Reykjavík Grapevine - 29.08.2014, Blaðsíða 14

14
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 13 — 2014
In 2005, a few months into my editorship, Paul Fontaine and I did a marathon road trip
around Iceland’s Ring Road—the most beautiful 1,332 kilometers of road in the world. That
72 hours didn’t bring lasting inner peace, but I can say that most of the time I was filled
with the appreciation of life, the fully engaged imagination, that monks and junkies and
babies on the breast are supposed to experience.
Editorial | He's back!
That trip around Iceland, and the peo-
ple you see, especially if you expand
the Ring and include the Westfjörds, is
a profound tourism experience—I can
imagine nothing else that is so acces-
sible and so inspiring.
And now I should point out: I made
the trip not purely for journalistic
purposes. I was essentially selling out.
I took our sole journalist around Ice-
land to let advertisers and distributors
know that we cared about tourism and
about their businesses. During that
trip, said journalist and I even became
the brochure photo for a fishing busi-
ness in Húsavík. Mom and Pop busi-
nesses lined up to ask us to try their
guesthouses, their restaurants.
The highlights of my experience
at the Grapevine were dealing with
developing tourism in places like
Húsavik, Mývatn or Siglufjörður, or
the places that couldn’t get a foothold
in Reykjavík. You arrive at a truck stop
outside Vík, for example, and you’re
looking at IMAX beauty scenery. But
you’re also talking to people who are
sincere, intelligent and acting out of
a genuine interest in connecting with
people. The bedrock of the Grapevine
business has been that we support
smart tourism, because people who
dedicate their lives to connecting with
strangers are worth supporting.
The people we discovered and pro-
moted—I have the dubious honor of
having written the
Associated Press ar-
ticle that launched
“the Clinton,” the
godforsaken tourist
attraction hot dog
at Bæjarins Bestu,
but we also discov-
ered Kjartan and his
amazing Sægreifinn
experience—for all
of them, I’m happy
if tourism expanded. Things have got-
ten better since I was the editor of the
Grapevine. The Grapevine, for exam-
ple, is better. Tourism has expanded
threefold, which means possibly less
freedom for tourists, but for the hosts,
for the Mom and Pop businesses, they
don’t have to struggle quite so hard.
To bring it back to the Grapevine
and to journalism, and to my point
that in essentially day one I sold out
to people in the tourism business. The
Icelandic tourism business supported
this crazy ass magazine that offended
every person of power, from the Prime
Minister to the Mayor of Reykjavík to
a homophobic talk show host, to Quen-
tin Tarantino. We never sold a story, or
a review—there has
never been an adver-
torial or native ad-
vertising associated
with this publication
(though one journal-
ist was not retained
when she attempted
to sell a positive re-
view). If you’re a
tourist, look at your
hometown papers—
I’m writing from Seattle, where one
major alternative weekly literally sold
prostitution of minors to keep afloat.
In my opinion, then, so long as lo-
cal companies are involved, and the
Grapevine is around covering it, the
ceiling on tourism here is a lot higher
than anywhere else in the world.
“The bedrock of the
Grapevine business has
been that we support
smart tourism, because
people who dedicate
their lives to connect-
ing with strangers are
worth supporting.”
The Ceiling On Icelandic Tourism,
And Apologies For “The Clinton”
Words by Bart Cameron
Photo by Julia Staples
Bart served as editor for The Reykjavík Grapevine from 2005-
2006. He currently resides in Seattle, WA, where he writes,
performs and records music with his band The Foghorns.

Words by Paul Fontaine
Photo by Sigtryggur Ari /DV ehf
On August 26, Parliamentary Ombuds-
man Tryggvi Gunnarsson sent Minister
of the Interior Hanna Birna Kristjáns-
dóttir a third letter of enquiry regarding
ongoing police investigations of her Min-
istry in the case of the now-infamous
Tony Omos memo—which has already
resulted in charges filed against one of
her assistants, Gísli Freyr Valdórsson.
The remarkable thing about this letter
is its partial transcription of a recorded
interview the Ombudsman conducted
with former Commissioner of the Capi-
tal Area Police Stefán Eiríksson. Stefán,
as you might remember, resigned from
his position in late-July—at the height of
his department’s investigation of Hanna
Birna’s ministry—spurring hitherto un-
confirmed rumours that the minister
had driven him from the post.
Amongst the details revealed in the
Ombudsman’s letter was that Hanna
Birna had directly interfered with police
business, repeatedly questioning nearly
every step of the investigations. In partic-
ular, she questioned their scope—which
included confiscating an assistant’s com-
puter and telephone records, with Stefán
quoting her as saying, “We will of course
let you have everything. You will have ac-
cess to all of it, but aren’t you going too far
in all this?” Hanna Birna also questioned
the speed of the investigations.
This, she would tell a live TV audi-
ence, was a completely natural and not
at all intrusive interaction with the head
of the police under her employ, who were
tasked with investigating her ministry.
The Interior Minister also reportedly
told Stefán that when all was said and
done, that “it was completely clear in her
mind that there would need to be an in-
vestigation of the investigations from the
police and the State Prosecutor.”
This, she would also tell a live TV
audience, was just her speaking in gen-
eralities—that she’d intended to do some
overall review of all kinds of offices.
For a sidebar of completely not inter-
fering with a police investigation, her as-
sistants tried to get Stefán to issue a press
statement denying details of news cov-
erage of the case. Stefán refused, saying
that he does not issue press statements,
but that “I am in the phone book, and my
phone is open” to members of the press to
contact him.
To all of this, Hanna Birna has cat-
egorically written it off as the Ombuds-
man “set[ting] up an unnatural picture of
our natural communications and coop-
eration.”
Throughout these meetings and
phone calls, she was also telling parlia-
ment that she was nowhere near the in-
vestigations, and was not aware of how
they were being conducted. “It would be
unnatural if I knew about any part of this
investigation,” she told Alþingi on June
18.
Another thing she would also tell a
live TV audience was that she never re-
ceived the Tony Omos memo from the
Ministry Registrar in her email. In fact,
police investigations revealed in a Reyk-
javík District Court ruling last April con-
firmed that she did receive the memo in
question.
Hanna Birna says the matter has
made her question whether politics
holds a future for her. In the meantime,
Tony Omos does not have the luxury of
getting to decide whether he stays or
goes.
The Interior
Minister’s Deafening
Cognitive Dissonance
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