Monday 10 August 2015



Politically incorrect journeys (3): Sweden


This is a travel blog about Malmö, Scandinavia and the failure of multiracialism throughout northern Europe.

Taken from the free downloadable book Kebabville & Zone: Click HERE




I rented a room in a private flat in Södervärn, racially one of the most mixed areas of Malmö, in one of the many municipal apartment blocks. I was told later that Malmö’s apartment blocks have a reputation for being gerrybuilt—it was the first time I had ever heard that accusation made against the meticulous Swedes—but I could not fault mine. It was comfortable, warm, spotlessly clean and green, with a little wall plaque outside detailing its energy usage and “environmental impact.” But Södervärn, I soon found out, is one of the least desirable downtown addresses. The main problem was security. I needed to negotiate three locks to get from the street to my digs. “Homeless people try the doors,” my landlady said. “Don’t leave windows open, at any time.” A neighbour had lost a computer, and another had come home and found somebody under the bed.

Malmö is now home to well over 100 ethnicities. Most numerous are the Iraqis, at over ten thousand, though several other groups are of similar size. Overall, the immigrant population of Malmö is overwhelmingly Middle Eastern—Arabs, Turks, Kurds and Iranians—and Muslim, with a large number of Bosnians adding a European contingent to the mosque congregations. There are also Africans, Afghans, Greeks and Russians, though few Indians, Pakistanis or East Asians. Södervärn, where I was, reflected this mix.

It wasn’t exactly run down—nowhere in Sweden is—but it wasn’t a place to linger in either. When Malmö was a manufacturing city, this was a working-class residential area of solid, turn-of-the-century tenement blocks. Now you find jobcentres and welfare offices, Arab cafés, pokey bazaars and discount supermarkets, and a charmless neither-here-nor-there atmosphere. It had a lot of down-and-outs. Every day, you saw old, homeless Swedes lounging drunkenly on benches, rummaging through bins or begging by cashpoints, while Roma squatted here and there with their hands out. I was astonished that there could actually be homelessness in Sweden, a nation with more space, money and cheap construction timber than it knows what to do with. One reason, I found out later, is the pressure on housing caused by open-door immigration. There is now talk in the alternative media that local authorities are considering appropriating and housing refugees in some of the country’s half-a-million stuga summerhouses, cabins in the woods which are dear to all Swedish hearts and form a pillar of Sweden’s culture of the outdoors.

It would fair to say I spent most of my days drifting. Private freelance translation work took up a few hours each morning, and after that I would go out into the streets, sometimes with a destination in mind, sometimes to print stuff or do some heavy computing, sometimes just following my nose. Downstairs from my room was a café, run by a pair of Iranians, where I would begin the day with rolls, cheese, eggs and tomatoes, the only “Swedish” food I ate during my stay. The place opened at six-thirty in the morning to catch the bus commuters. The owner did the preparation and the wife the serving. She had been in Sweden for four years, she said, having been brought over by her husband, who had started the business. She had very little Swedish, but a warm smile that lit the whole place up on dark mornings. Here, or at another café a few doors down, I would eat and sample the press, while Malmö went to work outside the plate glass window. 
Initially, I posed as a “newly landed Swede” myself. I became a regular at the local Medborgarcentrum (citizen’s centre), where I could work with a good internet connection. At the centre, immigrants got jobseeking and welfare guidance, and help in filling out paperwork. Few had good Swedish or English. Staff tried to communicate in Swedish only, but when things broke down, they resorted to English, and if that failed, an interpreter occasionally appeared from a back-office. The staff were patient, but had a permanently jaded air and a tendency to talk in baby-Swedish that rapidly became annoying even to eavesdrop. “Har du fått anmälningsblanketten? Har - du - fått – anmälningsblanketten? Anmälningsblanketten? Re-gis-tration form? Did you get it?” This went on all morning. It wasn’t their fault—they had to talk like this, to communicate at all, but inevitably they sounded condescending. In addition to incoherent immigrants, they also had to deal with sometimes obnoxious Swedish drunks and homeless men.
Of the more than 1.7 million people granted permanent residency since 1980, only 35,000, a little more than 2%, were refugees seeking asylum by the United Nations definition, and more than 700,000 were dependents. Some came in under a new category invented by Sweden, “övrig skyddsbehövande,” or “otherwise in need of protection,” which covers those who do not meet the UN criteria, including those affected by “environmental” disasters. In 2012, 43,887 people applied for asylum, up 48% from 2011. The figures have continued to rise. During 2015, up to 94,000 people are expected to seek asylum in Sweden.

“In Malmö, asylum seekers start out at camps outside the city,” said Lars. He was an elderly volunteer helper at a nearby charity café for workless migrants and others. “They get a two-year permission to stay and then they can go on to a permanent residence permit. After a few more years they can begin the citizenship application process. And, once accepted, they can bring their spouses here too. But if you lack asylum status, it’s not at all easy to get here from the Third World.” A Cambodian he had been helping was sent back home after his tourist visa had run out, he said. Lars, who referred to Cambodia by its Khmer Rouge name of Kampuchea, had gone back with him to petition the Swedish Embassy in Phnom Penh .. “But the best way to get into Sweden, you know, is to come without papers and without passport. Just turn up, and then you go into the asylum camp, and that gets the ball rolling.”
“In other words, people throw away their papers?”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”

According to the writer Julia Caesar, to whom I am grateful for much statistical detail, 95% of foreigners who seek asylum in Sweden never present any ID document; the government basically has no idea who it is letting in. Of 54,259 foreigners who sought asylum in Sweden in 2013, only about 4,880 presented ID.
“Are those without papers ever sent back?”
“I couldn’t say.”
After a moment, he went on: “Asylum seekers get everything for free here, and that includes accommodation, whether it takes them three months or three years to get a job. It’s not easy to get a flat here unless you’re an asylum seeker.”
“And yet there’s a two-year waiting list for council flats, with homeless on the streets and youth unemployment high?”
“Yes, about 20 percent, I would guess.”
“Do you think that’s fair?”
“These are people who need help.”
In the reception area hung a large portrait of Olof Palme. On my way out, I stopped to look at it. Palme was the outspoken socialist leader who ushered in multiracialism in Sweden and who later fell victim to an assassin’s bullet in a Stockholm street—a murder that remains unsolved.
Landsfadren,” said Lars, with a smile. The father of the country.

I asked to see an advisor at one of the many official employment consultancies around town. I was referred to a middle-aged lady tapping away at a laptop. She did not look up at first, and spoke very slowly, as if to a child, in thick skånska, the heavy dialect with back-rolled ‘r’ that is characteristic of this län (province), and which I found quite hard to follow. She was clearly used to dealing with foreigners. I told her I was a migrant from Britain, looking for work in Sweden, and gave her some personal details.
“Frankly,” she said, “as a 54-year-old, you have very little chance of finding work here, regardless of background or qualification. Even if you can speak Swedish.”

What was the job market like generally?

“Employers are tired of immigrants,” she said. I had not expected such candour from a government employee. “They want Swedish people who can understand the language properly. Very few European Union nationals come to Sweden to seek work. You are unusual. Immigrants usually come from the other side of the world and they are nearly always people escaping conflicts, war and crisis. And there are many cultural problems.”

I had haircut later at an Iraqi barbers’ near my flat. The other waiting customer was also an Iraqi. We got talking as the barber worked.
“I came here as a student,” he told me in good Swedish. “I learnt the language, so my experience was not typical. But it’s really difficult for most immigrants. If you end up in a factory, you get stuck there. They just tell you hämta det, gör så här (get this, do that). You don’t really learn proper Swedish and you can’t really form relationships with people.”

The restaurant and personal-service sectors were the only real options for most newly-landed Swedes, he said. My barber was a case in point. He had very little Swedish. He had moved here from Denmark, he said, having got himself a Danish passport. It turned out the other customer had too. Both came to Sweden because competition for accommodation in Copenhagen was tough. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of immigrants had one foot in either country like this, they said. The customer said he preferred living in Sweden, because there were fewer people around. The barber said he had preferred living in Copenhagen, because there were more people around.

It was a good haircut, but I came out of there looking like a poster boy for the Hitler Youth. For some reason, while I had been yacking away, he had been quietly giving me a 1940s-style comb-over with the parting a few centimeters above my left ear. He had wanted to put pomade on. I stopped him just in time, but still he got to my quiff, and I could smell my hair for the next twelve hours.

Taken from the free downloadable book Kebabville & Zone: Click HERE

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