Politically incorrect journeys (7): Sweden
This is a travel blog about Malmö,
Scandinavia and the failure of multiracialism throughout northern Europe.
One
quarter of the city’s population is Muslim, though that is just an estimate—I
could not find official figures. Troubled Rosengård, scene of major riots in
2012, is probably the centre of the community. It is certainly the area where
the least integration has occurred.
Rosengård
was quite a long bus ride out from the centre. There’s not much to say about
it. You find a complex of barrack-like tenement blocks straddling a dual
carriageway, with a threadbare shopping center in the middle. “That dump? What on earth would anyone want
to live there for?” a Swede said to me. It seemed regimented, lifeless and
forbidding, but nothing like as dispiriting as the average deprived North
London housing estate. Buildings were in good condition, and there was little
graffiti or sign of other vandalism.
This neighbourhood,
housing over 20,000 people, is virtually empty of ethnic Swedes now. It did
indeed feel like a ghetto, and its economic profile is predictably dismal:
fewer than a third of working-age people in employment, and one-fifth of
households are on försörjningsstöd
(livelihood support, Sweden’s welfare provision for those with no income).
However, the picture is economically dismal in many immigrant communities in
Sweden: Overall, people born overseas get nearly half of Sweden’s myriad social
security payouts.
An
Iraqi resident I talked to blamed the Rosengård riots on a combination of youth
unemployment and alienating environment. Looking at its apartment complexes and
bleak concrete expanses grouped around the dual carriageway, I found hard to
imagine a more unrealistic pairing of civilizations than the Middle East and
Sweden: the one a place of sandy heat, bazaar-based street life, barter and
banter, poverty and corruption, and intensively conservative morals, and the
other a land of concrete expanses and closed doors, tedious months of snow and
darkness, taciturnity, strictly rule-based conduct and liberal values. But the
worst thing about Rosengård, it seemed to me, was that you couldn’t just set up
your own little street stall, and sell fruit, tobacco, falafel, whatever, on a
corner—eke out an independent living, and chat and drink tea with friends on
the pavement. There was no street life.
I had
now been in Malmö long enough to have noticed that there was bad feeling in the
air now and then. I had seen heated exchanges involving Swedes and foreigners
in the street and in a bank, and now, sitting on the bus back into town from
Rosengård, I witnessed a confrontation that almost turned violent. About twenty
minutes into the ride, a Middle Eastern guy got up in his seat and yelled “Detta ar Sverige! (This is Sweden!)” at
the back of the guy sat diagonally in front of him, who was also a Middle
Easterner. The latter’s companion, a Swedish girl, stood up and shouted Sluta! (Stop!). The first guy remained
standing, body tense and face contorted, and then the bus reached the next stop
and the pair got off. As the doors closed, I watched the guy outside yank off
his rucksack and hurl it against a wall in fury. He had not said a word
throughout this, but there was murder in his face. The journey resumed in
silence. It was the first time I had ever heard anybody shout in public
transport in Sweden.
My
landlady commented later that it might have been a family conflict over
arranged marriage or something. “The ones you find on the buses are the poorest
and the angriest. If they have money, they have their own wheels.”
***
At a
local tailor’s I got a rip in my trousers fixed. You see a quite a lot of
old-fashioned tailor’s shops in Malmö, as it is such an easy business for an
immigrant to start. This guy was a Bosnian, working with an old lady,
presumably his mother, who sat hunched over a sewing machine. As she worked on
my trousers, I asked him,
“Do you
like living in Sweden?”
After a
pause, he said, “You know, in Bosnia we escaped from a war...” His mother did
not react in any way, just kept on sewing. He found it more lively in Denmark,
he said, easier to talk to people there. He had health problems that required
him to go to Denmark for treatment.
“In
conversation with Swedes, it’s quite difficult to get beyond the weather.
Always the weather …. You cannot even greet people in this country. If it is
woman she will turn around and look at you in a funny way as if you said
something odd. I’ve often thought about going back to Bosnia, and I still think
about it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment