a constant presence in black townships, more than seven thousand people, mostly youth, had been arrested, and South African troops were sabotaging neighboring countries and killing South African refugees. Palme then announced massive increases in humanitarian aid to the liberation movements in Southern Africa and a boycott of the country at all levels.
To thunderous applause he said,
What we are now witnessing in South Africa is a vicious circle of increased violence in defense of a system that is already doomed. If the world decides to abolish apartheid, apartheid will disappear.
Later Oliver Tambo hugged him closely. Neither man knew this would be their last meeting.
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A week later, on February 28, 1986, Olof Palme was at his desk in his rather minimalist office. He had won his tennis match that morning. He must have been pleased, after all, at fifty-nine he was not the youngest man on the courts. He had a full day ahead of him. The meeting with the Iraqi ambassador at noon was probably the highest level for the day.
But first he had to call his middle son, Mårten. He regretted not spending more time with Lisbet, and their three sons. At least he had kept his promise to her to spend four weeks of every year at their cabin by the beach. It was there, with no access to electricity, or a telephone, or running water, that Palme would unwind.
Now he dialed Mårten’s number. They agreed to see The Brothers Mozart, a Swedish comedy.
Palme and Lisbet had a quick bite to eat before taking the train to the cinema. Most people recognized him by now and he would have stopped to chat but they were running late. He had sent his bodyguards packing. This was unofficial business. Anyway he always wanted to meet face-to-face with ordinary citizens, ensuring that people had a direct connection to him.
After the movie the two couples chatted briefly outside. It was cold and their breaths come out in white puffs. Their footsteps crunching in the dirty snow.
Mårten tried to convince his parents to take a cab. But Palme was adamant on stretching his legs.
They parted ways.
It was 11.15 pm.
Palme and Lisbet walked down Sveavägen. It was a wide shopping street, with lots of upmarket stores. There were still a few people out and about but the streets were emptying quickly as the temperatures dropped to below freezing.
As they reached the intersection with Tunnelgatan a tall man in a black overcoat stepped closer. Seconds later the sharp pop-pop of bullets shattered the evening quiet. The man escaped up the steps on Tunnelgatan and disappeared into the night.
A bullet grazed Lisbet. Olof Palme was shot in the back at close range. The bullet entered between his shoulder blades, raced through his chest and pierced the great vessels near his heart.
He was declared dead soon after arriving at the hospital.
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Did the apartheid government kill Olof Palme? We don’t know. Palme’s assassination remains unsolved. But during his parole hearing, Eugene de Kock, an South African mass murderer known as Prime Evil, and a close colleague of apartheid spy, Craig Williamson, testified it was Williamson’s covert company Operation Long Reach that was responsible.
Williamson has repeatedly denied the allegation.
In 2014, Svenska Dagbladet, a Swedish newspaper, reported that the author Stieg Larsson, before his death, sent police fifteen boxes of evidence that linked Palme’s assassination to an ex-Swedish military officer alleged to have links with South African security services.
We also know apartheid covert agents were operating in Stockholm at the time, because six months after Palme’s assassination, a bomb exploded in the ANC office, in the heart of Stockholm.
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The Zulu word “ubuntu” is a philosophy defined broadly as human-ness. It signifies sharing, harmony and mutual respect. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and all-round nice guy, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, defines ubuntu as, “A person is a person through other persons.”
February 28, 2016, is the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Olof Palme. A day the world lost a man who was the very essence of ubuntu.
Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me two stars, which when I open them,
Perfectly distinguish black from white
And in the tall sky its starry backdrop,
And within the multitudes the one that I love.
Gracias a la vida — English translation
Violeta Parra (1966).
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