Sweden ‘naive’ about integration: ex-Peshmerga Swedish MP

STOCKHOLM: Sweden’s “naive” approach to integrating asylum seekers has opened the door to the far-right, an outspoken lawmaker told AFP ahead of elections expected to see the country’s once-marginal anti-immigration party make gains.

Amineh Kakabaveh is an Iranian Kurdish ex-peshmerga fighter who sought asylum herself in Sweden in the 1990s and has been a member of parliament since 2008. She has been a vocal critic of Sweden’s handling of the 400,000 asylum seekers taken in since 2012, including 160,000 in 2015 alone, the highest number in Europe per capita. Sweden is “increasingly divided”, said the 40-year-old politician, whose views have earned her enemies among her own formerly-communist Left Party who accuse her of stigmatising immigrants.

Yet Kakabaveh is ruthless in her criticism of Sweden’s shortcomings on integrating immigrants, giving it a failing grade.

“We have been naive. We have not been brave. We had no plan,” she said, adding that this has enabled a rise in “fundamentalism” in Sweden’s suburbs that has fuelled the far-right. “Sweden has been having integration problems for 20 years,” Kakabaveh tells AFP in an interview just days before the election.

“This is why the Sweden Democrats (SD), a racist party, is now (poised to be) the second biggest party,” she says.

SD, an anti-immigration party created in 1988 by ex-neo-Nazis, is tipped to win around 20 percent of votes, according to an average of seven polling institutes in the final weeks of the campaign. That would put SD just behind Prime Minister Stefan Lofven’s Social Democrats, and neck-and-neck with the conservative Moderates Party. Kakabaveh is worried about all the asylum seekers who have fled “from war, dictatorships, Islamic dictatorships, and regimes like Daesh (the Islamic State group).” Sweden is “increasingly divided,” she says, clad in a red dress, red cardigan and high heels. “All red — I’m a socialist!” she says with a laugh.

“This multicultural society has been poorly constructed over the past two decades, and that has led to a separation of communities.” The issue is so infected that it’s taboo to talk about, she says. “SD has occupied the public debate even though it has ideas that have nothing to do with wanting to help the most vulnerable in society. Now they’re heroes because the others don’t dare rise to the challenge,” she says.

Kakabaveh is not a household name in Sweden. But she’s been threatened by “racists and fundamentalists” and says she lives under the protection of Sweden’s security service Sapo, in charge of intelligence gathering and counter-terrorism. Despite her disillusionment with Sweden, she still thinks the Scandinavian country that prides itself on being a “humanitarian superpower” and model of tolerance is “a land of opportunity.” “I arrived here illiterate. Six years later I was at university and now I’ve been a member of parliament for 10 years,” she says.