TASS Newswire is our publicly most well-known service.

We feature only top stories on the web for PR reasons. The full TASS Newswire feed is available to subscribers only.

Our clients are primarily large corporations who depend on early access to information or who need classified information about governments or competitors.

To learn more about TASS InfoWerk, please browse our web. There is an application form where qualified corporations can order our information package.

TOP STORY BACKGROUND:

Pol Pot - Why Sweden ?

Sweden's acceptance of Pol Pot may seem odd at first. But with deeper knowledge about Sweden the action becomes clear.

From "Year Zero", as 1975 was called among the Khmer Rouge supporters, Pol Pot was held in high esteem by many Swedish intellectuals for his brave brand of socialism, although some now agree that he may have gone too far in his strive for the ideal society. Birgitta Dahl, the speaker of the House in the Swedish parliament, was the chairman of the Sweden-Kampuchea Friendship Association. Jan Myrdal, the leading leftist intellectual with two Nobel Prize winning parents who has written many internationally acclaimed books about China, was another supporter.

The late prime minister of Sweden, Olof Palme, was a well known world leader who stood up for small independent socialist states like Viet-Nam, Kampuchea, Cuba and Tanzania and severely criticized the US for their foreign policy. SIDA, the Swedish Interna tional Development Agency, has also been a large contributor to Kampuchea and other countries. Sweden was also the first country to recognize Soviet Union's incorporation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

As a neutral country Sweden has always played an independent role in world politics. Dag Hammarskjöld, the famous diplomat who worked in fine Swedish tradition asSecretary General of United Nations, was killed on a mission in Kongo in 1961.

Sweden has accepted a number of important refugees, one of the latest examples being Taslima Nasrin, the female writer from Bangladesh. In the Second World War Sweden was able to save jews from the German camps with the help of another Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg. Many American young men found asylum in Sweden during the Viet-Nam war in order to escape the draft. After General Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973 Sweden accepted many Marxian academics and union leaders as refugees.

The unexpected step of accepting Pol Pot as a refugee must be seen against this background of neutral foreign policy with a special relation to communist and socialist state and as a nation open for refugees of the right kind. The state department has den ied that they have been involved in any negotiations.

<EOF>