The Assyrians of Sweden

Andrew Brown

Gothenburg

It might be tempting to describe a Swedish politician as a 'super-patriarch, with a mandate he can only have received from God himself, whose assertions are `despicable lies and inventions ... falsetto sermonising (that has) managed to prevent any objective discussion of the pro- blem ... which he has shamelessly ex- ploited in order to make a name for himself in domestic politics'. But it took a diplomat actually to do so. Ingmar Karlsson, the Swedish charge d'affaires in Damascus, has been attacking 011e Waestberg, an MP for the People's Party, in these terms in the pages of Svenska Dagbladet. Waestberg has only managed to suggest in return that Karlsson is a xenophobic anti-semite.

The quarrel is about race — what other subject nowadays is sufficiently loaded with guilt and hypocrisy to cause even diplomats to explode like that? — and though the point at issue is a relatively minor one, it has important implications. Waestberg has taken up the cause of the 'Assyrian' minori- ty of Nestorian peasants from Anatolia and northern Syria, of whom about 12,000 have settled here, most of them in Soedertaelje, an unattractive industrial town south-west of Stockholm. These people, along with the Latin Americans and the 'boat people', constitute the most eye-catching part of the Swedish immigrant problem, though they are for this reason atypical. The problem itself is potentially huge: roughly an eighth of the population of this country are first- or second-generation immigrants. But the sheer formless size of the labour immigra- tion from Fit Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey makt it difficult to grasp: the `Assyrians' of r a microcosm of the issues raised.

The first thing to be said about them is that they have nothing to do with Assyria. They call themselves 'Syrians', but they are a religious, not a national minority, the pro- duct of a 16th century schism in the Nestorian church. There are about two and a half million followers of this church, of whom two million live in India, 250,000 in the Middle East, and the rest in Europe or North America. The second undisputed fact is that since 1976 the Swedish govern- ment has done its best to keep them out of this country, and has treated aspiring im- migrants with the sort of systematic cruelty more usually associated with the British Home Office. And no one disputes that life on the borders of Turkey and Syria is nowadays nasty, brutish, and frequently shortened. But is life nastier for the Chris- tian peasants than for the Muslim ones, or for the landless Kurds said. to infest the area? Statistics suggest that it is not, and that the 'Assyrians' are refugees from poverty rather than from organised persecution, since they are not murdered in such large numbers as the other inhabitants of Turkey. 'The Riksdag has repeatedly established that the "Assyrians" are the victims of organised persecution', writes Waestberg, as if that closed the discussion. But Karlsson, who is after all the Swedish government's man on the spot, claims that this is nonsense. Nor is it clear what respon- sibility the Swedish government has for conditions in eastern Turkey.

But anyone on the mailing list of the Foreign Office here knows that nothing ever happens anywhere for which the Swedish government has no responsibility. Herr Ola Ullsten (foreign minister, leader of Waestberg's People's Party, and live-in friend of the woman who does the publicity for the Commission for Sexual Equality) seems to count the week wasted in which he does not tell the world (or at least the Riksdag) what should be done about Nami- bia, Poland, the Middle East, or anywhere else that has recently been on the television news.

One cause earlier this year was a cam- paign in the press and in the Riksdag to close down the 'free city' of Christiania, since Swedish youths can easily buy hashish there. But Christiania is in Copenhagen. So a Danish MP travelled to Stockholm, where he bought a lump of hash on the square outside the Riksdag building, which is one of the city's main drug markets. Once safely out of the country, he held a press con- ference to confess his crime, and to an- nounce that he did not demand that the Riksdag be closed down even though inno- cent Danes could be corrupted by the substances freely available outside it.

If even the level-headed Danes find ir- resistible the temptation to kick a Swedish

I'm sorry, officer, I hope I'm not queerin' your pitch.'

politician who is posturing with his head in the sand, what are the peasants of Anatolia, to make of this country? The 'Assyrians have been officially recognised as a persecuted minority, what are known in the jargon as 'Li refugees'. But unlike all other

refugees', they have no automatic right of entry even if they can reach this country. This right was taken from them in 1976, when the government woke up to the fact that they weren't so persecuted as to be unable to come here in very large numbers unless something was done about it. The decision was the only one consistent with a policy of stopping labour immigration as far as possible, but it has placed successive governments in a very difficult position. For however many would-be immigrants are bounced out at the immigration counter, some will always make it through the obstacle course, and then apply for a residence permit here. The only grounds on which a permit can be granted to someone already in the country are either that theY have close family connections here, or that they are in danger in their homeland. It would seem quite easy to determine whether these conditions are fulfilled in any par- ticular case, but in fact applications regular- ly take up to two years to process. (Mine took two months, but then my skin is the requisite greyish pink colour.) During this period, the applicants are in limbo. They cannot be thrown out of the country, and they cannot do anything else either.

By any reasonable standards, however, the Swedes treat their immigrants ex- tremely well. You can see racialist graffiti in the Stockholm underground, but these have usually been crossed out, not by the authorities, but by other graffitists (one ex- ception is a three-foot section of wall which advises us, in English, to 'Get drunk: three million Swedes can't be wrong'). But there is no question of sending them back when times get hard, as the Germans and the Swiss do, and there is here none of the widespread public bitterness towards col- oured minorities which is so striking to England. The attitude that seems most common among native Swedes is a vague, patronising interest, which alcohol precipitates into contempt. Everyone knows that Finns drink; Greeks gamble; Yugoslays tear up the kitchen floor to plant potatoes, and slaughter pigs in the bathtub; Turks smuggle heroin to supplement their social security money; gypsies steal uncon- trollably; and the English are quarrelsome, bone-idle, and loud-mouthed. But none of this is important since no one but other irn" migrants really mixes with them. Social fric- tion is very rare when social contact is reduced to a minimum.

But liberal principles can have strange workings in a society ruled by policrats (this term is a useful Norwegian compound of `politician' and 'bureaucrat', to describe the ruling classes of a social democratic state). A policrat can be persuaded to believe almost anything except that people should be allowed to get on with their lives as they think fit. The straitjacket of

laws, exhortations, and prohibitions which the Riksdag wove throughout the Seventies (at a rate of 10,000 laws a decade, or one every eight hours, day and night) is very light-fitting in places, but it is not consis- tent, and works to constrict society in very arbitrary ways. One can argue that all this frantic activity was an attempt to replace the even tighter network of unwritten con- ventions which controlled the old Sweden

a society with strict and clearly recognis- ed, but permeable, class barriers in which everybody knew their place. Or one can regard it simply as a result of megalomania. But it is clear that the social and geographical upheavals caused by the transformation of a poor rural country into a rich suburban one within the lifetime of the currently middle-aged has made it much easier to assimilate the, immigrants than would otherwise be the case. The past is such a very foreign country for almost everyone in Sweden, whether they were born here or not. But this by itself is not enough to produce the set of common values which the policrats try to enforce. When the policrats refer to the state as society" — and this word, in Swedish Public language, refers exclusively to what is publicly financed — then they may fool themselves, but they do not make the real world any more controllable or homogeneous. The isolation of the im- migrants may prevent friction, but it hardly Promotes understanding.

The joke is that, officially, the im- migrants here are to preserve and develop their own cultures. This works well enough with the larger immigrant groups but the sinaller the groups become, the more it is necessary for 'society' to invent them. All Immigrant children, for example, are entitl- ed to teaching in their own languages in state schools. So there is a suburb of Stockholm where classes are conducted in More than 20 languages, including Berber, Which is suppressed by the government of Morocco, from which these pupils come. The children of the 3,000 `boat people' here are taught Chinese, though they would rather learn English. Some of them are lear- ning Chinese for the first time in their lives, because they are in fact Vietnamese.

But the 'boat people' are a special case. The government was shamed into taking the first batch, and then discovered that they were unpopular here anyway, so the remainder have been brought in quietly. Meanwhile Sweden is giving Vietnam another £50 million this year, out of pure bureaucractic inertia, as far as anyone can see. In the same way, the 'Assyrians' were first invented as an ethnic group and then denied a sanctuary by the politocracy — so it is only fitting that some of them should have been taught an entirely new language. This mixture of the two mutually incom- prehensible degenerate dialects of Aramacic was taught for some time in the schools of Soedertaelje (and spoken nowhere else on earth) as 'Assyrian'. Waestberg denies this; the immigration ministry says that the prac- tice has now stopped.