The Skåne Witch Trials

“Incitement against an ethnic group” (hets mot folkgrupp) has reared its ugly head again in Sweden.

A local Swedish politician is currently on trial under the country’s hate-speech statute, and our Swedish correspondent LN has been keeping us abreast of unfolding events. Here’s the note he sent me yesterday:

Baron,

This might be the crucial trial — the best thing would be that he loses in the first instance and wins in the second of three possible instances, however I doubt it will go so far as to the third instance, maybe if he loses in the second.

I am that indignant and upset about this massive legal stupidity.

It might be that now it will be decided whether I can say to a Negro matter-of-factly, “Your skin is black,” or if I have to say, “Your skin is melanin-saturated!”

And don’t tell a Muslim he has got a stupid god!

ln

LN has drawn the material for his account from Aftonbladet and Sydsvenska Dagbladet. He reports that the Swedish word uteliggare means “those who sleep out of doors”, and can be translated as “homeless”, or “dossers”, or “hoboes”. In the text that follows, I have chosen to use “hoboes”, since it is such a politically incorrect term.

As you read the material below, keep in mind that this man is on trial for saying things the state considers uncharitable about a certain national group. That’s it.

He didn’t pull a gun on anybody. He didn’t desecrate a cemetery, or firebomb a mosque. He didn’t yell, “Nuke the ragheads!” He simply referred to some people — presumably accurately — as members of a particular national and ethnic group while describing their activities. He should have been praised for celebrating diversity!

But what he did was against the law in Sweden.

Below is LN’s summary of material from Sydsvenska Dagbladet and Aftonbladet:

Dahn Pettersson, a local politician in Burlöv, a suburb of Malmö, Sweden, represents a very tiny local right-wing party called the Alliance Party, which [in its program] declares itself to have the mission of keeping Sweden Swedish, guaranteeing the freedom of the Swedish people in their own country, and wishing to expand real Democracy and to keep the Monarchy. He cared a lot for the hoboes in the municipality, so last autumn he wrote a petition to the municipal council about the miserable living conditions of these people.

In his petition he argued that the number of homeless people is increasing — in the end due to an increase in heroin smuggling, but more proximately to the increasingly easy availability of the drug, and that this in turn was due to the large number of ethnic Kosovo Albanian immigrants in Sweden.

A fellow politician, the right-winger (member of the Moderate party) Lars Johansson (Källvägen 6 , SE-232 51 Åkarp; lars.johnson@moderat.se) contacted the police to get information about the truth of this assertion. The petition came under the eyes of an assistant police precinct chief named Mikael Storm, who judged the statement about the “Kosovo Albanians being connected to smuggling and distributing heroin” probably to be so-called racial agitation against an ethnic group (hets mot folkgrupp), and made a report of it to the police.

Dahn Pettersson says that his intention with the petition was solely to stand up for the hoboes and not at all to express contempt for any ethnic group.

What then was the blameworthy content of Dahn Pettersson’s petition? According to the newspaper Aftonbladet the blameful and indictable in spe content of the petition amounts to the following verbatim passus:

95 percent of all heroin arrives via Kosovo, must you then wonder why the hoboes are increasing in number when we have imported this drug because Friggebo [female liberal idiot-politician— ln] gave 46,000 Kosovo Albanians permanent residence permits. After this mistake the heroin has flowed freely in Sweden and in Europe.

After a long and thorough preliminary investigation of the case since October 2006, the district prosecutor Mats Svensson arrived at the conclusion that the accused has “officially spread a statement or other message that express disrespect for a group of people, with allusion to origin of race, colour of skin, nationality, ethnic origin, or confession of faith.”

Dahn Pettersson today (May 30 2007) had to appear in court. He now has to face a charge of hets mot folkgrupp, “agitation against an ethnic group”.

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According to the prosecutor, the primary purpose of Dahn Pettersson’s petition was to express disrespect/contempt against refugees in general and Kosovo Albanians as an ethnic group in particular, and not to stand up for the homeless.

The prosecutor pointed out different factual errors in Dahn Pettersson’s petition, but at the same time said that it was not “errors, if any” of the factual content that the trial was about; the trial was about the purpose of the petition. And the purpose of the petition was, asserted the mind-reading prosecutor, to paint Kosovo Albanians (as an ethnic group) in black colours. “In the petition rhetoric is used that is prevalent among new political parties that are opposed to immigration — one wants to achieve one’s objective through placing different groups against one another, one places immigrants against pensioners or the unemployed,” the mind-reading prosecutor declared. According to the prosecutor, Dahn Pettersson shall be sentenced to fines for minor “agitation against an ethnic group”. Verdict in two weeks time.

The accused’s legal representative, who seems to have made a very bleak appearance, emphasized the importance of freedom of speech and declared that the prosecution would be rejected.

The local edition of the newspaper Aftonbladet, on the day after the trial, with veiled mockery makes a show of the following headline:

Blaming Kosovo Albanians for wave of heroin

However, this same paper on February 29th 2000 wrote: “The police have made a survey of how Albanian gangs control the drug trade. Kosovo Albanian clans control the heroin market in Scandinavia. These clan- or gang-members can be found in the Swedish towns of Malmö, Lund, Landskrona, Göteborg, Stockholm, Kalmar and Halmstad. Walter Kegö gives his opinion that 80% of all brown smoking heroin emanates from Kosovo Albanians.”

Seven years ago!

As far as Albania is concerned “We do not talk in kilos any more but in tonnes of drugs,” a senior Western diplomat in Tirana told the Irish Times in July of 2006. “Albania is like a big drugs warehouse,” the diplomat concluded.

Although the prosecutor obviously seems to have mostly air between his ears (can we call him an unnecessary idiot??), he all the same has thorough knowledge about the smuggling and distribution of heroin and this trafficking’s total absence of any connection to Kosovo Albanians. And could it be that, of the heroin that is distributed in Europe, it is not 95% that is of mostly Afghan origin arriving via Kosovo, but only 75%? What is the difference?

If this prosecution acquires legal force, I suppose a spade can never more be called a spade in Sweden. Truth has become antiquated, and for coming generations an unknown celebrity.

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LN supplied me with ample documentation of the “Kosovo Connection” in the European heroin trade. I have compiled some of it into a separate document here, rather than take up additional space in this post.

To summarize: the heroin comes in from Turkey and Afghanistan and passes through established routes to Kosovo, where it is smuggled north to Scandinavia via central Europe. This creates new addicts in Sweden; hence the “hoboes”.

A final quote from LN:

Statistics speak for themselves: 19,500 Kosovo Albanians are clogging German jails for selling drugs; 2,500 Kosovo Albanians are in Swiss jail for selling drugs; Hungarian anti-mafia chief Djerd Hološi says Albanians control 80% of Hungarian drugs; Czechs attribute 70% of drug distribution to Kosovo Albanians… the Azuri coast in Spain is controlled by the Kosovo Albanian Mafia… (Partly from: Kosovo Albanian Criminal Enterprise, by M. Bozinovich February 11, 2007)

Next stop Pristina? Any alighting passengers??

Update: LN emailed me with some last-minute corrections and additions, and they have been incorporated into the text of this post.