Jenny’s Pennies

22 years ago, I woke up to the sound of my mother crying. I could hear the radio was on, but it didn’t seem to be that usual Saturday morning chatter. The whole atmosphere was strange.
I was six years old, laying in bed, terrified, because I know something was terribly wrong. if I got up, I would have to face that frightening unknown, so I kept laying there, despite my desperate need to go to the bathroom, and I wet the bed.

That is how I remember the day that Sweden woke up to the news that prime minister Olof Palme had been assassinated. That, and the front page of our local newspaper, which had a black and white photo of Palme, framed by four red roses. Maybe there were words too, but I only remember the picture and the roses.

Some people say that Sweden changed forever on that day. I don’t know, I was only six when it happened. Most, if not all, of my perceptions of Olof Palme are created after his murder, when hearing his often brilliant speeches replayed, hearing him brought up in debates and memorials, reading about the failed murder investigation. I do see what they mean though: a new sense of vulnerability, that something that we only had read about happening elsewhere suddenly happened to us, that our way of life - that the prime minister can go to a movie theater on a Friday evening without needing caravans of police escort - was threatened (feelings which once again awoke in 2003 when foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death while shopping in a department store).

But it is too easy to assign to a single event, however huge its societal impact, the power to change everything. Contra-factual history writing may be a worthwhile intellectual exercise and the subject of some great authorship, but to say “if Olof Palme hadn’t been murdered, x never would have happened”, is to simplify too much. I’m not at all sure, as some people like to think, that we as a country would have more solidarity with the poor and disenfranchised, or a more brave and outspoken foreign policy, had Palme not been murdered 22 years ago. I wish that would have been the case. But political ideas should be based on reality and visions, not nostalgia for times long gone. Thinking about what might have been clouds the issues facing us today. In the ten years that I have been allowed to vote, I don’t recall that I have ever voted for the social democratic party. Not because I don’t agree with the ideology, but because of the abandonment and distortion of that ideology. I don’t know if I would have voted for Olof Palme, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is now, what we can do now to create a better world. Asking what would have been if only, isn’t a way to create change, if it is indeed change that we want.

Reports BBC:

Military archives spanning nearly four decades of civil war in Guatemala will be opened to the public, the country’s President Alvaro Colom has announced.

Some 250,000 civilians were killed or disappeared in the 36-year conflict, which was ended in a1996 by a UN-sponsored peace agreement.

Mr Colom made Monday’s announcement from the balcony of the National Palace overlooking Guatemala’s Central Square. Demonstrators had gathered from all over the country to hear the news.

“We are going to make all of the army’s archives public so we can know the truth, to start building on a foundation of truth and justice,” Mr Colom told the hundreds-strong crowd.

This is a good initiative, but questions arise on if and how the evidence found in the archives will be used against serving or retired military officers (government forces were the main perpetrators in the conflict, that many label as genocide). In 2006, I listened to a lecture by Orlando Rodriguez from ODHAG (Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala, the Guatemalan Archbishop’s Office for Human Rights). One of the things he said was that there is a “conflict over history” in Guatemala:

- There are people who don’t want to talk about what happened, that want it kept quiet. The state has not acknowledged its responsibility, and has not apologized to the victims. What happened needs to be discussed. We can’t build a new society based on a lie.

The whole article is here (in Swedish).

I hope that the opening of the archives can be the beginning of a true healing process in Guatemala, and that impunity for the perpetrators will be ended.

The Seminal has more here, and I had a link to Amnesty International about impunity in Guatemala in Friday food for thought a while ago.

British pilots who served in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) during World War II will be given a special merit award. Of the people who worked for ATA, 15 women and 100 men are alive today. Their job was to fly Spitfires, bombers and other aircraft between bases and back to factories for repair, and also to ferry them up to the front line where the fighter pilots would take over.

Even though they were not allowed to fight, ATA duty was not without danger. Amy Johnson, the first female pilot to fly alone from Britain to Australia, was one of the 154 ATA pilots who were killed during their work.

Another female pilot was Wendy Sale-Barker, aunt of the Conservative politician Lord James Douglas-Hamilton. From the BBC article:

Lord James said that on one occasion his aunt crashed on her way from Cape Town to Cairo and had to be rescued from the Kenyan bush.

Speaking about the honour, he said: “I think they were able to fly every bit as well as the men and they did not receive the recognition which many of us feel they deserved.

“It is very refreshing indeed that they are now receiving that recognition belatedly, but they did give invaluable service to their country - notwithstanding their quite excessive modesty.”

I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was younger, but physical obstacles made that impossible. These ladies were so cool and I would never have their guts!