Alessio Lasta is the author of a reportage broadcast on La7 in the latest episode of Corrado Formigli ‘s Piazza Pulita . A few days after the attack that hit Stockholm, the service revealed all the flaws in Swedish social integration and in particular the drama of the “ghetto” of Rinkeby, the Muslim quarter where the Europe of rights and freedoms seems far away, indeed very far away. Here is Formiche.net’s conversation with Lasta. We saw on TV the images of the “Lovefest”, the party of love, organized after the attack in Stockholm with a notable participation. You were there a few days ago. What an air you breathed
The impression I had and that at this moment Sweden is like a boxer who has received the punch of the knockout. At the “Lovefest” there was a mass participation, very different from what we have seen in Europe. On the stage, for example, only two politicians got on the stage. The philosophy behind the event was to make civil society talk and put politics in the corner along with the controversies that could ensue. A streamlined ceremony, not very rhetorical and with a moving participation. But I was impressed when I interviewed them on the street. Not only them, but not even the press uses the word “terrorism”, which has been banned from the media: it is significant that the name of the Uzbek bomber was made known only two days after his capture.Sweden is a country where right-wing extremist forces are far from irrelevant. There may be no hard feelings, no angry reactions to what happened
In fact, there was an alarm from the police and the secret services, some outbreaks of the far right are starting to move. There is the conservative party Sverige, which from 2010 to 2014 more than doubled its seats, elected two deputies in Europe in 2014, and next year it will meet with guaranteed success. Their strong theme is the rejection of uncontrolled immigration and security. I tried to interview them but they are very reluctant, in this precise historical moment not even they wanted to exploit the wave, if it had happened in Italy there would have been dozens of press conferences. There is another extra-parliamentary group that is growing, “The Soldiers of Odin” (SOO): they go out at night to patrol immigrants. Last year they caused a sensation because they went to the center of Stockholm to offer coffee to the Swedes, refusing it to immigrants and people of color. All these groups are growing more and more at the polls, especially Sverige. Perhaps in the next elections they will not be able to govern because there is a proportional system and all the other parties will ally themselves against it.Your service for Piazza Pulita begins with a video of an Islamic preacher arguing that women should not go around without a veil or be free to do whatever they want.
In early April, the Aftonbladet newspaper aired the video of the Islamic preacher Mohammad Zamzam as he gave a lecture in Gothenburg. That man is the head of the Swedish Muslim Union, one of the many associations that receive funding directly from the state. Radical preachers like him abound in Malmo, Gothenburg, and throughout southern Sweden. The Swedes have only now discovered that they have let these people grow up at home. Because the Swedish integration model is not working
Because their reception model is based on a wrong philosophy: integration yes, huge funding as well, but immigrants must stay away from their cities. This government policy should be rethought: there is no immigrant house built in an urban center, this is not integration. Only some of them work in the city, but they are a minority. The others attend Koranic schools, which are subsidized by the state and they call “free schools”, a bit like our peers. We recently saw the social drama of the ghetto in the French banlieues. Abandoning and isolating these neighborhoods denies any possibility of integration.
There is a difference though. While France was a colonial power, and somehow there is a common reference to the motherland, in Sweden this is lacking. The country’s historic opening to immigration has always been political rather than cultural. In the 1970s, Sweden launched the “Million Program”: one million houses to be built in outlying areas, such as Rinkeby, the Muslim district of Stockholm. But the hives they built are very different from our suburbs. In Rinkeby, a sort of Bronx in Stockholm, there are artificial turf soccer fields for children. There is a large economic investment by the government in welfare and these public houses are full of services and not at all dilapidated.In your reportage that neighborhood looks like the Kabul of the worst times. One of the women you interviewed talks about a “moral police” running around those streets, stuff that gives you goosebumps. Tell us what you saw in Rinkeby
As for the neighborhood, I gave the data in the report: 35,000 people, 98% of them Muslim, 923 reported to the police in recent years. The “moral police” is made up of men in traditional clothing, Islamic extremists. There in the center of the neighborhood there is a square with a bar frequented by men only, women cannot sit or approach. In the rare case that someone tries, this “moral police” comes and fills her with insults, calls her a prostitute, tells her to leave. What I want to underline is the situation in which women live in these suburbs. There is an activist I interviewed, her name is Mona Walter, a Somali who arrived years ago as a refugee in Gothenburg in southern Sweden. For some time she lived in the Islamic community until she decided to take off her veil, now she is a Catholic. She told me that every time she tried to speak to the Swedish government trying to explain the situation in these suburbs she was accused of being Islamophobic and anti-integration. This gives a measure of how it was taboo for Swedes to speak of radical Islam to date. The only woman I was able to talk to in Rinkeby is a Somali girl, who told me she had put on the veil “by choice” at the age of five.But Christians also baptize and have their children receive communion when there is still no full conscience on their part. It is not the same thing
There is a big difference: baptism is not a sign of social exclusion, the veil on Rinkeby instead becomes a sign of segregation. In that place, if a woman takes off her veil she is marginalized from society. In three days that I have been there I have not seen a single woman without the veil: this “State” in the State is very strongly felt, a parallel law that the real police do not deal with, because the policemen are afraid to enter neighborhoods like Rinkeby. In the report we see that many have tried to stop you from working, some have tried to attack you. Who did you manage to approach
Many did not want to speak out of fear. I have also asked for interviews with intellectuals, analysts and writers who had written books on the subject of marginalization, but I have always received no. This issue is taboo in Sweden, even for intellectuals. For years they have encouraged this model of integration in newspapers and on TV. Let me be clear: the model itself is positive: granting immigrants places of worship, schools, homes. The problem arises when we think that by granting the rights that are fundamental to us they will become like us. Instead of this policy of concession, a policy of true cultural exchange would be more useful, which attempts to unite the center with the peripheries, which have now become real ghettos.
Watch the reportage
