Interview published in
Katoikos
Icelandic minister: ‘I would side with Wikileaks over the FBI’
Famous for standing up to the FBI, Ögmundur Jónasson spoke to
Katoikos about whistleblower protection, countering the rise of populism and Iceland’s
unique approach to the financial crisis.
Before becoming a member of
the Althing, the Icelandic Parliament, Ögmundur Jónasson was a journalist
engaged in trade union politics. In 1988 Jónasson became the chairman of BSRB,
the Federation of state and municipal employees. A Left-Green Movement
politician, Ögmundur has held office as minister for health, minister for justice
and human rights and minister for transport, communications and local government.
The last two ministries were united to form the Ministry of the Interior at the
beginning of 2011 and he became the first Icelandic minister for the interior.
Throughout our
conversation, the politician shared his thoughts on the current political
situation in Iceland, freedom of information and whistleblowers. Finally, he
explained how Iceland overcame the financial crisis and analysed the political
setting of the European Union.
Transparency and disclosure of information are in the hands of whistleblowers. © Flickr .le.
I. Iceland, whistleblowers
& data protection
What led you into
politics?
I have been politically and socially active all my life. I studied
history and politics and was a journalist for ten years — a TV reporter at
Icelandic State Radio — and part time lecturer in history at the University of
Iceland. Also, for over 20 years, I led the public services unions in Iceland.
I entered politics in 1995 and had a dual role as politician and
trade unionist until I became minister for health in 2009. Critics sometimes
asked if it was proper to be a politician in parliament while a trade union
leader. But after entering parliament I never took pay for my work in the union
and was always on the same side of the table whatever my role was!
After serving as minister for health for just under a year I
resigned from the government over the “Icesave”
dispute — a dispute Iceland had with the British and the Dutch governments on
tax-payer responsibilities related to the fallen banks and the financial
crisis. I came back into government a year later.
As an Icelandic
parliamentarian with 20 years of experience and several ministerial posts, how
do you see recent developments in Iceland?
Anti-politics is on the rise. I think we are experiencing similar
developments in Iceland as elsewhere, meaning a growing distrust in
representative democracy. In parallel, traditional political dividing lines are
becoming unclear. We are moving into an age of uncertainty. There are new discernible
horizons with new opportunities and positive openings, but there are also
dangers that we should take very seriously. I say with great concern that in
this new age democracy and the rule of law should not be taken for granted.
What’s the meaning of the
Pirates’ rise and why it is occurring?
The Pirates are responding to a demand in society on both sides of
the political spectrum for more openness, more transparency and to some extent
more accountability, more democracy, more direct
democracy. On all of these points I agree with the Pirates’ ideology and vision.
But this also means that people with strong left or right political affiliations
would not vote for the Pirate party even if they agree with their basic
principles.
When sharing their views with the electorate on issues other than
freedom of the Internet and transparency, the Pirates became unclear and
diffuse — particularly on privatisation, NATO, fishing policy, etc.
Because they focus on a very limited scope of politics, the Pirates
aren’t as radical as they may seem. The IMF recently claimed that the Pirate
Party posed no threat. That is not a compliment in my mind!
This explains why the Pirates ranked so high in opinion polls but
got much less when it came to the actual elections.
The longer the campaign dragged on the less support they became, and
they plummeted from 30% in the opinion polls down to 14,5% in the election.
The Pirates’ idea is better than their flesh and blood. But I
suppose, this applies to all of us politicians. We all look better at a
distance than close up.
What kind of government do
you expect to be formed now?
All kinds of constellations are being tried. I long for a left-leaning
government led by the Left Greens, including the Pirate Party and Social
Democrats. The problem is that we would need five parties to form such a
majority.
Besides, the whole political spectrum, including my own party, the
Left Greens, has moved to the right. The Social Democrats are very much in the
European mould.
The worst scenario is a right-wing coalition. Some compromise might
also be on the cards. We will see this shortly.
Extrapolating from
Iceland, how could recent developments affect other European countries?
Here we have some contradictions. While the institutional political
world has been moving to the right there has been a radicalisation at the
grass-roots and in political discourse there. See what happened to Syriza in
Greece where expectations had been high and then came disillusionment at grass-roots
level. It happened also to some extent in Iceland when we, the left, came to
power in 2009 on a radical surge. We did indeed do many good things and most
importantly we did not do what the right wing no doubt would have done, namely
use the shock of the crisis to privatise and sell off the infrastructure. But
we were expected to introduce systemic change, especially in the banking world.
When we didn’t live up to these expectations many people were
disappointed, and rightly so. If the institutional world of politics does not
give radical solutions to extreme conditions, the dangers are that these two
worlds drift apart. And this is what is happening with uncertain and in some
instances alarming consequences. The left – not least social democratic parties
but also the socialists – must rethink its approach to politics. I fear it has
a long and winding road ahead.
You are “the minister” who
refused to cooperate with the FBI because you suspected their agents on mission
in Iceland were trying to frame Julian Assange. Do you confirm this?
Yes. What happened was that in June 2011, US authorities made some
approaches to us indicating they had knowledge of hackers wanting to destroy
software systems in Iceland. I was a minister at the time. They offered help. I
was suspicious, well aware that a helping hand might easily become a
manipulating hand! Later in the summer, in August, they sent a planeload of FBI
agents to Iceland seeking our cooperation in what I understood as an operation
set up to frame Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Since they had not been authorised
by the Icelandic authorities to carry out police work in Iceland and since a
crack-down on Wikileaks was not on my agenda, to say the least, I ordered that
all cooperation with them be promptly terminated and I also made it clear that
they should cease all activities in Iceland immediately.
It was also made clear to them that they were to leave the country.
They were unable to get permission to operate in Iceland as police agents, but
I believe they went to other countries, at least to Denmark. I also made it clear
at the time that if I had to take sides with
either Wikileaks or the FBI or CIA, I would have no difficulty in choosing: I
would be on the side of Wikileaks.
Do you think that
whistleblowers should be protected?
Yes, I think that it is very important. The role played by
whistleblowers could be seen as public service. We owe a lot to Manning. We owe
a lot to Snowden. We owe a lot to Assange. We owe a lot to Wikileaks. It’s not
only about the Iraqi war and other illegal military aggression and immoral
power-political manoeuvres, but also the recent international trade agreements
TISA, TTIP and CETA.
Who were the people originally giving us insight into these behind-closed-doors
negotiations? It was Wikileaks who revealed what was meant to be secret. The
stakes are high in these negotiations. This is not just about trade, it is
about giving international capital access to the infrastructure of our
societies. We are talking about handing over the very heart of democracy.
What do you think of
Julian Assange?
I don’t know him personally, although I met him when he came to
Iceland. But I look at what he stands for and that is where I side with him;
his endeavours to open the secret world of the military and of power-politics.
How do you see the
possibility of Iceland giving citizenship to Edward Snowden?
I have raised this issue in our Parliament on several occasions. By
granting Snowden asylum we would be paying tribute to democracy, to openness
and to all the whistleblowers of the world. But there has not been
political consensus. Iceland is part of NATO and such a decision would be
strongly objected to by the US. The Cold War lingers on. Or it might just be
the power of the big and mighty.
How do you read the “hero
vs. traitor” paradox around whistleblowers?
They are certainly not villains in my view. However, this is a
reminder of how we tend to see the world in black and white. Either we are for
whistleblowers and openness or we are against them. But the real picture is
more complex. We are not only for openness. We also find ourselves in a world
where it is important to protect privacy. We don’t want the American secret
services listening to our phones, or the Russian secret services, or the
Chinese! We are
therefore limiting our demands for transparency and openness to matters that are
relevant to politics.
This should be open, but at the same time we want to prevent
attempts to break into the private world of individuals. So what I’m really
saying is that we need to have a very deep and serious discussion about how
to balance the open world and the private world. Whistleblowers fight the
real villains who refuse to respect our rights, including our right to privacy.
So when judging them, we must always ask ourselves who they are, why they are
acting, to what extent and to what end?
Iceland is about to become
an international transparency safe haven for journalists and whistleblowers.
Will the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) resolution be strong enough to
protect future whistleblowers?
I think this is quite a long way off. It is an idea that has to be
developed much further. The good thing about it is that we concentrate on
freedoms and democracy, on whistleblowers and on protecting these people. But
then of course when it comes to protection of freedom on the Internet there are
darker sides as well. We certainly don’t want to be a haven for paedophiles. I
do not want to talk this idea down because I see its positive side, namely the
protection of whistleblowers. But there are more dimensions to this and we
should avoid being naïve on this issue.
The term “cyberwar” has
become commonplace in recent times. In 2012, Forbes London bureau chief Parmy
Olson claimed in her book We Are
Anonymous that WikiLeaks members contacted hackers because they wanted
help “infiltrating several Icelandic corporate and government sites”. What do you think of such actions as a
politician in office at the time?
I have nothing positive to say about this, but then I must say that
in this world of cyberwar I don’t take anything for granted. I think we should
be critical towards Wikileaks as we are towards others: they are not infallible.
But we should remember that there have been attempts to smear them in order to
undermine them. I want all the facts on the table before coming to any
conclusions.
What about the resignation
of your former prime minister over the Panama Papers leak?
This definitely falls into the category of good revelations. Panama
Papers revelations involving Iceland proved politically important and led to a
discussion that is still ongoing. They are likely to change the political world.
We have covered this issue extensively in the Council of Europe, where I have
been active. This is about political morality, taxation and tax evasion, the
welfare system, openness, transparency and accountability. We are not finished
with this subject, in Iceland or on the world stage.
In today’s world, we are
confronted with increasing security challenges. How do you balance security
needs with the right of citizens to know what their governments, and security
agencies in particular, are doing, and the right of citizens to preserve their
privacy from governmental intrusion.
Before meeting security challenges, we must ask why we are facing
these challenges. And in seeking the answer we should get hold of some useful
working tools: I suggest a mirror.
The rich part of the world should start by looking at its own
reflection and asking what it is doing to itself. In other words, it should
ask, what is my role? Could it be that the poor parts of the world, the ostracised,
the uprooted and unwelcome immigrants, the unemployed, see the rich and the
powerful, the military machines of state power, as the real security challenge
to their lives?
If this is the case, the answer to security threats would be to remove the
conditions that make people feel threatened. And then we would need more social
justice, more equality in society, more security. We must analyse why it is
that millions of people leave their homes against their will and flock to the
rich parts of the world, which in turn become obsessed with security.
In South East Turkey, 450,000 Kurds are on the move, uprooted from
their homes after longstanding curfews by Turkish authorities. These people
will end up as asylum seekers. And who is the terrorist: the one who is
killed by a drone or the one who kills with the help of a drone? Let us start
by using the mirror, holding it up to our own faces and asking all these
questions.
Iceland does not seem to be a prospective EU member. © Wikimedia
II. Iceland and the
European Union
How do you think that the
EU could counter the recent surge of populism?
What do we mean by populism? Sometimes I think we should not use
this term because it is a little arrogant, being popular is close to democracy,
is it not? What we understand by populism, presumably, is that prejudice is
being exploited in order to gain power and then to use that power to further
entrench prejudice; that populism is manipulative and fascist in nature. I
think these should be the terms we use. I think most people would agree that
uncertainty and insecurity provides the breeding ground for prejudice, and when
people feel threatened they are more apt to become aggressive. Aggressive
insecurity is a deadly cocktail.
The unemployed may feel threatened by the influx of immigrants. So
full employment should be on every government´s agenda. That would be a realistic move against rising
populism, or fascism, as I would prefer to call it.
Another source of prejudice is ignorance. In segregated communities,
as many parts of Europe are becoming, it is again a deadly cocktail. So what do
we do? We try to do away with segregation and have people learn about each
other, talk to one another and learn that at heart we are all the same. These
are only some answers. But this is the solution, the methodology of the
solution.
How do you see the EU evolving,
especially in its capacity to satisfy the electorate on social issues?
I think the EU has to reconsider its fundamental principles. In the
last two decades, the social model of the EU has been based on a market system.
The emphasis should be on the social side, not the market. And people criticise
the centralising tendencies within the EU and how central power has been used
to enforce marketisation. That is why many people on the left in Britain voted
for Brexit.
Now Brexit is a reality and it should not be used as a pretext for
revenge but for reconsideration and revaluation. Originally, the EU was
designed to bring the nations of Europe together, to reduce tensions between
them and avoid war. But once you create a central state with a common monetary
policy and a central authority with punitive powers, you create the very
tensions you wanted to avoid. This tension is now increasing between the rich
and the poor, the Germans and the Greeks. Europe should once again become a looser
union. It should place more emphasis on human rights, regionalisation, culture,
and less on centralisation and the visible hand of capitalism.
Is the EU’s lack of room
for manoeuver in social policy behind Iceland’s rejection of EU membership?
There are two reasons why Iceland is outside the EU. First, we do
not want to defer Icelandic fishing rights to the EU. Second, the EU’s
democratic deficit is not very convincing. I’m sceptical about joining the EU
because of it. But I want to emphasise that I’m all for European cooperation. I
have been much involved in European cooperation and I want to strengthen it,
but please don’t try to force the power of capital upon us. Let us rather give power
to the people. The EU needs to become more social and more democratic before it
becomes appealing to sceptics like me.
Icelandic voters rejected debt repayment plan in a referendum, 2010. © Google
III. Iceland and the
financial crisis
Iceland did an amazing job
managing the financial crisis. Do you think that the EU should have imitated
the Icelandic model?
Some of the things we did could inspire the EU, namely that in times
of crisis limits should be place on the extent to which difficulties in the
world of finance can be shifted onto the shoulders of the general public. What
we did – and this proved to be crucial in saving us from ruin – was to make a
clear dividing line between the real economy and the world of speculation. We
did not allow the taxpayer to pay for the mistakes of the bondholders.
Many households went through great hardship and many lost their
homes. And here we could have done more. The IMF would not agree with me on
that, which tells us a great deal. The crux of the matter is that capital
interests are too powerful within the EU to allow democratic will to threaten
these interests. The dispute with the Netherlands and Great Britain about
Icesave that I mentioned before illustrates this.
How did Iceland manage to
successfully exit the financial crisis?
Iceland was assertive. Who was to pay for the private debts of the
banks, the taxpayers or the investors and capital owners? The British and the
Dutch governments tried to force us to make the taxpayer foot the bill, but in
the end this was taken to a referendum and the majority of the people said “No,
we are not paying”. Now, the EU, the IMF and all these international
guardians of capitalism, were utterly shocked, not by our decisions themselves,
but by the way these decisions were reached. A matter of this nature should
never be referred to the people. The reason is obvious: democracy is dangerous to
capital interests.
This is what made Iceland unique in dealing with the crisis; the people were
empowered. In Iceland the bankers, or “banksters”, as they were often referred
to, were prosecuted and held accountable. Many of them are now in prison. I’m
not joyful about that, but it is important in the eyes of the public that
justice should be served for white-collar crimes. From this point of view, we handled
the crisis correctly. We still have a long way to go. But at least we now know
the direction.
