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 Bjorn Soderberg was murdered outside his flat in Satra 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. Soderberg 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 Soderberg’s murder, Stieg burst into
“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 Bjorn Soderberg. 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 understand,” he said with a sigh, “why Soderberg 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 Bjorn Soderberg 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 Bjorn Soderberg 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 Bjorn Soderberg has been murdered in his own home.”
