Ola Larsmo from Swedish PEN gave this year's ICORN lecture at the Kapittel 11 Festival for Literature and Freedom of Speech in Stavanger. The 22 July atrocities in Oslo and at Utøya obviously resonated through this year's edition of the Kapittel festival programme. Larsmo's lecture addressed the spate of immigrant-related terrorist acts in Sweden and Norway over the past years, culminating in the massacre in Oslo and Utøya on 22 July. The speech considers the state of democracy and freedom of expression in modern Scandinavian society, and it examines what drives those who choose to commit acts of random violence in the name of national purity.
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I do not think many Swedes would readily recognise the name Taimour Abdulwahab. Possibly it may give rise to vague feelings of discomfort at the back of some people's minds. I, myself, was in Stockholm city when Abdulwahab blew himself to pieces on Drottninggatan on December 11 last year. He first detonated a car bomb and then his own explosive belt in the midst of the on-going Christmas shopping. Had he managed to implement his initial plan he could have injured and killed hundreds of people. We still don't know-and we may never know-why he detonated the bombs prematurely, whether it was by mistake or if he staged a last minute withdrawal from the plan. The image of his dead body lying on a snow-covered street in Stockholm can be easily accessed on the Internet. He was the only one to die.
Almost a year has passed and very little is known about the reasons behind his actions. He was a ‘normal' guy, a young man from Tranås, who had not shown any specific religious or political concerns at school-not until 2001 when in Luton and with the Moslem groups at the University. According to his family his change was sudden and dramatic.
One name, however, that most Swedes would recognise is the name of Peter Mangs, the man who was detained in Malmö a few weeks prior to Abdulwahab's suicide bombing in Stockholm. Mangs is charged of three murders and thirteen attempts of murder, where the victims share one common trait: either they or their parents were born outside of Sweden. Despite the fact that Mangs probably is one of the most notorious political assassinators in modern Swedish history-the ‘laserman' John Ausonious has been convicted of one murder and nine attempts of murder-after the suicide bombing in Stockholm Mangs disappeared completely from the headlines. Mangs is one of the worst kinds of racist mass murderers of our time yet his name is not actively remembered.
As you may have understood already this talk is also about Behring Breivik. These three, Abdulwahab, Mangs, and Behring Breivik, have nothing much in common apart from their conviction that they for purely ideological reasons regard themselves as having the right to kill people indiscriminately-to murder people whom they have never set eyes on before.
