The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has released around 5,000 documents from Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul’s cardboard box archive on the Oslo Process.
The documents, which were found in a basement storage room in Oslo following a raid by Økokrim on the diplomatic couple’s flat in February this year, cover the period from 1983 to 2003.
The material has been made public via the National Archives, which is now reporting a huge influx of enquiries from the public.
At the same time, the PST has cleared the couple of any suspicion that the storage in the basement storage room may have been illegal:
– “The PST has found no breach of the Security Act,” says Eirik Veum, communications adviser at the PST, to NRK.
The material documents parts of the couple’s work on the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians during the period when Rød-Larsen worked at Fafo and later at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Rød-Larsen had previously refused to hand over the archive, despite requests from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has now changed his mind:
– “I have always wanted this material to be preserved for posterity,” he says, according to a press release from his lawyer, John Christian Elden. In the press release, Elden states that the documents are not part of any criminal case.
– The archive consists, amongst other things, of public documents from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and private material from Terje Rød-Larsen. This has been organised into a single archive comprising a combination of public and private documentation. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Terje Rød-Larsen have agreed to present this material as a single collection, according to the National Archives.
The documents can be viewed at Digital Archive.
– Israel’s errand boys
It was in 2004 that historian Hilde Henriksen Waage discovered that documents from the first nine months of 1993 were missing from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ archives. She tells NRK that the material that has been released is more extensive than she had imagined. She points out that Rød-Larsen and Juul have claimed for over 20 years that they had no documents.
– They couldn’t remember having anything at home, just a few private notes. “I expect to find what I concluded 20 years ago, which concerned how this peace process was conducted, and how Norway acted as Israel’s errand boys because Israel was the stronger party,” says the historian.
After a brief look at the documents, she is certain she will find “more evidence than a researcher could ever dream of”.
Among the papers that have been released is, for example, a letter from the Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to the then Norwegian Foreign Minister, Johan Jørgen Holst.
“Terje Rød-Larsen, Mona Juul and Jonas Gahr Støre have stated that these are not documents belonging to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” says Waage.
Among the documents are Rød-Larsen’s and Juul’s personal copies of the Oslo Accords, which were signed between Israel and the PLO in 1993, as well as earlier draft agreements and minutes of meetings from the so-called ‘back-channel’ negotiations.
Several of the documents were previously classified, but none of them are classified today.
Charges remain
Juul remains charged by Økokrim with serious corruption, whilst Rød-Larsen is charged with aiding and abetting corruption.
– “It is not possible to determine which documents originate from Rød-Larsen’s archive, which were in Juul’s possession, or which came from other third parties,” Elden’s press release states.
He commented on Waage’s criticism to NRK as follows:
– She should be glad that she has been given access to the material. If the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is missing anything from its archives, she must ask the Ministry about it. What Terje Rød-Larsen had was his own; he was not employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during this process.
