Author:
Publication: Wiener Zeitung
Date: June 8, 2004
URL: http://www.wienerzeitung.at/frameless/english.htm?ID=Eng&Menu=7453
Sweden fights image of "safe haven"
for terror
Victims of dictatorships from Chile
to Iraq, people fleeing violence in the Balkans or the Horn of Africa,
and rebels and separatists from Indonesia or Latin America have for decades
found refuge in neutral Sweden. But as even the most law- abiding corners
of the globe get dragged into the "war on terror", Sweden is taking a closer
look at some of its foreign guests.
Klas Bergenstrand, the new head
of the SAPO security police, pulled no punches when he told national radio:
"In Sweden, too, there are people participating in networks whose ultimate
goal is to carry out terrorist attacks." Margarethe Linderoth, SAPO's head
of counter- terrorism, said that "all terrorist organisations are more
or less represented in Sweden with one or more persons".
But while acknowledging that Sweden's
asylum policy and membership of the European Union's border-free Schengen
zone made it hard to check the flow of people, Linderoth said new laws
passed in 2003 should help ensure Sweden is "not a safe haven".
Compassionate neutrality
Recent arrests of suspected Islamic
militants in Stockholm and Malmo have brought home the idea that even Sweden,
which has not been to war for 200 years and does its best to project an
image of compassio- nate neutrality, is not immune. In a poll by the tabloid
Aftonbladet, over 90 percent of 20,000 respondents said "terrorists" were
hiding in Sweden.
Sweden is one of Europe's fastest-growing
immigrant destinations, and among the fifth of the population born abroad
or to foreign parents, many are from troubled zones including 70,000 Iraqis
and 60,000 Iranians. That makes it easy to find cover, said Linderoth.
Gunnar Jervas, terror expert at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, said
that the ethnic mix, generous asylum laws and welfare and "the fact that
the police are not on your tail" meant that "in principle Sweden should
be a very good country for terror planning purposes. It is entirely reasonable
to believe that there could be 'sleeping cells' here that are planning
terror actions abroad."
Favoured guerrilla hideout
Anders Hellner at the Foreign Policy
Institute wrote in a column that Sweden hosted "many groups and cells who
support al Qaeda and other similar terror organisations -- many more than
we know about. Some are very active and willing to take up terrorist methods
to reach their political goal".
Sweden has been visited by al Qaeda
leader Osama bin Laden: a snapshot shows him as a teenager with 22 of his
siblings next to a pink Cadillac during a family holiday in Sweden in 1971.
Devotion to equality
Back then in the Cold War, NATO
outsider Sweden was becoming a favoured guerrilla hideout, and in 1988
police discovered that radical Palestinian group Abu Nidal had set up a
cell here with an arms cache in a forest near Arlanda international airport.
But the vulnerability of Sweden's "open society", where bodyguards were
not needed, was dramatised in 1986 with the murder of Prime Minister Olof
Palme and last year when Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was killed by a mentally
unstable man.
When police arrested four suspected
Muslim extremists in April, Sweden's largest such swoop since the September
11 attacks on the United States, and a Malmo post-mark showed up on a threat
against Thailand for sending soldiers to Iraq, Prime Minister Goran Persson
said the "war on terror" had come to Sweden despite its opposition to the
U.S.-led war on Iraq.
"The fight against terrorism must
also take place in Sweden, when it is called for we must not hesitate,"
Persson said. "Sweden is waking up, at last, to the fact that they have
dangerous elements here," observed a Middle Eastern diplomat.
Careful to avoid offending ethnic
and religious groups
With 400,000 Muslims living in Sweden
and the ruling Social Democrats unswerving in their devotion to equality,
authorities are careful to avoid offending any ethnic or religious group.
"I don't think there is a single
Muslim in Sweden who deserves to be called terrorist and nobody with any
links to terrorism," said Mahmoud Aldebe, a Muslim community leader.
Diplomats from countries involved
in long guerrilla wars say Sweden seems keen not to be considered a "safe
haven" for rebel groups or supporters. When Palestinian militant group
Hamas's Web site was found in March to be hosted on a server in Sweden,
SAPO referred it to prosecutors and the site was taken down. Colombia's
FARC guerrillas ran their own "news agency", ANNCOL, out of Sweden, until
police took unspecified action and it relocated to Denmark.
