Politically incorrect journeys (10): Sweden
This is a travel blog about Malmö,
Scandinavia and the failure of multiracialism throughout northern Europe.
“I had lots of friends in England,” said N. “We went to the bingo, had meals together. Here I have no friends. I have nobody. All I have is this job.”
I had become a regular at a local internet game center, where I could do work-related bulk printouts cheaply. N, a despondent young Iraqi, ran the place afternoons. Over several days, I learnt his story. He had left a turbulent life in Iraq in his teens, and had lived for a decade or so in both England and Sweden after obtaining a free education in Sweden and a Swedish passport. He had lived in the far north of Sweden before coming to Malmö.
He looked out contemptuously at the shadowy rows of computers, most of which were unused in the daytime, the time when I came in. He was worldly and articulate in both English and Swedish. He had originally studied computing, and his first job was in load-test programming. It hadn’t gone anywhere.
“I go to the job centre. I get work for some months. It’s nothing. I’m stuck with this.” Nonetheless, he said, he found Malmö a better place to live in than Birkenhead.
His family were in the north of Iraq, but it was very dangerous traveling between Baghdad and the Kurdish area. “Every time I go back, I want to stay, but I end up coming back to Sweden. You can get murdered for not being a good Muslim in my homeland.
“I was jailed as a child. I was kidnapped. I hated Saddam. And now .. now, you know, I want him back. The situation, the violence, is so bad. If I go back it would be dangerous for me, my family name is well-known. I realize now a country like Iraq needs a leader like Saddam. It has to have a strong leader. I just don’t know what to do. Where should I go?”
“What about America?”
“I hate America. I have never been, but I hate it.” He left me to read between the lines: there cannot be many Iraqis who do not remember somebody who was killed as a conscript soldier.
“France? Belgium? Holland? They all have large Arab communities.”
I wondered, as I spoke, if he actually wanted to be in an Arab community.
“I know Europe,” he said. “I have been all over Europe.”
“What do you think of it?”
He shrugged.
“Sorry, but it’s all the same to me. From Greece to the Arctic Circle, Europe is all the same.”
I thought: he means the Christian world.
“So where do you want to go?”
“You mentioned Belgium,” he said, after some reflection. “I haven’t been there. You think it would be better there?”
“Maybe. Brussels, maybe.”
He stood there, thinking about Belgium, peering out across the dark, pokey salon where, every evening, bored young Arabs pretending to be commandos played video games like Operation Desert Hammer, in which heroic Americans with huge biceps slaughtered young Arabs with high-tech weapons.
“I give it another twenty years,” he said. He meant the open-door policy. “I do not understand why the Swedish government is doing this. Do they not know that Al Qaeda is infiltrating the country? I have overheard conversations here, guys with military experience. Experience with guns. And all those Syrian refugees. So many problems here already. Why do they let them in?”
After weeks of two-pound-fifty falafel dinners, I ended that day with a buffet blowout at a Lebanese restaurant. I had no idea what I was eating, but I found the mildly spicy sauces, the rich, sensual drapes and furnishings, the Arabic inscriptions, the politeness, and the soothing Middle Eastern music irresistible. I couldn’t help contrasting it with the last Swedish place I had been into, where the music had been all American or British rock, the décor Mediterranean and the beer Belgian. The aim of an Arab restaurant is to bring Arabia to you. The aim of a Swedish cafe, it seemed, was to transport you out of Sweden.
***
As said, Iraqis are the biggest ethnic group in Malmö. Hassim, gentle in manner, stocky, middle-aged, was a resident of Rosengård. I asked him, overall, did he think Arabs living in Sweden fit in?
“Some do, some don’t. This is a country with rule of law, a country with equality, and some of them cannot adapt to that. The situation here is better than it is in the Arab world. We should be very grateful to Sweden for taking us in.”
He too had excellent Swedish. As we talked in the empty café, where he worked as a paid volunteer helping unemployed migrants, he kept touching my knee. Arabs seemed to like doing that. I found it a bit off-putting.
“Just how do you go about getting your first job in this country,” I asked, “without the language? Given that so many immigrant jobs are customer-service jobs?”
“You can get jobs where you just don’t need to know any Swedish or English. For example, working in a bakery. Your line boss will be a compatriot, he will tell you what to do and you just make the bread. You don’t need a word of Swedish.”
“What about the paperwork?”
“Then you get a translator.”
“It sounds cumbersome.”
He shrugged: Where there’s a will there’s way.
He had come to Sweden before the invasion of Iraq, and had previously tried to make an asylum application in the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, to the embassy of Singapore, which was near his home, only to be told by the Singaporeans that they had no “legal basis” for helping. He too regarded the Iraq invasion as a disaster. He did not strike me as the type that flowers in a conscript army.
“I did not like Saddam, but at that time I at least had a country. Now I have no homeland. Because Iraq is now three countries, Kurdish Iraq, Sunni Iraq and Shia Iraq. It’s chaos. People getting killed all the time. If you are Shia, a Sunni will kill you, and if you are a Sunni, the Shia will kill you.” He returned repeatedly to the subject of religion. “You in Europe have Protestants and Catholics, but do you have this problem? Do people kill and resort to violence over religion?”
“They did in Northern Ireland. But then again, that wasn’t really about religion.”
“What I want is modern democracy and a modern way of living. Borders should be open and people should be able to live where they want to live.”
“So if the population of, say, Holland becomes 90% African because people are living where they want to live, you would see no problem?”
“I don’t like it when countries are isolated, and think themselves better than other people.”
“Isolating yourself does not necessarily mean thinking yourself superior. It means wanting to conserve your own culture.”
“But it also means not caring about other people.”
“That’s not true.”
“Are you a leftist?” he asked, oddly.
“No,” I said. “Anything but. What on earth gives you that idea?”
“I don’t know. The ones that ask these sorts of question usually are, I guess. If you are not a leftist, what are you then?”
I always found this a hard question. What was I? A nationalist? No, that was too strong. Little Englander? With a box set of Inspector Morse DVDs and a subscription to This England? No, too well-travelled and cynical for that. Racialist? No, I believe more in cultural than racial factors, though I do not discount race. The word I felt that fitted my thinking best was one that few people are familiar with: identitarian.
“A what?”
“I’d call myself an identitarian. I am a believer in the overriding importance of cultural and ethnic identity. Because of that, I am a believer in the basically homogenous nation state. Because of that, I oppose mass immigration and open borders, and because of that I oppose the European Union.”
“Ah, I see,” said the Arab. He pondered a bit. “But without the European Union, contact between European nations would cease. No more trade or personal relationships, no more travel.”
It amazed me how many otherwise intelligent people came out with this fatuous claim.
“Contact would not cease. Travel would be more cumbersome but borders would remain basically open. Trade and personal contacts would continue much as before.”
“So why change things? What is basically wrong with the EU?”
“No normal country in all history has ever wanted to give up its sovereignty, its control over its borders, its fiscal policy and its lawmaking powers.”
“But is sovereignty that important today?”
“If things like borders and sovereignty are not that important to you, why do you care that Iraq is splitting into three?”
It was a good-humoured conversation despite the disagreement. My retort shifted the conversation onto Arab history, a subject I found him particularly interesting on. Major responsibility for the mess that is the Middle East, he said, lies with Great Britain—he pointed at me accusingly. “You guys fixed the borders. You guys created the city states. Why are they there, the city states?”
“I don’t know. To ensure the oil is in little places that depend on the west for security?”
“Exactly. You know, from an Arab perspective, the British were much smarter and better at the imperialism game than the French. The problem with the city states is that they permanently destabilise the region by perpetuating quarrels over land and resource ownership. That means western countries constantly have an excuse to come back to the Middle East with their armies.” He added, after a pause, “What the common people want is a single Arab state.”
“The caliphate?”
“No, not the caliphate. A modernised Arab state.”
“What is stopping the emergence of the Pan-Arab state now?”
“Vested interests, of course. Too many ruling elites stand in the way, not to mention great-power meddling. At the personal level, there is no real antipathy among Arabs. There is no real dislike even between Iranians and Arabs. The problems exist at the political level.”
So we chatted, until late in the afternoon.
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