Scandals Ruin Image : No Longer Untarnished, Swedes Find

The late Gunnar Myrdal, the world renowned Swedish sociologist and economist, used to muse, “Why has this country never experienced corruption?”

Like Myrdal, most Swedes were proud of their government’s lofty reputation for efficiency and probity: Other nations might have to battle corruption and incompetence, but Swedes assumed they were immune.

But, now, something has gone wrong with Sweden’s squeaky clean self-image, and possibly with the country itself.

In recent months, Sweden’s confidence and sense of superiority have been tested by a series of embarrassing scandals in its government and law enforcement agencies that have left the country shaken and querulous.

Palme Investigation

The scandals have ranged from the botched investigation into the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme--whose killer has never been identified--to charges that Swedish weapons makers were paying bribes in order to get contracts. Even the chief ombudsman, the once-irreproachable guardian of the Swedish civic conscience, has been challenged for fiddling with his expense account.

In Stockholm’s handsome Parliament building, Anders Bjoerck, a leading member of the opposition Moderate Party, reviewed the growing list of scandals and commented: “We Swedes took the view that corruption could not happen here. It only happens abroad. So we have been more naive and less suspicious, without built-in safety checks.”

On the other side of the building, another member of Parliament, Sture Ericson of the ruling Social Democrats, said: “There has certainly been damage to our national image. Swedes used to be convinced we were right in most respects. Now we have to face some hard facts. We may not be any more ethical or competent than our neighbors in Europe.”

Closer to Normal

And the independent daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter editorialized: “We are no longer holding the Swedish model intact. We are gliding closer to a normal European type of society and humanity.”

“I’m afraid the Swedish national psyche is not as good as it was,” said Olof Ruin, a professor of political science, in an interview in his high-rise office at Stockholm University.

Sweden’s troubles--at least the national appreciation of them--began with the still-unsolved slaying of Palme on a downtown street on Feb. 28, 1986, as he was returning home from a movie theater. The police were slow in arriving on the scene, in cordoning off the area and in setting up roadblocks and airport surveillance to catch the assassin.

Later, Police Commissioner Hans Holmer issued a number of statements about suspects but reported no significant clues. At one point, he ordered the roundup of a score of Kurdish immigrants but had to release them for lack of evidence. He resigned under fire earlier this year, and since then the police ombudsman has disclosed that the Kurds’ civil rights were violated during the search for the killer.

‘Just Don’t Know’

“The sad thing,” said Bjoerck, the Moderate Party member of Parliament, “is that we just don’t know who killed Palme.”

In the wake of the Palme investigation came the ombudsman affair. In 1809, Sweden developed the concept of the ombudsman, an officer designated to protect the rights of the citizens from the government. Sweden gave the word to the English language, and many other governments and corporations have since borrowed the concept.

But a few months ago Sweden’s chief ombudsman, Per-Erik Nilsson, was accused of mixing pleasure with business on official trips abroad--specifically with taking his secretary along on a vacation to Portugal, which he claimed was an official government trip.

Rather than face a long investigation, Nilsson resigned.

More recently, the Swedish security services were involved in another embarrassing incident, the escape of Sten Bergling, who in 1979 was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and was serving a sentence of life in prison.

Both Had Disappeared

Under Sweden’s liberal penal rules, Bergling had been allowed to make a conjugal visit to his wife in her suburban Stockholm apartment. His guard, who had checked into a nearby hotel, went to pick up his prisoner the following morning only to find that the Berglings had disappeared.

Again the police bulletin came hours too late. And it was disclosed that Bergling had been allowed to change his name to Eugene Sandberg as part of the prison rehabilitation process and had obtained a passport under the new name.

“This was another example of police incompetence and lack of coordination of the various security authorities,” Ericson, the Social Democrat, said. “These conjugal visits may be a worthwhile penal experiment, but I don’t think you should experiment with spies.”

Justice Minister Sten Wickbom resigned.

Medical Pension

The investigation also brought out that Bergling/Sandberg had been given a medical pension of $9,000 a year for what were described as the “strains of prison life.”

All this has produced a joke that is making the rounds in Stockholm: “The bad news is that the police are after us. The good news is that they’re Swedish.”

Swedes also have been rattled by the collapse of Fermenta, a biotechnological firm that had risen swiftly until it was disclosed that the founder, an Egyptian immigrant named Refaat el Sayeed, had lied about his academic credentials.

Then it was disclosed that the firm had falsified financial statements and misled investors, and the company went into a tailspin.

A public opinion sampling indicated that more than 50% of the people who responded thought the Fermenta affair had lowered their confidence in Swedish industry.

There was more to come, notably an incident involving the arms maker Bofors, a subsidiary of Nobel Industries, whose founder Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and established the international prizes.

The Bofors incident has cast a pall over Sweden’s status as a neutral power in the forefront of the peace and disarmament movement.

Critic of U.S.

Prime Minister Palme incurred the enmity of successive U.S. presidents with his constant criticism of American involvement in Southeast Asia, yet a parliamentary investigation has disclosed that Bofors and other arms makers have exported weapons to countries that were on a government blacklist. The blacklist was designed to ensure that Sweden exported arms only to countries not involved in warfare.

According to the weekly Economist in London, Sweden “pretends its arms may be sold only to customers nice enough not to use them.”

Further, investigators now believe that Palme, while on a trip to India promoting peace, was instrumental in the sale of a $2.8-billion Swedish artillery system. The sale, said to have been arranged by Palme with Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, was allegedly accompanied by huge payoffs to Indian middlemen and fixers with connections to the government.

In recent days, Indian opposition figures have been in Stockholm seeking information on the weapons sale that could be politically damaging to Gandhi’s party, the Congress-I.

Sweden’s National Audit Board has determined that Bofors paid between $30 million and $40 million in commissions to agents in India in the course of the arms negotiations. The company refuses to disclose the nature of the payments.

‘There Were Kickbacks’

“I’m afraid we are used to the double standard here,” said Bjoerck, the opposition member of Parliament. “We should have no illusions. There were kickbacks. Palme was eager to secure that Indian order.”

Professor Ruin commented: “We have tried to have it both ways when it comes to arms. We want to be on the side of peace. We say we ship arms only to neutral countries, yet our guns turn up in the gulf.”

He referred to an investigation that showed that huge quantities of Swedish arms, particularly Bofors anti-aircraft missiles, had been shipped to Singapore but that Singapore was only a transit point and the weapons wound up in the Persian Gulf, notably in Iran.

“The government took the word of Bofors that the end-users were in Singapore,” Ericson said. “Civil servants tend to believe what thy are told. This may have been naive, but it is very Swedish.”

The ambiguous position of the Swedes on arms sales--the defense industry keeps Sweden independent but needs an overseas market as well--seems to be reflected in an official brochure about the country prepared for visitors.

The brochure cites a long list of Swedish industrial firms and exports but makes no mention of armaments--Swedish planes, tanks, guns, missiles, submarines. The big Nobel firm is listed as manufacturing only “chemicals.”

Scandal Victim

The weapons scandal has already produced a victim--Matts Helstroem, a former minister for foreign trade who was reprimanded by a parliamentary committee for making misleading statements about Swedish arms sales.

“Swedish officials have been interested in disarmament, justice, and peace,” Ruin said, “but at the same time our companies have been selling arms and smuggling them into the Persian Gulf. These are the ambiguities that jeopardize the Swedish image.”

A sidelight to the weapons affair was the mysterious death of Adm. Carl-Frederik Algernon, who was responsible for approving export licenses. He died under the wheels of a subway train in Stockholm’s Central Station six days before he was to testify in an arms investigation.

Although officials now say his death was suicide, some Swedes suggest that he may have been pushed from the platform to silence him.

Another open Swedish wound is the armed services’ failure to prevent Soviet submarines from prowling around in Sweden’s territorial waters, a practice that has been going on for years.

“The only time we actually landed one,” a newspaper editor said the other day, “was when the Russian sub ran aground in 1981. This hurts our national pride.”

In analyzing what seems to have gone wrong in Sweden, politician Bjoerck observed: “We have had 170 years with no war, a high standard of living, a quiet country with a welfare state. That tends to make you much less suspicious than you should be.

“It worries me that Sweden wants to go back to the same kind of life we lived when we were still a remote part of Europe. But the outside world has come closer to Sweden; we have been used as a base by some terrorists; we have seen our prime minister assassinated. It has been a painful time, but I think we are waking up.”

Bengt Albons, Dagens Nyheter’s foreign editor, said: “We have been law-abiding citizens. But if we see the leaders are not law-abiding, then that is not good for the rest of us.”

Albons said Swedes trust their officials more than most Europeans do but added that this could change, and probably will.

Still, Bjoerck said, it is a positive sign that the justice minister resigned because of the incompetence of his department--the first time a senior Cabinet official has taken such a step because his department had erred.

‘All to the Good’

“We have now accepted the principle of accountability for the first time in Sweden,” Bjoerck said. “This is all to the good.”

The scandals do not appear to have jeopardized the rule of the Social Democrats under Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, who succeeded Palme, partly because none of them can be attributed to any one party, but rather to the way things have been done in Sweden.

As Ruin put it: “To some extent Sweden has been used as a model by other countries as the classic socialist, welfare democracy. To some extent, we are the God that failed.”

And Social Democrat Ericson: “I think we Swedes will become more realistic about many of these things in order to avoid such scandals in the future.”