Remembering Olof Palme, A Social Democrat

Feb 28, 2006 at 02:04 o\clock
Twenty years ago today: the assassination of Olof Palme
by: socialdemocracynow

Today, February 28, 2006, social democrats all over the world mourn the assassination of Olof Palme, the last of the great Swedish social democrats and probably the last real social democrat ever to hold the top job in any country until the unexpected and still astonishing rise of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.Do we know who murdered Palme? Perhaps we do. A petty criminal and longtime drug abuser, Christer Petterson, who died in 2004, confessed to the murder in 2001. He was identified as the assassin by Palme's wife, Lisbet, who was herself shot during the attack. Then, on February 24, 2006, Pettersson's close friend Roger Östlund claimed on his death bed that he had actually seen Pettersson shoot Olof Palme. (SOURCE)

Two motives have been offered for the murder. In 2001, Petterson's friend, Swedish journalist Gert Fylking, told the BBC that Petterson had had no grievance against Palme personally, but that while he was in prison, he had met someone who had. So after being released from prison he murdered Palme to avenge the other man's grievance. (SOURCE)

A marginally more plausible motive surfaced this week, when Östlund claimed that Petterson had mistaken Palme for a drug dealer: 'Östlund, who is now dying in hospital, says that Palme was simply the victim of mistaken identity - the real target was amphetamine dealer Sigge Cedergren, whom they had intended to attack as part of a turf war among drug dealers. Östlund says he and another man had planned to attack Cedergren together with Pettersson, but did not know that Pettersson had a gun.

Friends of Östlund told Expressen that he has not spoken out before because he was afraid of being killed.' (SOURCE)Although it's always nice to have a perp, a great deal about the assassination still doesn't make sense. Although he had murdered someone before - in 1970 - there is no evidence Pettersson ever owned a gun.

The 1970 murder weapon had been a bayonet and in the other violent incidents in which he was involved, a knife had been used. Östlund says that he did not even know that night that Pettersson had had a gun. The obvious questions, therefore, are: how did Pettersson get the gun? And are either motives plausible? Superficially, this looks a textbook case of assassination by a 'lone nut,' and perhaps it was always meant to look this way. But can we really believe that Pettersson just happened to be looking to kill a drug dealer at the exact same time and in the exact same location that the Swedish prime minister happened to be out without his bodyguard? And on a cold (minus 7 degrees) February night? Why would Petterson have expected to see Cedergren on the street at around midnight on such a cold night?The fact that Pettersen had a gun on him and fastened on Palme as his victim suggests the possibility that he was somehow manipulated into committing the crime.

There is overwhelming evidence that something unusual was afoot on the night Palme was murdered. Palme's behaviour was by no means normal that night, leading to speculation that he was supposed to meet somebody, and there is also overwhelming evidence of police complicity in the crime. (SOURCE)

At the time Palme was murdered, he was a very unpopular figure indeed with three interlocking sets of actors: the governments of South Africa, Israel and the United States. The same nexus of rightwing South Africans which was linked to the assassination in 1996 just happens to have included in its web Jack Abramoff, the Republican party operative currently embroiled in corruption scandals, whose connections back in the 80s went from South Africa to both the Reagan White House and Israel. It would seem a fair bet that Abramoff knows why Palme was killed: after all, he was the intermediary figure between Palme's three main groups of enemies.

There is something all too convenient about Palme's assassination that makes me sceptical about the new theory that he was just a victim of mistaken identity. Not only was Palme a forthright opponent of apartheid, he was pro-Palestinian and closely associated with 'the leading personalities of the non-aligned countries, for example Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.' (SOURCE) Isn't it interesting that he was assassinated less than eighteen months after Indira Gandhi? With the deaths of Indira Gandhi and Olof Palme, two of the most important leaders of the non-aligned world were removed from the scene: it's not hard to see that the decapitation of the non-aligned movement fitted in very nicely with the interests of the Reagan White House, then absorbed by Reagan's obsession with cranking up the Cold War.What's more, by the 1980s, with Thatcherism and Reaganism in the ascendant, social democracy was being roundly dismissed by mainstream commentators as passé. Yet Palme was one of the leaders of 'the so-called Socialist International, consisting of Social Democratic Parties, which underwent a resurgence from the early 1970s onwards, engineered above all by the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, the Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky' and himself. (SOURCE)

That the 1980s saw the eclipse of social democracy and the invasion of neoliberal economic lunacy was in no small part due to the loss of such a formidable social democrat as Palme.Are there reasons to suspect American involvement in the Palme assassination? Yes, if you consider former CIA agents reliable sources. First, according to former CIA agent Gene 'Chip' Tatum, Palme 'was murdered on behalf of a hidden organization, the OSG, which had a certain colonel Oliver North in a leading role. North's ultimate superior was Vice President George Bush.' In early 1999, a Swedish-American investigator obtained a snippet from a 1997 interview in which Tatum 'disclosed how Palme had been set up and murdered.' (SOURCE) A short part of the interview can be heard here. That Tatum disappeared in 2000 and hasn't been heard of since seems an indication that after he left the CIA he made too many inconvenient disclosures for his own good.Second, an Italian investigation has established that the matter was related to Iran-Contra:'In late June-early July ... interviews with [former CIA agents Richard Brenneke and Ibrahim Razin] were broadcast in four parts by [Italian state television] TG1. The most explosive element of what they said, was that three days before Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated, Licio Gelli, Grand Master of the Propaganda 2 (P-2) Freemasonic lodge, had sent a telegram to Republican Party representative Philip Guarino, an intimate of George [H. W.] Bush, announcing that "the Swedish tree will be felled.'' In his sequence, Razin claimed that the text of the telegram exists in the archives of the National Security Agency, and that the FBI has opened an investigation into this. Razin added that he knew of the existence of such a telegram from a high representative of the American mafia, and that Palme was assassinated because he knew about the illegal weapons trade in connection with the Iran-Iraq war. As Brenneke put it, Palme had become a "fly in the ointment'' for those responsible for the dirty doings.' (SOURCE)

The latest revelations about the Palme assassination therefore do not close the book on the case by any means. It is the question of the murder weapon that ensures that the case still cannot be regarded as solved. Although Petterson confessed to the crime and has furnished at least two motives for doing so, he has never said anything about the gun: where it came from, why he happened to have it on him that night, and what happened to it afterwards. This implies that at the very least a second person was involved - someone who supplied the weapon, manipulated his movements that night, and who disposed of the weapon afterwards.

The only logical reason why Petterson never addressed the matter of the gun is that he refused to implicate one or more other people.If Östlund was really there - and I don't know of any witnesses who say they saw a second person lurking around with the gunman - he surely would have to know the answers to these questions.

Isn't it a little too convenient that Östlund says he didn't know anything about the gun? So let's consider the possibility that while Östlund was dying, persons unknown approached him and made it worth his while to issue a bogus statement confirming that he had seen Petterson shoot Palme, thereby confirming Petterson's earlier confession. This would be a perfect way to shut down suspicions of a conspiracy, wouldn't it? Most people would be inclined to say, well, that clinches the matter! So while I am convinced that Petersson was the gunman, I strongly question whether Östlund's deathbed confession should be accepted at face value. Its timing too - just days before the twentieth anniversary of the tragedy - is also a little hard to swallow.

Further reading: Trowbridge Ford, "Assassination of Sweden's Olof Palme (Operation Tree)" here, and Dean Andromidas, "The Palme Murder" here.
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