Sweden’s
anti-refugee vigilantism has revealed its dark side
Opinion
Christian
Christensen
Monday 1 February
2016 14.48 GMT
This
is a country with a history of accepting refugees in great numbers.
Now its reputation for tolerance seems irrevocably lost
Is there a sharper
knife that tears at the fabric of society than the threat of physical
violence on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, gender or political
affiliation? The recent images of young men, wearing hoods and
dressed in black, roaming the streets of central Stockholm looking
for “north African street children” to “punish” for their
mere existence reminded Sweden and the world of the worst elements of
European history.
People immediately
took to social media to express their shock that this could happen in
a country like Sweden. Or, to be more accurate, Sweden as they
imagine it to be.
Tragically, these
are images the world is accustomed to seeing. But not from Sweden, a
country with a global reputation for egalitarianism, the recognition
of human rights and support for international justice. With the
restriction on the intake of refugees in late 2015, the announcement
that up to 80,000 asylum seekers could be returned to their countries
of origin, and now the threat of street violence, the image of the
country as a bastion of tolerance and progressive politics has been
ruined. It’s unclear whether it can ever recover.
When huge numbers of
refugees and migrants braved the Mediterranean in search of a better
life last year, Sweden took in nearly 200,000 of them. For a nation
of 10 million this intake was massive, shaming many larger EU
countries that claimed they were not able to help. This magnanimity
was held up as a glowing example of the best of Swedish social
democracy. While other countries made excuses and procrastinated,
Sweden put its money where its mouth was.
And this wasn’t
the first time. After Iraq was bombed into the ground a decade ago,
Sweden took in huge numbers of Iraqi refugees while the US accepted
just a trickle from the country it had destroyed. After the US
supported the overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador
Allende in Chile in 1973, leading to the brutal Augusto Pinochet
regime, it was Sweden that accepted political refugees from that
country. The list goes on.
The memory of this
history – and the feel-good afterglow of Sweden’s recent
humanitarian efforts with the Syrian refugees – has quickly
evaporated, replaced by the image of a country no different from its
European fellows. That may not be entirely fair (Sweden is still one
of the largest per capita foreign aid providers in the world), but –
as with many countries – much of Sweden’s image is a mixture of
facts, half-truths and mythology.
When the far-right,
anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats first entered parliament in 2010 with
5.7% of the vote, many described them as nothing more than a
one-issue “protest party”. Six years later, they have just over
18%, while the Social Democrats – the party of slain prime minister
Olof Palme – languish at 23%, their lowest number since polls
began. The thought that there would be just five percentage points
between the two parties would once have seemed ridiculous.
This is an
existential social and political crisis for Sweden. While the number
of gang members searching for “non-Swedes” to attack in Stockholm
a few nights ago was only around 100, their actions reverberated
around the country, and the world.
Vigilante street
violence is disturbing at many levels. It is disturbing because it
suggests that clusters of citizens have abandoned their belief in the
efficacy of the democratic system, and have decided to take the law
into their own hands.
It is disturbing
because debate and argument have been abandoned in favour of brute
force. And it is disturbing because it suggests the potential erosion
of the social and ethical rules by which ordinary citizens operate on
a daily basis, and by which large groups of people can live together
in the usually tense but occasionally wonderful places we call
cities.
This is not the
Sweden the world knows. This is not the Sweden many Swedes know. This
is a Sweden no one knows.
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