Palme Killing Jolted Scandinavian Complacency : Tidy, Efficient World Losing Its Immunity to Ills of Other Nations

Buffeted by an icy north wind, a single blood-red rose stood in a jar to mark the spot along Stockholm’s busiest thoroughfare where so many still stop and stare.

Here, on the last February night of 1986, an unknown assassin shot and killed Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.

With him died a part of Scandinavia.

Although Palme’s death jolted the confidence of his own nation, it also sent tremors beyond Sweden to the neighboring Nordic countries of Norway and Denmark, which share a common heritage and a similar conviction that although political violence occurs, it is supposed to happen elsewhere.

In a region where political tempers rarely rise above lukewarm and the last major assassination occurred when George Washington was the American President, the killing is seen as signaling the end of an age--an age in which geographic remoteness and a strong Lutheran work ethic helped ensure a prosperous tranquillity unknown elsewhere in the West.

Much as the death of President John F. Kennedy ended the myth of “Camelot” for a generation of Americans, so the Palme assassination helped undermine the Scandinavians’ belief that their tidy, efficient world was somehow immune to the maladies of the late 20th Century.

Indeed, for years, social democrats in all three countries believed the solidarity and moral fairness of their welfare states might somehow flow outward to inspire a more ordered, peaceful world.

But to their growing dismay, Scandinavians have watched the tide turn toward them, carrying with it a frightening array of problems.

From the east, radioactive cesium from the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Soviet Union has wreaked havoc in Europe’s last great wilderness, which sprawls across the northern Scandinavian peninsula.

Last month, stunned scientists found that radiation levels in local moose and reindeer had risen sharply over the past year instead of declining, a development that could mean decades of contamination.

From the west and south, pollutants from industrialized Europe ride on strong winds, then fall as acid rain into Scandinavia’s once-pristine inland lakes. In surrounding oceans, deep-sea dumping of toxic waste generates waves of slime--so-called “killer algae”--that wash onto the western coastland and infect wildlife.

From the Middle East, an influx of Muslim refugees threatens the Protestant consensus on which the Scandinavian welfare states rest, and from the English-speaking world, a message of growing violence and moral decay floods in through the television screens.

“I view the threats and the challenges this country faces as coming more from abroad than from domestic cleavages,” noted Bjoern von Sydow, a senior adviser to Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson.

For many, the most disturbing of these challenges are those symbolized by the Palme affair.

Collectively, they show that consensus-dominated Scandinavian politics can succumb to violence, to political arrogance and to the same abuses of power occurring elsewhere.

For a people historically so trusting of government that they tend to interchange the words “state” and “society,” the messy scandals and police incompetence that have unfolded during the chase for Palme’s killer are deeply troubling.

“The Palme murder is not just a trauma for Sweden but for all of Scandinavia and for the social democracy that exists here,” the Norwegian novelist Jan Kjaerstad said. “Its message is that behind the beautifully ordered facade there is chaos. Behind the doors of this dull house is a madhouse.

“There is a sense this beautiful Scandinavia can’t last,” he added.

Keystone Kops Aura

Swedish police efforts to find Palme’s killer have carried an aura more akin to the Keystone Kops than the crisp Nordic law enforcement that Scandinavians had come to take for granted.

It took eight hours after Palme’s death for subordinates to locate their boss, Stockholm Police Chief Hans Holmer, the man responsible for the investigation.

For most of the ensuing year before he was fired, Holmer deployed a 300-member investigating team--the largest ever assembled in modern Scandinavia--on the trail of members of a small Kurdish Communist splinter group living as exiles in Stockholm, who reportedly were angered by Palme’s refusal to grant entry to their leader.

Three Kurdish suspects arrested in January, 1987, after nearly a year’s police work were released hours later for lack of evidence. Holmer himself departed soon afterward, only to become involved in a highly dubious private investigation that featured a well-connected--but highly amateurish--sleuth bumping around Europe before his bodyguard was arrested on charges of trying to illegally import bugging devices.

The venture led directly to the resignation of Justice Minister Anna-Greta Leijon, who had authorized the free-lance operation. It also brought the first televised Watergate-style legislative hearings in Scandinavian history--avidly watched elsewhere in the region.

“The hearings revealed certain features of our own system that we were only dimly aware of before,” Copenhagen University historian Niels Thomsen said. “No one believed that such things could conceivably happen at these latitudes.”

As a result, the idea of routine parliamentary hearings is currently under discussion in Denmark.

Two years and nine months after launching Scandinavia’s biggest manhunt, Swedish police had the spent bullet that killed Palme, found by a member of the public, up to 18,000 tips--and no hard leads.

“The joke . . . is that it may be bad news that the police are after you, but the good news is it’s the Swedish police,” Electrolux chairman Hans Werthen quipped during an interview.

That was the situation until this week.

On Wednesday, Stockholm police formally arrested a convicted murderer as a suspect in the assassination.

The 41 year-old man, who under Swedish law was not identified, has a long criminal record and is said to have been questioned and released early in the investigation, Reuters news agency reported.

The man admitted being near the scene but denied shooting Palme, police sources told the agency Wednesday.

As scandals plagued the long-running murder investigation, revelations began tumbling out on Palme’s own activities.

Arms Sent to Belligerents

While in New Delhi as head of a global commission on disarmament, he had lobbied Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to buy $1.3 billion worth of Swedish artillery pieces. While he worked to personally mediate a cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War, a Swedish company was illegally shipping explosives to both belligerent countries.

The Palme affair, together with the assault on the region’s environment and the influx of outsiders, all have raised doubts that the traditional spirit of cooperation--known in Swedish as andan and so effective in pulling society through earlier trials--may no longer be enough.

“In general there’s the feeling that Sweden isn’t prepared for these kinds of things,” Per Holmstroem, a third-year law student at Stockholm University, said. “The Palme affair shows us that the country has to adjust to the realities of the rest of Western Europe. A lot of people have been shocked.”

A classmate, Mikal Soennerback, added, “People thought Sweden was a country of open, honest people, but there’s an awareness now that things happen underneath that aren’t good.”

To be sure, any erosion of the region’s tranquillity remains relative. No terrorist organizations, no drug lords or street gangs roam Scandinavian capitals. Only occasional drunks and football hooligans threaten the peace.

Police are inconspicuous, airport security checks spotty and a coat left on a railroad station bench is still likely to be there two days later.

The number of homicides in all three countries totaled 246 in 1986, compared to more than 1,598 in New York City, which has roughly the same population.

Still, those who reside here say they feel an awareness to the problem that didn’t previously exist.

Although Swedish political campaigns rarely get emotional, some veteran political analysts spoke of a conscious restraint during the prelude to last September’s national election, the first since Palme’s death.

Unlike the American reaction to the Kennedy assassination, no cottage industry has sprouted in Sweden to nurture a Palme myth or purvey a Palme image.

Television also has tended to ignore the subject. In sharp contrast to the 1964 U.S. election campaign, which President Lyndon B. Johnson fought largely in Kennedy’s name, Palme was barely mentioned before the recent Swedish voting.

Aside from the possible backlash in a culture where employing a dead man’s name is considered poor taste, Palme was controversial--a contentious leader of a society that treasures consensus, a man who evoked a rare mixture of dislike and adoration.

For many, the mourning that followed the assassination has been more for the country than for the man.

One study conducted by the University of Umea found that 90% of Swedes questioned “felt disturbed that something like this could happen in Sweden,” while less than half that number said they felt the loss of “someone very close and dear.”

Although Scandinavians can muster only marginal influence on many of the developments concerning them, calls to halt immigration have brought a definite response.

Some political parties in both Norway and Denmark have adopted strong anti-immigration positions aimed mainly at stemming the recent influx of citizens from Middle Eastern nations.

They appeal to the conviction of many Scandinavians that immigrants take from the welfare state but seem to show little of the sense of the necessary community responsibility.

Sometimes the message is subtle, as in the Swedish government news release that specifically notes that households that include foreign nationals now take a larger percentage of social benefits.

Sometimes the message is more direct.

“There should be no Muslims in Denmark,” Mogens Glistrup, former leader of the Danish Progress Party, said in an interview. “Islam is more than a religion. It is a political system, a total way of life that doesn’t fit well here.”

After a campaign loaded with racial overtones, the southern Swedish town of Sjoebo last September voted by a 2-to-1 margin to refuse any further immigrants residence there.

Such developments have lowered Nordic voices once fond of telling other nations how to deal with their own minorities. These trends have even dented the strongly held Swedish sense of superiority, albeit not severely.

“We still realize we’re the best,” said Swedish film maker Jan Troell, attempting to describe the national mood. “But there’s the feeling the distance between us and everyone else isn’t as great as it once was.”

Times researcher Christine Courtney contributed to this article.