The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  What to make of it all? The Swedes have a global reputation for being sexually liberated but many commentators, visitors and even the Swedes themselves say this is largely unwarranted; what some perceive as Swedish ‘sexiness’ is attributable to a number of factors, none of which have much to do with where they put their genitals and how often they put them there.

  Firstly, there was the decriminalisation of the Swedish porn industry in the 1960s, a move that mirrored one by the Danes around the same time and which had the effect of turning the Swedish and Danish porn industries into global leaders. Then there is the Swedes’ apparently relaxed approach to nudity – in saunas, on the beach, and so on – which, again, has very little to do with actual ‘copping off’. There is a wonderfully awkward television interview between David Frost and the soon-to-be Swedish prime minister, the late Olof Palme, from 1968 (awkward only on account of Frost’s creepy, self-satisfied manner, I should add; Palme comes across as a thoroughly decent, intelligent politician), in which the latter is asked about the Swedes’ reputation for sexual liberation. Palme calls it ‘overinflated’, describing the Swedes as ‘a people with a deep moral sense and great inhibitions in the sexual field’, but adding that they also had a ‘very normal, healthy attitude towards sex’.

  Sweden’s great strides towards gender equality may also have confused casual observers into believing Swedish women were especially free and easy in other areas (Agnetha Fälstkog’s low-cut jumpsuits probably didn’t help matters), but these measures were implemented primarily to get more women into work, not into bed.

  If anything, the National Museum’s exhibition revealed a country that was, historically, rather puritanical about sex, but at least it made a change from the usual Nordic museum experience. By now, towards the end of my travels, I had become familiar with the stylistic clichés and thematic tropes of museums in this part of the world. The eerie, whistling-wind sound effects with which they augmented all their prehistory sections, for instance. (If the museums of the region are to be believed, most prehistoric Scandinavians spent their lives trudging, alone, across windswept heaths before accidentally falling into peat bogs and dying.) It had also become a minor hobby of mine to spot their politically correct, pro-Viking propaganda, and Stockholm’s Historiska museum did not disappoint on that front either.

  ‘The Vikings are probably best known for their warlike rampages. But there was so much more to them than that,’ claimed one of its captions. And it wasn’t just the Vikings they seemed keen to rehabilitate: Scandinavian history museums specialise in presenting this kind of politically correct, positive spin on virtually every mildly controversial issue, from their bloodthirsty ancestors to issues of gender, race and disability. This is not necessarily meant as a criticism. Though it might not always be apparent, I am a great enthusiast for political correctness: it may be counter-fashionable these days, but it seems to me just another manifestation of politeness and, as I believe we have established, I want more politeness, not less. That said, attempting to blame the Swedes’ drinking on the Italians, as one caption in the museum did, seemed a step too far: ‘Gambling and strong drinks are nothing new. During the first centuries AD, Roman habits spread to the people of the north.’ Ah, I see, it’s all the fault of those loose-moralled swarthy types from the south!

  One must also tiptoe around the subject of diversity. ‘In today’s Sweden we constantly meet different ways of believing,’ explained another caption charting the country’s late-twentieth-century immigration. ‘Sometimes there is fear, but more and more often there is also understanding. The satellite dishes and broadband of the suburbs are directed at the whole world. There is room for the whole world.’

  Was this true? I had seen relatively few black or Asian people in Stockholm. During an afternoon wandering around the upmarket district of Östermalm, literally the only person of colour I had seen was emptying the bins outside McDonalds. I was surprised by how unintegrated, how un-multicultural the city centre had been considering Sweden had by far the highest level of immigration in the region.

  Yet an exhibition at the Historiska museum had featured photographs from Sweden’s most notorious immigrant estate, Rosengård in Malmö. Rosengård is known throughout Scandinavia for its social problems, racial tension, squalor and violence, and is genuinely feared by the Danes who live just twenty minutes away across the Øresund strait. They talk with palpable horror of Rosengård – of the lawlessness, the Islamic extremism, the shootings, the arson. You’d think they were describing a suburb of Mogadishu.

  It was time to pay a visit, and to take a closer look at Sweden’s great, multicultural experiment.

  Chapter 4

  Integration

  ‘I DON’T GO there after dark,’ my taxi driver tells me as we drive away from Malmö Station on a bright, sunny spring morning. ‘A driver I know was very badly beaten and robbed there recently. It’s Sweden’s Chicago, you know.’

  This is one of the wealthiest, most developed and safest countries in the world, but it is not the first time I have heard such tales about Malmö’s Rosengård estate, where we are heading. In the eyes of Danish right-wingers, Rosengård and its near 90 per cent immigrant population have come to symbolise all that is wrong with Sweden’s open-door immigration policy. If you believe the rumours, it is a crime-ridden hellhole, a sink-estate-of-no-hope where the country herds its Somali, Iraqi and Afghani immigrants, denying them any hope of a decent life or income.

  At the extreme end of this political spectrum are the likes of Anders Behring Breivik and the ranting Eurabian bloggers who claim that Europe is facing a second Siege of Vienna. They say Rosengård is a no-go area for non-Muslims, a place where white people and even the emergency services are not wanted – a hotbed of the kind of Islamic extremism which has already implemented Sharia Law in this small pocket of the city and intends to roll it out across the continent. At the less extreme end of the spectrum, Norway’s Progress Party and their Swedish equivalent, Sverigedemokraterna (the Sweden Democrats – slogan: ‘Security and Tradition’) cite Rosengård as evidence that the people of a hundred or more different faiths, races and nationalities who live there cannot cohabit harmoniously with ethnic Swedes. What happens to traditional Swedish values when the ‘real Swedes’ are outnumbered a thousand to one they ask.

  Rosengård has something of a bad rep then, not helped by a number of media-friendly, headline-grabbing episodes over the last ten years – riots, arson and sniper attacks. It doesn’t matter that some of these crimes were committed by ‘ethnic Swedes’, or that there are also regular shootings and occasional riots in Denmark’s most ethnically diverse quarter, Nørrebro in Copenhagen; the Danes dismiss these as mere inter-gang warfare. ‘It’s just the bikers and the drug gangs taking pot shots,’ Copenhageners will say, metaphorically ruffling the miscreants hair. Similarly, the indigenous mafia-style organised biker gangs that terrorise provincial Danish towns and run many, if not most, of the drug operations in the country, are rarely, if ever, referred to by the Nordic Right. Despite the fact that attention shifted to Stockholm in the spring of 2013 following several days of serious rioting, Malmö’s reputation for exemplifying the rotten core at the heart of the great modern Scandinavian experiment endures.

  So I had come to see Rosengård for myself. How bad could it be? After all, this was still Sweden, the country where mothers leave their babies sleeping in prams outside of shops, and people in the suburbs leave their front doors unlocked; home of the three-point safety belt; the country where everyone is required by law to drive with their headlights on at all times.

  Continuing the road safety theme, my arrival in Malmö had begun with a perfect parody of Swedishness. Before starting his taxi, my driver had blown bashfully into a dashboard-mounted breathalyser, explaining that the car wouldn’t start unless his breath was entirely free of alcohol. It was, and, eventually, we headed away from the cobbled squares and tranquil canals of Malmö’s historic centre, arriving after just a f
ew minutes amid a very different landscape of tower blocks, ring roads and strip malls. This was Rosengård.

  Actually, Rosengård didn’t look all that bad. Though it may well hold less appeal on those evenings when the cars are burning and molotov cocktails are being hurled, or if you are living ten people to one damp, cockroach-infested apartment, on that sunny April day it looked like every other modern Scandinavian high-rise housing project that I had seen from Helsinki to Oslo, including Copenhagen – no better, no worse. From the outside, the tower blocks appeared to be well-kept; many had new façades; there were plenty of trees and greenery surrounding them; little razor wire, few CCTV cameras or walls topped with shards of glass. Having lived in South London, I know just how grisly low-cost, high-rise housing can become once the local authorities have relinquished responsibility for its upkeep, but Rosengård was a world away from its equivalents in Brixton or Kennington.

  The taxi driver dropped me outside the main shopping complex, a bland, low-rise affair housing various discount stores, a chemist and a supermarket. It wasn’t terribly attractive, but Scandinavian shopping malls never are, even when they are located in the most exclusive of residential areas (I always assume this is on account of some deep-seated, Lutheran notion that shopping for pleasure is shameful and wrong).

  I had an appointment with the man with perhaps the toughest communications job in all of Scandinavia: Dick Fredholm, Head of Public Relations for the City District of Rosengård. His office was just behind the strip mall in a newly built council building.

  I asked him, first, what Rosengård had done to deserve its dubious ghetto reputation. ‘Well, we don’t use the word “ghetto”,’ he said, briskly. ‘It’s not paradise on earth, but it has no more problems than city districts of Stockholm or Gothenburg. The last major riots were four years ago. It’s much quieter now, we’ve had lots of infrastructure changes. Everyone says Rosengård is proof that immigration has gone bad, but we say this is where integration starts.’

  Fredholm, in his late thirties, dressed casually and sporting a perky quiff (looking like a member of Morrissey’s backing band, if that helps), was friendly enough but, perhaps understandably, also wary. He listed a rose garden project, a new cycle track and a swimming pool as recent local improvements, adding that the area was beginning to attract corporate investment – I passed a large office for Ricoh on my way out of the area later that day. As for crime, he claimed that, because most of the residents were Muslims, there was little alcohol-fuelled crime or drink-driving, and ‘they don’t beat each other up on a Saturday night.’ He also name-dropped Zlatan Ibrahimović, Sweden’s best footballer of recent years, who was born in Rosengård.

  Malmö’s Social Democratic mayor for the last decade and a half (he retired in 2013), Ilmar Reepalu, was similarly upbeat when I met him the following day, back across the water where he was holding meetings in Copenhagen’s town hall: ‘I have just seen a study that shows that if it was a suburb of Stockholm, Rosengård would be one of the safest parts of the city,’ he told me proudly. He laid the blame for Rosengård’s problems on the private landlords who own most of the large apartment blocks there. They were built as part of Sweden’s extraordinary Million Programme; between 1965 and 1974, the Social Democratic government constructed over a million new homes, many of them surplus to requirements. According to Reepalu, the problem was that housing planning in Sweden is a very slow, long-term business, often outpaced by economic and demographic changes.

  ‘From 1971 to 1981 Malmö’s population declined by almost forty thousand, but they were still building four thousand flats a year, so there was lots of empty space. In the early 1990s they began to be filled by immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, who worked here in the shipyards; by the end of that process there were ten people in every flat.’ This was the beginning of the dark days for the estate as landlords essentially left the apartments, and their residents, to rot. Basic amenities broke down, the fabric of the buildings deteriorated, and overcrowding from the next wave of arrivals from the Middle East exacerbated the problem. Eventually the local authority bought and repaired some of the buildings, the mayor told me, but then in the early nineties, Sweden’s economy tanked, unemployment quadrupled and the central bank’s interest rate hit 500 per cent. The central government passed a law preventing any more homes passing into public ownership as part of the cost-cutting, privatisation strategy and Rosengård was left to fend for itself.

  I was intrigued to hear from Fredholm that Rosengård’s most notorious group of apartment blocks, Herregården (where unemployment runs at 90 per cent), borders Almgården, a predominantly white, working-class housing complex which has one of the largest proportions of voters for the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats. The party polled 36 per cent of the votes cast in Almgården in the last election, compared with just under 6 per cent nationally.

  Malmö’s first major riots took place in Herregården back in the early 2000s. At the time the apartment blocks here should have provided homes for two thousand people but in reality they housed eight thousand. ‘People were living in the hallways,’ Fredholm told me. ‘The only reason to go to Herregården was either to buy drugs, or if you lived there.’ The buses stopped running to the estate for a while and, in 2008, when one of the building’s landlords closed down a mosque that was operating from the basement, it was the scene of the worst riots in the city’s history.

  In other words, the two polar opposites of Swedish society lived cheek by jowl with one another right here in these two low-income housing districts – the immigrants and asylum seekers on one side, the right-wing working class on the other. After my meeting with Fredholm, I took a walk to check them both out.

  I passed the shopping centre again, where I was assailed by the characteristic Scandinavian culinary aromas of ketchup, vinegar and stale cooking oil. I crossed the main road and passed Rosengård School, a modern, open campus with jolly pastel-coloured buildings and low fences.

  As I walked further, beyond the school, it occurred to me that the chief reason this part of Malmö felt so soulless was not because of the clusters of tower blocks, which were surrounded by reasonably pleasant gardens and recreation areas, but due to the broad, busy ring roads that encircled them. Each group of apartment blocks was isolated by non-stop, four-lane traffic, the roads lined sometimes with wide pavements, sometimes with no pavement at all, and often entombed in steep embankments like medieval ramparts. This tended to make the distances between the residential areas quite large and difficult to negotiate on foot. At one point I had to climb a steep muddy bank and push back the branches of low trees to arrive at the road I wanted to cross. The road itself was busy with fast-moving traffic which I was forced to cross in stages, pausing perilously at the halfway mark before dashing across to the opposite pavement. ‘City planners have a great deal to answer for,’ I thought to myself as I picked the leaves out of my hat. Then I thought again: perhaps the isolating nature of the urban layout here in Rosengård was intentional. Perhaps someone wanted to fragment these communities and keep them apart.

  I passed a small allotment, an oasis of humanity amid the traffic, and stopped to talk to a couple of older men – from their accents I’d guess they were Turkish – about their vegetables. I don’t really understand spoken Swedish, and they didn’t speak English, so the conversation mostly consisted of us all smiling and pointing at plants, but it provided a welcome human interlude amid this dystopian landscape.

  I was heading for the local mosque and Islamic centre, the dome and minarets of which I could make out in the distance. I couldn’t help notice that, in this supposed Islamic ghetto, the mosque was located within sight of two churches. Both the churches were locked, but their grounds were open and there was no apparent security. I could walk right up to their doors. It did not appear to me as if anyone was living in fear because of their religious beliefs here, at least not the Christian community.

  ‘This is how it looked in 2003,’ the founder a
nd head of the mosque, Bejzat Becirov, told me when I complimented him on how well-kept the building and its grounds were. He showed me photographs taken after the centre suffered the worst of several arson attacks in recent years (there were two more in 2005, plus a shooting on New Year’s Eve in 2009 in which Becirov was injured). In the photos it resembled the scenes of devastation we are used to seeing on a weekly basis from Tikrit or Kabul, with gaping, charred walls and a foreground of rubble. Who destroyed the mosque in 2003 is still unknown (as we will discover, the Swedish police are the antithesis of the Mounties). The most likely culprits are right-wing ethnic Swedes, like the Malmö sniper Peter Mangs – on trial as I write for shooting dead three people and injuring twelve others in a series of attacks on immigrants in the city over the last nine years – but it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the attacks were carried out by local Muslim extremists disgruntled with the mosque’s moderate approach.

  Becirov, who came to Sweden from his native Macedonia in the 1960s, opened the mosque in 1984. Being a ‘Western’ Muslim, he was proud that Sunnis and Shiites worshipped side by side here. Becirov was even broadly tolerant of the Danish Mohammed cartoons: ‘I did not personally approve of them, but we live in a democracy.’ (Improbably here, I found myself holding a more extreme stance on the cartoons than an actual imam: I thought the cartoons were childishly provocative and, perhaps worse, about as funny as dental pain.) The mosque was partly funded by Colonel Gaddafi’s World Islamic Call Society (the late dictator’s attempt to prove his Islamic credentials to the rest of the Arabic world), but Becirov, in his early seventies and dressed in a suit, was keen to impress upon me the moderateness of his congregation, showing me photographs from open days attended by local dignitaries, including the city’s leading rabbi, and even the US ambassador (not to mention, Siv Jensen, leader of Norway’s Progress Party). As if to prove there were no extremists hiding about the place, Becirov took me on a tour of – literally – every corner of the building.