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from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/12/sweden-risbergska-orebro-gun-massacre

Will any Swedish politician defend the group most terrorised by the
Örebro gun massacre?
Martin Gelin
Martin Gelin
In one generation, Sweden has become polyglot and cosmopolitan – but
denial has met the wave of white supremacism sweeping the country

Wed 12 Feb 2025 02.00 EST
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It was the worst mass shooting in Swedish history. Ten people were shot
dead and many more wounded before the gunman shot himself. A week on
from the atrocity in Örebro, about 125 miles west of Stockholm, Sweden
is soul-searching for answers that are not easy to find.

The suspect, a 35-year-old white man, was initially described by
authorities as “a lone wolf”. He may or may not have had an ideological motive.

But we now also know that most of those killed had an immigrant
background. And it is hard to believe that the target of this violence
was not political: Campus Risbergska, where the shooting took place, is
an education centre for adults, many of whom were enrolled on a language programme called “Swedish for immigrants”. The centre is a remnant of
the once vast nationwide public network of well-funded institutions for continuing education and after-school programmes to help recently
arrived people to assimilate.

Local people describe the centre as a warm and welcoming place for
people who did not always feel an immediate sense of belonging in
Örebro. The young poet Aya Kanbar took classes there, and after the
massacre, she recalled the institution in a moving article, calling it a
haven for immigrants.

“These were people who had immigrated from all corners of the world, and
it was so nice to witness the sense of community among them. How the
language brought them together – their Swedish, still in its embryonic
stage. Their desire to belong to a society that is so often described as
cold and alienating.” Now, she wrote, it is a place of “bottomless sorrow”.

So far, we have no evidence that the Örebro killer explicitly targeted immigrants. In the immediate aftermath, the police sent out a statement claiming that nothing pointed to this. They said everything suggested he
was a non-ideological killer.

This drew heavy criticism from across the political spectrum – from
leftwing columnists to conservative editorial writers. It would have
been more honest of the police to say they simply didn’t know, and it is hardly far-fetched for experts on mass shootings to point out that many
similar events have been committed by white supremacists – even when
they were erroneously described as lone wolves initially.

The news channel TV4 obtained a recording, allegedly from the scene, in
which a man’s voice is heard shouting: “You should be gone from Europe”, seconds before shooting starts. We don’t know whether the voice is that
of the killer. What we do know is that the massacre has left many
immigrant communities in Sweden feeling terrified and vulnerable.

Sweden has many other schools and education centres where young
immigrants still get a chance to learn Swedish. Many of these students
say they are too afraid to return to class. The question must now be
asked, is anyone in elected office willing to openly address migrants’
fears?

In one generation, Sweden has changed into a polyglot and cosmopolitan
country, as ethnically diverse as the UK. In the same four decades,
roughly encompassing my lifetime, we have also seen a terrifying wave of
white supremacist violence, racist mass shootings and serial killers,
often targeting immigrants.

But over the past 10 years, the ruling conservatives (the Moderate
party) and the centre-left opposition have mostly avoided saying
anything that might be perceived as accommodating to, let alone in
defence of, migrant communities. Instead, they have gradually embraced a
more combative rhetoric, linking immigration to crime and gang violence.
Just three days before the massacre in Örebro, the conservative prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, went on TV to explicitly blame crime rates on migrants.

The centre-left opposition, so eager to win back voters from the far
right, tends to run from any opportunity to call out racism or protect migrants, in order to avoid being attacked as “naive” by nationalists. A rising star of the centre-left Social Democrats, Lawen Redar, recently
bragged about the party’s new platform not being very “woke”.

Meanwhile, the rightwing nationalist Sweden Democrats tried to fit the
massacre in Örebro into an existing narrative of chaos and crime
enveloping the entire country, as though immigrants were somehow
culpable, even when they were the victims.

The governing coalition, which relies on the support of the far right,
focused its immediate response on gun laws and restricting access to semi-automatic weapons.

Sweden, it seems, has no vocabulary to talk about its problem with
xenophobia, or the racist violence that often follows it. Instead, there
is a deep bipartisan consensus that migrants are the problem, and that
previous immigration policy was too generous. When Magdalena Andersson,
the former Social Democrat prime minister, visited Örebro after the
massacre, a woman came up to her and pleaded: “Can you please say
something nice about immigrants now?” Other survivors of the attack, and relatives of the victims, have told Swedish media that they have long
felt like “moving targets” in an increasingly hostile and xenophobic country.

The prime minister, probably responding to public pressure, addressed
the nation in a televised speech on Sunday, in which he pleaded for
unity: “At the end of the day, there’s only one Sweden. Not us and them. Not young or old. Not born here or abroad. Not city or country. Not
right or left.” It was a significant shift in tone but, for many
foreign-born citizens, it was too little, too late.

When a far-right extremist killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, 69 of
whom were at a Norwegian Labour party youth camp in Utøya, many in the
Swedish media quoted experts on terrorism, who confidently proclaimed
that this must have been committed by Islamist extremists. One survivor,
the leftwing politician Ali Esbati, now tells the Swedish newspaper
Aftonbladet that this follows a disturbing pattern, where acts committed
by white supremacists are “individualised”, whereas violent acts
committed by racialised minorities lead to blanket blame of the entire
group.

One of the cruellest aspects of racism is precisely the way in which it
turns victims into perpetrators. When refugees from Syria or Sudan
escape war or violent terrorism, they arrive in countries where too many associate them with the very violence that they have fled. It is as
though they have to carry the burden of the perpetrator’s crimes, as
well as the trauma of survival.

The massacre in Örebro led to predictable calls for unity and solidarity
in Sweden, but something more than that might be required. For everyone
in Sweden to feel safe and harmonious, the dehumanisation of immigrants
as a group must also stop.

Martin Gelin writes for the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter

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