Pål Steigan


Pål Steigan is a Norwegian communist and former leader of the Maoist Workers' Communist Party, AKP, from 1975 to 1984, and jointly leader of the Red Electoral Alliance until 1979. He is a writer and editor.

Workers Communist Party, AKP (m-l)

During his leadership of AKP, Steigan traveled to countries under communist regimes, such as China, Czechoslovakia, Albania and Cambodia. He met Mao Zedong, Enver Hoxa and Pol Pot.
After meeting the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in 1978, he began to support the regime, later admitting his support for the genocidal Khmer Rouge was a mistake explaining that he now believed it was not Marxist. He has continued to be criticised for bearing a personal responsibility for his political support to the regime.
In 1978, he told an interviewer from The Call, the newspaper of the American Communist Party, that since the foundation of the party five years earlier "we have been waging a struggle against two brands of revisionism" in Norway, "the Brezhnevist, Moscow revisionist type party, which is the old so-called Norwegian Communist Party, and a newer Eurorevisionist party." According to Steigan in the same interview: "t’s obvious that the Soviet social-imperialists are planning to take Norway in the initial stages of a war over Europe."

Books

Steigan's memoirs En folkefiende were published in 2013.