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Saturday, May 25, 2013

Paris...London...Now Stockholm

 It was London two years ago and it was Paris in 2005. Now it is Stockholm.

Days of protest riots in Sweden began on May 19, after police shot dead a knife-wielding 69-year-old man who had locked himself in an apartment in Husby, a poor district in western Stockholm. The anger spread to other immigrant-dominated suburbs that ring the city, and soon reports flared up of burning cars, stone-throwing and confrontations with police. Disturbances spread to 23 suburbs. Housing segregation is rampant. Many of the riots have occurred in crowded  run-down housing estates, which were constructed as part of Sweden's "million homes" project in the 1960s and 1970s when Stockholm was in the grip of one of a housing crisis. Long-since abandoned by almost all of their original inhabitants, they are often the only source of available housing for migrants and asylum-seekers.


In a country that prides itself on a reputation for social justice, that prides itself, and rightfully so, on its willingness to take in refugees, proud of its past efforts to instill equality regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race and other qualities, it has fuelled a debate about how Sweden is coping with both youth unemployment and an influx of immigrants. The world’s image is of a Sweden filled with blond, blue-eyed Vikings but as many as two million Swedes (out of a population of 9.2 million) have immigrant backgrounds which has had a long tradition.
Some 15 percent of the population are foreign-born, and unemployment among these stands at 16 percent, compared with 6 percent for native Swedes, according to OECD data. The jobless rate in Husby stands at 8.8 percent, much higher than the 3.3 percent in Stockholm.

 Many of the jobs that people with immigrant backgrounds do have would be classified as “menial”. If you live in Sweden, the odds are high that the people cleaning your home or office, baking your pizza, dry-cleaning and pressing your clothes, driving your taxi, or running your kebab-and-hot dog stand have immigrated to Sweden. The public transport out of Stockholm center late at night are full of exhausted-looking immigrants returning home from work. Even second generation immigrants struggle to find white collar employment.


In general, someone born in Sweden, with a Swedish last name, stands a much better chance of landing a job than someone who is darker and whose name is not Svensson. It’s not unknown for people with non-Swedish names, especially from non-western regions, to change their last names via marriage or legal process: this, they hope and believe, will help them to get a foot in the employment door.

“We see a society that is becoming increasingly divided and where the gaps, both socially and economically, are becoming larger,” said Rami Al-khamisi, co-founder of Megafonen, a group that works for social change in the suburbs. “And the people out here are being hit the hardest. ... We have institutional racism.”
After decades of practicing the “Swedish model” of generous welfare benefits, the government has been reducing the role of the state since the 1990s, spurring the fastest growth in inequality of any advanced OECD economy.

According to Sweden’s state television, the average income in Husby is 195,000 SEK (USD 29,300) compared to 327,000 SEK for Stockholm.

Police in Husby are accused of used racist language: words such as ‘nigger’, ‘blackheads’ and ‘monkeys’”. (The ethnic slur “svartskallar” or “blackheads” is directed often at dark-haired people who are perceived as having Middle Eastern backgrounds).

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