A Hate Crime Swedes Couldn’t Ignore

No one here took much notice of the hundreds of hate crimes against immigrants over the last few years that besmirched the image of Sweden as a bastion of tolerance and serenity.

Nor did many here rise up in anger over the execution-style slayings of two police officers who foiled a bank robbery by neo-Nazis in May, or the car bombing a month later that seriously wounded an investigative reporter who had been documenting this country’s white supremacist movement.

But when a mild-mannered warehouse clerk was gunned down in his Stockholm apartment last month after protesting the election of an avowed neo-Nazi to the board of his trade union, Swedes got the message that any open-minded person could be an enemy or a victim of racist radicals.

Three gunmen fired six bullets into the head of Bjoern Soederberg on Oct. 12 after the warehouse worker for an office supply company disclosed to newspapers that the man elected to represent his union shop, Robert Vesterlund, was the publisher of two racist periodicals and participated in white supremacist rallies.

Vesterlund had been forced to resign before the shooting, for which three neo-Nazis in his inner circle have been arrested and charged.

“Bjoern wasn’t an anti-Nazi crusader. He was just an average guy who did what any decent person would have done, which is to stand up and confront something that is wrong,” said Anna-Clara Bratt, editor of the Arbetaren labor journal. “Almost 90% of Swedish workers are trade union members, so his murder served as a warning call that anyone could be next.”

Before Soederberg’s slaying, Bratt said, Swedes tended to avert their eyes from the ugly assaults and harassment of immigrants and refugees, who now make up as many as 1 million of Sweden’s 8.9 million residents.

Since 1995, there have been at least four slayings of foreigners attributed to neo-Nazis, and police have investigated hundreds of racially motivated attacks each year, said Margareta Lindroth, deputy director of Sweden’s SAPO security forces.

Attacks such as those on the police officers and journalist likewise were brushed off by most Swedes as occupational hazards.

Sociologists and historians attribute the recent surge in neo-Nazi violence to desperation among a small but powerful minority that has come to realize that it cannot penetrate the established political parties and win converts to its anti-immigrant and racist message.

Unlike in Austria, where the ultranationalist Freedom Party won the second-largest number of votes in parliamentary elections last month with toned-down rightist rhetoric, the vast majority of Swedes array themselves among parties firmly on the political left.

“Neo-Nazi activists today realize there is no way they can ever arouse the Swedish masses. The majority of Swedes will never get behind the national socialist banner of racial revolution,” said political scientist Matthias Gardell, a University of Stockholm professor who has written extensively on Sweden’s racist radicals.

Like other analysts, he estimates the number of neo-Nazi activists at no more than a couple thousand, of which perhaps 50 are believed to be willing to carry out serious crimes. But their relatively small number and fragmentation make them all the more dangerous, he said, because being marginalized intensifies their “paranoid view of themselves as white warriors facing extermination.”

The Internet allows Sweden’s racists to form bonds with U.S. white supremacist groups, emboldening the Nordic extremists by giving them the sense of belonging to a broader community, Gardell said. Sweden also has become the international production and marketing center for racist music cassettes and CDs, whose sales on the Internet help finance the extremists’ activities, he said.

But Gardell believes that Sweden’s radicals made a tactical error in attacking Soederberg, because the 41-year-old clerk’s slaying inspired the first broad anti-racist backlash. Tens of thousands took to the streets across Sweden late last month to demand a government crackdown on neo-Nazis.

Some political parties have called for a ban on public activities by racists and nationalists and a formal prohibition against membership in organizations openly espousing fascism.

A recent poll by the SIFO Institute published in Dagens Nyheter, a prominent daily newspaper here, showed 69% of respondents backing a criminal ban on right-wing extremism--the first hint of majority support for free-speech restrictions in modern Sweden.

But most leftists and liberals, who have controlled the power structure for decades, argue that a ban would do little more than drive the extremists underground.

“We already have laws against murder and bombing. We think the laws are sufficient; they just need to be practiced,” said Ulla Hoffmann, a member of parliament from the Left Party. “What is at issue is free speech. If we start by forbidding Nazis to talk, the next ones silenced will be the Communists and other leftist parties.”

What national leaders need to do to fight the neo-Nazi resurgence, Hoffmann said, is to guide the country through a long-overdue confrontation with its World War II role.

Although Sweden ostensibly remained neutral during the war, officials have conceded over the last decade that the country supplied Germany’s Third Reich with iron ore for its munitions factories and allowed Nazi troops to pass through Sweden en route to attacks on other countries.

Hoffmann and Hannele Peltonen of the Syndikalisterna, a trade union umbrella that covers Soederberg’s shop, tie the rise in right-wing extremism to a distorted self-image of Swedes as innocents and to flagging financial support for schools and social services. The latter, they said, enhances the impression among nationalists and conservatives that immigrants represent competition for pieces of the shrinking public pie.

“There are a lot of right-wing people working inside police and military organizations,” Peltonen said, suggesting that their sympathies for some of the neo-Nazi causes explain why existing laws prohibiting threats against ethnic groups or incitement of violence are seldom applied.

Syndikalisterna’s offices in the town of Gavle, about 90 miles north of Stockholm, were bombed a week after the suspects in Soederberg’s death were arrested, suggesting that a dangerous rear guard in the radical right remains at large and active, Peltonen said.

Police contend that the suspects in the Soederberg killing were linked with the National Socialist Front of Karlskrona, the country’s largest openly neo-Nazi group with an estimated 400 members.