Alternative War: Unabridged Read online

  The combination of the enhanced access to Europe provided by the bridge and the swift growth of the university have doubtlessly contributed to the changed landscape of Malmö’s economy – causing the knock-on effect on the social demographics of the city.

  Sitting in the independent Coffee House, baking in the Nordic sun which shone through the huge windows onto Stortorget, the historic city square, I could imagine Malmö as quite bleak during the winter. Stepping outside, I really felt the last bites of the chill, even despite the low daylight washing the colour out of the spring streets. My imagination was, in this case, supported as I wandered along the bustling Lilla Torg, where the restaurants provide blankets at every outdoor table, along with powerful gas heaters. Having arrived early in the morning by train, that hop which took only twenty minutes from Kastrup, Copenhagen airport, I’d noticed the prominence of darker skin tones on the near empty streets – as Malmö’s immigrant communities made their way to work. But, by the time I’d interviewed Karlsson at the Stadhuset and criminologist Manne Gerell back at the Central Station, white Swedish faces dominated everywhere. Two observations leapt out at me immediately.

  White, Swedish men appeared to be much more likely to openly ogle women, in particular if they were wearing skirts, and the same group were singularly prone to spitting or blowing their nostrils out, straight onto the pavement. I didn’t see anyone else doing the same, even watching keenly as I walked. According to hundreds of online articles claiming it’s saliva free, the spitting is not linked to the country’s consumption of snus – snuff – but I saw plenty of empty packets, like small tea bags, littering the floor. This is a fairly solid indicator that what the internet says may not be true in this case. The debris, however, was swiftly cleared by the regular passes of street-sweepers.

  In terms of misogyny, the Swedish nation is heavily involved in advancing gender equality, with most political parties representing the issue. Women make up almost half of the political representatives in the Swedish Parliament and the country has a permanent role for a Minister for Gender Equality – the government allocates money specifically to advancing this balance in the annual budget and in 2014 they allocated over two hundred and fifty million Kronor. Still, the wandering eyes are bothersome and it seemed obvious to me, even at a glance, there remains a quite blatant societal issue which these political moves have not yet addressed.

  Meandering up and down the side streets I was approached by a beggar. The man, a heavyset African, blind in one eye, approached me and I felt a little apprehensive – my experiences policing in England still haunt me in many ways – but he politely switched from Swedish to English and asked for a cigarette. I could not oblige as I had none, but he wished me a friendly good day with a smile. The same polite approach played out several times during the course of the day, with a Middle Eastern woman sat quietly between some bicycles and a few native Swedish men and women huddled in blankets on the bridges which cross the canal surrounding the wharf. Even with the arrival of better weather, I couldn’t imagine being homeless on the bitter nights here, so I offloaded what change I had in Kronor.

  Aside from the spitting and ogling, everything in Malmö appeared otherwise civilised and clean. Maintenance crews were everywhere tidying and repairing, and the air did not smell of anything – something which hit me harder when I got back to England. The day I returned, the smell of jet fuel persisted for longer than I’ve ever noticed as I drove back from Gatwick, and the night air beyond, though warmer, was always intrusively scented with rotting litter and pollution. Even visually, the problem of rubbish on the roadside is much more visible by comparison.

  After my own observations, a report was released in April 2017 which concluded up to forty million people in the United Kingdom live under the cosh of illegal air pollution55. The data showed 59% of the population is living in towns and cities where nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution breaches the lawful level of forty micrograms per cubic metre of air. According to the Guardian, who reported on the findings, about fifty thousand Britons die prematurely each year from respiratory, cardiovascular and other illnesses associated with pollutants such as NO2 and what’s known as particulate matter. In February 2017, the European Union put the British government on a warning of court action if they didn’t release their plans to tackle the issue within two months. The Government lodged an appeal with the high court which was rejected and they were ordered to publish their plans before the general election. The strategy itself, which was released after the court loss, was met with dismay and ridicule. Caroline Lucas, the co-leader of the Green party, responded by saying: “The government is standing idly by while Britain chokes. This feeble plan won’t go anywhere near far enough in tackling this public health emergency.”

  The public health costs of Britain’s air pollution problem have been estimated at twenty billion pounds a year, with around six million working days, some experts say, lost throughout the course of each as a direct result of polluting emissions. Conversely, the Swedish strategy is world renowned and they now recycle so much they are seeking imports of recyclable materials from other countries to process. Less than one percent of household waste in the country was sent to landfill in 2015 and this has been the case annually since 2011.

  Aside from cleanliness, everywhere I looked in Sweden there were signs of settled, balanced immigration and integration. Kensington High Street looks grubby and dangerous by comparison to the centre of Malmö, to give my observations some easy context. There are no Starbucks – barring a few rare exceptions – but Espresso House shops are everywhere, along with many kebab shops – oddly German in their influence. The worst immigration I saw in the central shopping area was a bizarre English outlet selling random tat and I still can’t fathom what it was doing there, even after the trip. Certainly not propping the British economy with artisan jam. Nothing was really empty or boarded up, either and the streets were free from what British people now call ‘Chavs’ – an acronym meaning Council Housed and Violent, which apparently originates from Stab Proof Scarecrows, a book by Lance Manley.

  What I saw in Sweden was people living, working and interacting together in peace. At the foot of the monument in Stortorget were more flowers, burned candles, and a stuffed toy. A few metres away was a large but simple sign declaring “Malmö loves Stockholm.” These were the very real signs of a crystallised unity in the wake of an horrific terror attack only days earlier and, almost spontaneously, a crowd gathered in a minute of solemn silence for the victims, before moving on with their usual routines. A group of teenage girls wearing hijabs ran to join the assembly at the last minute.

  It was unavoidable, the conclusion that commercialisation hasn’t had the same effect there as it has in Britain, with our carbon copy high streets all looking much the same now. The obvious marker was Starbuck’s absence, but the brightly coloured feathers, pussy willow, and pom-pom’s adorning the trees and windows denoted an Easter utterly free from eggs at three for a fiver. I liked it very much, the visual of a tradition untainted by the economy. The colours of hope simply displayed in a juxtaposition to winter’s passing bleakness. Even off the main streets very little changed, everything was still clean and I did not, for one second, feel the pressing sense of alertness I’ve gotten used to living with in most places in Britain. An unpredictability which, the more I think about it, should be seen as a more glaring indicator of the fact trouble isn’t coming at home: it has been around for a while, embedded in our daily lives and normalised.

  An orderly queue caught my eye at one branch of the Försäkringskassan – for all intents and purposes the benefits office. The line was almost a fifty-fifty split of white Swedish faces and darker Middle Eastern ones. The feeling I got again was overwhelming and wondrously repetitive: I was visiting a balanced, integrated, clean, and civilised city centre. So far, everything was reflecting Karlsson’s account of Malmö as a beautiful, welcoming city. After speaking to him and Gerell about crime though, I knew I needed to
look East of the centre. To Rosengård. That was where the truth lived, I had no doubt.

  The Rosengård district of Eastern Malmö, literally translated as Rose Manor, had a population of around twenty-three thousand people in 2012, making up only 7.6% of the city’s total population56. With the exception of a couple of specific areas, most of the district was built between 1967 and the early seventies – when the immigrant population was around low, at about 18%. The construction effort was a substantial investment in affordable housing by the government, the largest project of its kind in the world at the time. The aim of the Miljonprogrammet, as it was called, was to build one million homes in a country of eight million people and make sure everyone had access to them. Over the years, the assignment of housing by the state had almost inevitably increased the population of residents with an immigrant background to 86% in the area.

  Of course, there have been racial tensions and, in 2008, there was serious rioting57 – though nothing like on the scale of 2011’s London riots, which spread across the UK and lasted five days. The violence in Malmö, which was centred squarely on Rosengård, lasted only two nights and saw extensive fire damage to vehicles and bicycle sheds. It began when a building owner refused to renew the lease on a space which was rented and used by the Islamic Culture Association. Initially, angry youths who used the centre occupied the basement and refused to leave but, after several weeks, an eviction took place and a broader demonstration involving anti-fascism protesters, some of whom travelled in from outside Malmö, turned violent. The riot was quelled when two-hundred Malmö residents, organised and led by the Islamic Culture Association, mediated with the rioters and brought the events to an end.

  Three years before the riots, Rosengård was the location for a film, Without Borders – A Film About Sports and Integration, which was hailed at the time as a ground-breaking documentary about the successful integration of immigrants into Swedish society. Featured in the film was a young Swedish-Syrian, Osama Krayem58, who went on to be one of the perpetrators of the 2016 Brussels Bombings. Aged eleven during the production, it is believed Krayem was radicalised online during his early twenties and left Sweden in 2014 to fight with ISIS in Syria against the Russian-allied Assad regime. By his return to Europe in 2015, Krayem was using a false Syrian passport in the name of Naim Al Hamed and lived in Belgium rather than Sweden until the attack. His DNA was also found in the apartments used by the assailants in the Paris terror attacks of November 2015. During questioning, Krayem told terror police he had refused to detonate his suicide bomb in Brussels and expressed regret.

  Osama Krayem is not evidence of a particular problem in Rosengård, nor indeed Sweden, but his story does highlight how extreme a change the radicalisation process can create in young people, wherever they are from and however it is done.

  The same year as the Paris attacks another young Swede, Anton Lundin Pettersson, attacked Kronorn School in Trollhättan59, armed with a sword. He killed a teaching assistant and a male student, then stabbed another male student and a teacher. The second teacher died in hospital six weeks later. This was the deadliest recorded attack on a school in Swedish history and the police investigation concluded the assailant was motivated by racism. They also confirmed Pettersson had chosen his target due to its location in a neighbourhood with a high immigrant population and the horrifying CCTV footage showed Pettersson sparing the lives of students with white skin.

  Pettersson, the investigation found, had visited right-wing extremist groups social media sites supporting Adolf Hitler and had joined a group on Facebook wanting to stop immigrants coming to Sweden. He had also supported a petition by the Sweden Democrats to initiate a referendum on immigration. On the day of his assault on the school, he left a handwritten note at his home, declaring something had to be done about foreigners and stating he did not expect to survive his spree. Pettersson was killed during apprehension.

  I look at these two stories of young Swedish men, both radicalised online, and see no difference. Both were extremists. Both were terrorists.

  In terms of Rosengård itself, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of a negative influence the closure of the cultural centre in 2008 had on community relations, given the circumstances, and to what degree it created an opportunity for radical extremists to exploit the disaffected youths from the area. On top of all of this, the socioeconomic concerns – which both Karlsson and Gerell raised – still had to be considered so, I briefly looked up the figures and found less than 40% of Rosengård’s population was employed and only 60% were completing elementary school education. The latter fed the former, of course, given the now skilled nature of Malmö’s technical economy. A trap not uncommon across Western societies.

  It was only ten minutes from the city centre to Rosengård on the number five bus according to the travel information clerks so, I bought a return ticket and headed there to find out exactly how bad things were.

  Seven:

  The efficient public transport doesn’t take long at to arrive in Rosengård, only being a short hop from Malmö’s central station, and the bus itself was clean. The passengers carried themselves with the same quiet civility I’d seen everywhere else in the city and video screens displayed the upcoming stops and journey times on the right and live news on the left. The lead story was still a school shooting in the United States, which had occurred the day before.

  While Sweden’s most recent and deadly school killing was committed by a right-wing extremist armed with a bladed weapon, the incident at North Park Elementary School in San Bernardino60 involved a fifty-three-year-old Riverside man who went to his estranged wife's special education classroom and opened fire with a gun. In an apparent act of domestic violence, he fatally shot her and struck two students before killing himself. One of the students, an eight-year-old boy named Jonathan Martinez, died after being rushed to the hospital. With a chill, I grimly noted at the time Trump never muttered the phrase “last night in San Bernardino,” a pattern he followed again later, in May 2017, when two men were murdered by a white supremacist in Portland, Oregon, for defending Muslims from an attack on public transport.

  Having had the fortune to consult with one of the country’s leading criminologists, Gerell, I had decided to leave the safety of public transport at Ramels Väg – allegedly the roughest place Rosengård had to offer – and the bus stop was directly outside the entrance to the infamous estate of Herrgården – announced by a valkommen sign which also showed a clear map of the area.

  Herrgården’s population, according to published figures61, is 96% non-native, with well over two-thirds of those immigrant residents being born abroad, while the remaining thirty percent are shown in the statistics as being born to parents of non-Swedish ethnic origins. Of the diverse nationalities, which include Iraqi, Lebanese, Afghan, Yugoslav, and Somalian, it was estimated that only 15% of the estate’s residents were in employment. Almost half of the population was eighteen years old or younger, too, setting the estate firmly in a well-established risk zone in terms of the likelihood of serious violent crime occurring. Sadly, this is internationally recognised and quite logical.

  The first thing to strike me was the presence of those famous, Swedish recycling bins. They stand everywhere in the public squares, around which people were toing and froing almost constantly. The municipal agencies, the council, were also busy cutting the grass of the extensive green areas and, I noticed, there was next to no litter. Aside from one piece of graffiti which declared ‘Fuck SD’, the right-wing Sweden Democrats party, the rest of the décor was an elaborate riot of colourful urban art, often declaring love for Herrgården, Rosengård, and Malmö. Swedish flags flew on the balconies of the tower blocks and none of the windows were smashed or boarded up. It was, in short, a far cry from my experience of popular or municipal housing projects in Britain.

  While the estate was well kept, it did feel a little sterile compared to the historic centre, but these are utilitarian sprawls, built as part of that ambi
tious social programme to construct one million affordable homes. They have, however, stood up to time’s test well – the buildings aren’t dilapidated and the grounds aren’t wild or dirty. Children’s play areas are every few hundred metres and each of them was full of happy kids and chatting parents, older people walked the streets without any apparent fear, and bicycle traffic was nearly constant as people went about their daily lives on the extensive, designated networks.

  The schools fascinated me. There was clearly a very real social difference between Sweden and the UK – a positive one – because the playgrounds aren’t surrounded by ten-foot fencing. Even the nursery fences were low enough for an adult to lean over, indicating their purpose was simply to keep toddlers in.

  I keenly perused the carparks, too, looking for burned out vehicles. There were none. Not even scorch marks on the tarmac. Idly, I Googled Buckinghamshire Fire Service and found three reports of burned out cars and one arson on a caravan in the space of three days. Even basic details painted a very different picture to the online horror stories.

  Making a cheerful effort, I tried to speak to a few of the locals in passing, not far from a plot where the public ground had been dug over by residents to form allotments, but – unsurprisingly – the people I encountered spoke little or no English on top of their own languages and Swedish. Two very young girls, no older than nine, did, however, run up to me, excitedly asking what I was doing and why I was filming. They giggled, exercising their school English in this unexpected way, and then skipped off holding hands. There was no adult with them, yet they were safe to roam the estate freely – something which I would never consider with my own children, even in leafy, semi-rural England.