Opinion, 26 September 2003

From Palestine to Stockholm, victims of a way of life

I have been troubled in the past month with the loss of many good people I have worked or had contact with over the years ­ Abdel Majid al-Khoei, Sergio Vieira de Mello, Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim. Despite the deep shock occasioned by their untimely and violent deaths, the murder of Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh produced even more of a devastating impact. This is not simply because she was a woman and a mother of two small children, or because her assassin was necessarily crueler than those who kill Iraqis and supporters of peace in Iraq on a daily basis. Rather, the assassination was shocking because it raised fundamental questions about the Swedish way of life, as seen and admired from the outside.
Why is it that Sweden has lost so many of its public figures, many of them involved in foreign affairs? While the investigation continues into the possible motives of the suspect arrested by Swedish police, Lindh’s loss was widely perceived as both a loss for Europe, because of her faith in Sweden’s further integration into the European Union, and a blow to human rights worldwide. The commentary by Syrian Minister Bouthaina Shaaban last week on this page was as unusual as it was eloquent in describing Lindh’s contribution to human rights in the Middle East.
Although it is not well known, Lebanon also benefited qualitatively from the Lindh spirit in recent years. The Swedish Embassy in Beirut imposed respect for human rights at the very senior echelons of the Lebanese interior ministry, and its greatest success was helping bring about a moratorium on the death penalty, the first time this had ever happened in the region.
However, Lindh’s death transcended Lebanon and the Middle East. The foreign minister was only the most recent high-ranking Swede to lose her life to violence. This is without precedent in a neutral Western country. Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish charge d’affaires in Hungary during World War II, saved thousands of Jews from Nazi persecution, at great personal cost. He disappeared as Soviet troops advanced on Berlin, and is believed to have died in a Soviet prison in 1947.
Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator in Palestine in 1948, was assassinated in September of that year by the Stern Gang. One of those who ordered his killing was the future Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Bernadotte, who had also saved Jews during World War II, worked tirelessly on behalf of Palestinian refugees as well. In 1961 another Swede, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, lost his life when his plane was shot down over the Congo, where he had gone to discuss food aid, only to be rerouted into negotiating a cease-fire between Katangan rebels and the UN. However, probably the most notorious death was that of Olof Palme, Sweden’s prime minister and global conscientious objector, who was assassinated in Stockholm in 1986.
Most significant, perhaps, is that citizens Olof and Anna, by walking around their city without bodyguards, became victims of the Swedish way of life.
In Lund for a conference on law and philosophy a few weeks ago, I was mostly struck by the serenity and simplicity of the Swedes. The pedestrian and the bicycle are king, and when the weather is nice, one feels the country may be a prelude to paradise. On the train from Copenhagen, I met an Iraqi Kurdish woman and her son. She was clearly well integrated, spoke the language comfortably and had acquired values she was not prepared to trade for any promises of improvement back home.
Stockholm may now lose this uniqueness thanks to Lindh’s death. Britain was not unlike Sweden before former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came to power. Since then, however, one cannot walk up to No. 10 Downing Street any more; unarmed bobbies, the pride of British cities, are no longer as respected as they once were; less and less do cars slow down near pedestrian crossing areas; and women look behind their backs far more than they used to when walking the streets after dark.
So far however, Swedish society has refused to allow fear to change the habits of its top officials. Lindh had expressly refused to be told about the hate mail she received. The Swedish government’s decision to carry on with the referendum on whether to join the euro zone was consistent with Sweden’s attachment to the people’s right to rebus sic stantibus, which basically means leaving things as they are.
No matter what the risk, we can only hope that Sweden will persist in leading the cause of international human rights and retain utter simplicity in the daily life of its public figures. Sweden’s determination to remain both cosmopolitan and driven by human rights is nothing short of heroic, and one hopes this will not change, whatever the harm provoked by the cruel assassination of Anna Lindh.

Chibli Mallat is a lawyer and EU Jean Monnet professor in European Law at St. Joseph’s University. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR