Environmentalists herald Sweden as one of the top fighters of global warming. The country is aiming for an oil-free economy by 2020. A key index compiled by U.S. researchers ranks Sweden as one of the best pollution-controllers in the world. But news is emerging that “green” Sweden may have a skeleton in its closet.
A report broadcast Wednesday on the Swedish public television station SVT suggested that government officials stood by and did nothing while Russia allegedly dumped nuclear waste into Swedish waters in the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s. Evidence of a cover-up since then has the country’s current politicians pointing fingers and demanding explanations. Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt’s government says it knew nothing about Russia allegedly dumping toxic chemicals in its waters in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The station quotes former Swedish officials – a secret service agent and a political adviser to a former foreign minister – as saying Russia dumped radioactive waste off the shores of Sweden’s island province of Gotland in the late 1980s and early 1990s, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing. Russian vessels used the cover of night to stealthily sink dozens of barrels of chemical weapons and nuclear material, it reported. “They just sailed out at night and dumped in two areas,” secret service agent Donald Forsberg told SVT.
His account was corroborated by Sven Olof Pettersson, a political adviser to Anna Lindh, who was Sweden’s foreign minister from 1998 until her murder by a mentally deranged man in a department store in 2003. Before that, Lindh served as Sweden’s environment minister from 1994 to 1998. Pettersson was quoted as saying that Lindh learned of Russia’s dumping either during her time as environment minister or just after she became foreign minister, and tried in vain to launch a public inquiry. He said he clearly remembers her anger over the matter.
The program suggests that Lindh didn’t manage to start an investigation because of a cover-up by unnamed senior government officials who thought a probe would be too costly and difficult. Sweden’s public prosecutor is now investigating those claims. The Stockholm News reports the prosecutor, Mats Palm, has known some details about the dumping and alleged cover-up since last year, but that the SVT program provided more crucial information.
“We believe that we have reached the stage where we can initiate an investigation, and the reason is that we can presume crimes,” Palm told the Swedish news agency TT. He added that he would search for memos from the Swedish military intelligence agency, which might contain clues to what authorities knew about the toxic waste dumping, and when. “This is a very, very difficult investigation. It happened far back in time, and you may have to find the position of where the dumping took place, what it exactly is, and if it is leaking,” Palm said.
The allegations of contamination and cover-up come days ahead of the Baltic Sea Action Summit scheduled for Feb. 10 in Helsinki, where regional leaders — including Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin — plan to gather to discuss anti-pollution measures. Because the Baltic Sea is landlocked except for a narrow strait between Sweden and Denmark, it takes longer to flush out toxins and is more vulnerable to buildup of pollutants. Its coasts and the rivers that feed into the sea run alongside some of northern Europe’s largest industrial centers – places like St. Petersburg in Russia. About 85 million people live in the sea’s drainage basin.
In this case, the nuclear waste dumped in the Baltic is alleged to have come from the vast Karosta naval base in the Latvian city of Liepaja. The Russian Embassy in Stockholm said it couldn’t comment until Moscow investigates the issue. So far the only comment from Russia has been from a leading scientist who is now in the leadership of the country’s opposition Green Party. Aleksej Jablokov told Radio Sweden he doesn’t believe any nuclear waste was dropped in the Baltic in the early 1990s. At the time, he was working for Russian President Boris Yeltsin, leading an inquiry into nuclear dumping in the Arctic. Jablokov said he knew only of smaller quantities of waste with lower-level radioactivity having been dumped in the Baltic in the 1950s and 60s.
“For this to have been done in the 1990s is very different from if it had occurred in the 1940s or in the beginning of the 1950s, when there were no international regulations. International environmental issues did not have at all the same focus as they did later on,” Jonas Ebbesson, professor of environmental law at Stockholm University, told SVT. For now, Sweden’s current government is careful to skirt blame. A spokesman for Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt told Radio Sweden he “didn’t know about the issue.” “This is new information for the current government. What we are saying is that questions should be directed to the previous governments,” Roberta Alenius was quoted as saying.
Foreign Minister Carl Bildt told the Stockholm News he too wants to hear from the former administration. “For some reason, when the previous government received the information, they decided not to take any action. And I want to know a bit more about what was the basis for that assessment,” Bildt said. But the Swedish parliamentarian who represents Gotland province, where the contamination is said to have occurred, issued a news release saying “the most important thing now is not to find someone to blame. “”If the details of the dumping are correct, then it is something that affects all of the Baltic Sea states,” lawmaker Rolf Nilsson wrote. “The most important thing is to locate the dumped barrels and identify their contents.”
Lauren Frayerm, WorldSweden Probes Suspected Nuclear Dumping in BalticUpdated, AOL News, Feb. 5, 2010









