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Carl Bildt, Sweden’s Foreign Minister
Sweden will unseal classified diplomatic files dealing with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Foreign Minister Carl Bildt says.
"We will do something that has really never been done before in Sweden: declassifying an important part of the foreign ministry's archive," Bildt wrote on his official blog this week.
"We're talking about virtually all of our up-until-now secret reports from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Baltic freedom movement under the dramatic year 1991," he added.
Foreign ministry spokesman Anders Jörle told AFP the documents to be unsealed were diplomatic notes from Swedish envoys posted in the Baltic countries and the city of Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, at the end of the Soviet era.
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Eva,
Would you mind preparing an even more comprehensive comment article about this? Please write me at aage.myhre@VilNews.com to discuss.
BR/Aage Myhre
Funny you decide to publish this today!
This morning I was following (live) the Swedish Riksdag's discussion about a very particular interpellation (formal request to the government) for the Swedish secret police (SÄPO) to release the names of people who were collaborating with former East Germany's (DDR) Stasi [German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS)] organization.
The origin for this request is the Stasi-research done by Professor Birgitta Almgren who had full access to the SÄPO documents and published some of her research in her book: "Inte bara Stasi. Relationer Sverige-DDR 1949–1990",
Birgitta Almgren, (ISBN 978-91-7331-253-0, Carlsson, 2009). She is also expected to publish a separate report later this spring on the particulars around the Swedish political involvement with Stasi.
This is extremely interesting to the general public, as many of these people currently have positions within the government, police, secret police (!) and journalists.
However, the Swedish minister of justice Beatrice Ask (Moderate) rejected the request basing it on the Swedish security ideology, stating that we should try to avoid conspiracy theories. Failing to see the ironi in her stement, this is exactly what will happen when a longtime politician of the Swedish rightwing party is deciding to keep old records of collaboration with a former supressor state, involving known Swedish personalities, under wraps. This is in strong contrast to what most other European states who were former soviet sympathizers have done. Instead they have tried to clean out the dirt under their rugs and clear their conscience. One cannot help to think that there are more than one dead dog burried in these stories.
In addition this does not rhyme very well with trying to market the Swedish government as being open, liberal, understanding and to value freedom of expression.
The details of today's answer have not yet been published. But the original interpellation was made by Sven-Olof Sällström (SD) and can be found here (Swedish):
http://www.riksdagen.se/webbnav/index.aspx?nid=63…
Two other relevant media articles:
http://bit.ly/hcSCWV http://bit.ly/hqT2iN