PRESS RELEASE AND NOTE 08.01.2002 FROM THE
Anarchist International Embassy in Oslo
http://www.anarchy.no/anarchy/embassy.html

Your Excellency
Ambassador of Japan

 We have the honour to inform you, on the behalf of the Anarchy of Norway, about our apologizes for UD's strange doings related to the symbolic King Harald's promises about the Anarchy should contribute with a 4-5 million NOK to a common research project with a research institute in Japan, that has been neglected by the Royal Norwegian Foreign Department*, Utenriksdepartementet, UD.  

It is not always easy to understand that the symbolic King, with formal rank no 1 in Norway, has neither any political power, nor power over the public budgets.  

We will however remind Your Excellency about the good co-operation between the late great anarchist industrial organization researcher Einar Thorsrud et.al., and industries and researchers in Japan, and look forward to further co-operation on different fields of research. We will also inform you about the Anarchy of Norway in general, see http://www.anarchy.no/anarchy/a_nor.html

Altough the Norwegian Anarchist Council, NACO, is as powerless as the King, they may now and then have a slight influence on the decisions. This however must not be exaggerated, but we, NACO and AIE,  will ask the Prime Minister Magne Bondevik and the more powerful Storting to instruct the UD to give some money to the project. We don't know if, or when, this may be done, but we certainly in this way will like to contribute to a diplomatic solution to this embarrassing event. 

We send the assurances of our greatests appreciations

Yours sincerely

C. d'a. A. Quist  

for AIE and NACO

*) The UD usually calls themselves the "Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs", but this may sometimes be somewhat misleading. Thus, AIE has used a different translation.