Ministermordet - RIB Bibliotek

traumatic, shock experience for the
entire administration, even for staff on
placement abroad.
The Foreign Office saw an immediate
need for a special effort in communication
with the employees and quickly
provided opportunities for crisis therapy
for the staff (backed up by the
Cabinet Office and the ministries in
general). The need for debriefing and
crisis therapy can be expected to have
been large, but a far-sighted instruction
for collective crisis meetings in the
different sections of the F.O. seems to
have solved many of these needs.
It meant also that crisis management
had to be handled by people in leading
positions who were themselves borne
down by crisis and mourning. Even if
this crisis management must be largely
considered to have manifestly worked
well, the question remains of how appropriate
it is for directly affected players
to be called upon to provide crisis
management. On the other hand there
was no practical alternative, especially
in this case. All imaginable actors in
the crisis were more or less affected by
what had occurred.
The role of the
new communication
technology
Two previous major emergency situations,
the Gothenburg fire in 1998 together
with the terror attack on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon
in the USA in 2001, show what an important
role is played by the new digital
technology in connection with crisis
management and communication.
Firstly mobile telephony played a
decisive role, especially in the early
stages of these crises. The current
emergency shows the same picture as
the other emergency situations in the
immediate past. Communication
immediately after the attack in the
department store and in the immediately
following stage, the alarm and reporting
of the situation, took place exclusively
by mobile phone.
Secondly there can be no doubt that
the Internet has established itself as a
mass medium also in emergencies. The
murder of Lindh shows that the web
has strengthened its role in social emergencies.
But despite the fact that the
technological capacity to receive many
visitors on the Net has increased over
recent years, the loading is so heavy on
the central authorities and national
media that problems arise. Information
Rosenbad's web site went down for a
while due to the number of visits, e.g.
when the web was used for press
releases in other languages. Locally (in
Örebro) the council used the web for
external and internal information about
what had taken place and the number
of visitors increased.
The number of visitors to media
websites increased just as strongly. At
national level the newspapers' and TV
companies' pages were overloaded, and
the number of visitors to local papers'
websites increased also at local level.
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