A bit of Mesopotamia in Sweden

http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk
Thursday April 3rd 2008
Since 1967 Christians from the Middle East have been settling in a Stockholm city suburb. Flowing in from Turkey, Syria and more recently Iraq, these immigrants refer to themselves as the 'world's oldest Christian people'. This year, however, fewer Iraqis have been admitted into Sweden after claims by the government that the conflict in Iraq has stopped. Those who have made it over the border talk to Olivier Truc about why this isn't true

Christian Iraqi refugees in Sweden pray for a priest killed in their homeland. Photograph: Jacob Silberberg

Despite repeated warnings over the public address system the crowd swarmed onto the pitch at the Södertälje stadium. It was more than they could resist. Their football team, Assyriska FF, had just beaten Östersunds FK 4-2, securing promotion to Sweden’s premier league.
That was last autumn.

In the stands, mustachioed men wearing dark suits and white, open-necked shirts played with their prayer beads. Behind them, two enthusiastic reporters were covering the event in Syriac, an Aramaean dialect, for Södertälje’s Assyrian channel, Suroyo TV, which is beamed by satellite all over the Middle East.

On the pitch itself, jubilant youths waved flags decorated with a map of Mesopotamia or a four-branched blue star with a yellow spot at its centre and red, white and blue flames blazing outwards, the colours of a once powerful empire, the cradle of civilisation, now divided between Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon and Syria. They are the proud descendants of the "world’s oldest Christian people".

But the setting for this celebration was a sports ground in Sweden, and strangely it could hardly have happened elsewhere. Over the past 40 years many Middle Eastern Christians have settled in Södertälje, an industrial district in Stockholm’s suburbs. The first ones arrived in 1967 when, at the request of the World Council of Churches and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sweden accepted 200 stateless Christians from a refugee camp in Lebanon.

Many more have followed. They are so well integrated that they have their own football teams and members of parliament. Their successful integration is held up as an example in Sweden, though they have not forgotten their origins. The last time Assyriska FF made it into the premier league the team organised a minute’s silence before the first match of the season, paying tribute to the victims of the Armenian genocide in 1915 in full view of Swedish television. The Turkish authorities protested. "Football and politics go hand-in-hand here," says a supporter. Some even dream of the rebirth of the Assyrian nation.

The first waves of immigrants came from Turkey and Syria, but in recent years they have flocked here from Iraq. "Sweden welcomed 20,000 refugees in 2006, with twice as many in 2007 and mostly from Iraq," says Anders Lago, the Social-Democrat mayor of Södertälje. The pressure on Södertälje nurseries, schools and housing is nearing breaking point, with some three-roomed flats accommodating up to 15 refugees.

The number of Iraqis being allowed to stay in Sweden has now dropped. The Swedish Migration Board has turned down three-quarters of all applications this year, whereas the previous year it accepted three out of four. The board has justified its change of policy by claiming that armed conflict in Iraq has ceased. This prompted widespread criticism from human rights organisations, their fears being confirmed by the discovery last month of the body of the Chaldean archbishop of Mosul, Faraj Rahho, who had been abducted on February 29.

In a large flat in Ronna, a neighbourhood of Södertälje now known as Little Baghdad, the Solrosen organisation helps families with children. Nursel Awrohum has a massive workload. As with most first-generation Assyrian immigrants, she is from Midyat, a town in eastern Turkey with a Christian majority, not far from Qamishli, a Syrian town also with a predominantly Christian population, where many of Södertälje’s Syrian Christians originated. "The council schools are packed," she says. At the Solrosen centre, children are learning Swedish while their parents are taught to cope with the authorities and Swedish society in general.

Amir and Nadia are waiting for a decision on their cases. One day in Baghdad, Amir, a Chaldean barber, found a For Sale notice on his front door. His father was murdered shortly afterwards. Then in February 2007 Amir was kidnapped. He has photographs of himself, gagged and covered in bruises, with a pistol held to his head and a dagger pointed at his throat. His brother finally managed to find the $15,000 demanded for his ransom. The family left the country and moved to Sweden, paying a smuggler $15,000 for each person.

Nadia, who defines herself as Chaldean, arrived here from Baghdad in 2007. Masked men had kidnapped, beaten and tortured her 23-year-old son. She had to pay $25,000 to prevent him being turned into "mincemeat", as they threatened. When they let him go they gave him a note saying: "Leave everything behind or we will rape your 18-year-old girl." Nadia fled to Sweden, where one of her daughters was already living. "In Baghdad, we heard that in some mosques the imams were saying there was no point in buying houses from Christians because they would be leaving the country anyway."

Though their numbers are dropping steadily there are still about 700,000 Christians living in Iraq (3% of the population). Two thirds of them are Catholics – mainly Chaldean, Syriac or Aramaean Catholics.

"Even though we cannot accommodate them properly, because there is so much demand, the refugees from Iraq still want to come here, because what they are looking for above all is security," says Awrohum. "And for them security means family, and people with the same language and background." They all want to live in Södertälje, where almost a quarter of the 80,000 inhabitants are Christians from the Middle East.

"In the past two years Södertälje has taken more Iraqi asylum seekers than the US," says Sait Yildiz, a town councillor and one of the leaders of the Assyrian Federation in Sweden. "I quite understand why the Swedes are a little bitter.

"In a way everyone expects the Iraqis arriving now to integrate easily, in view of our past success," says Aydin Aho, the manager of the Assyriska FF football club. Aho himself is a typical example of this process. He was born in Midyat in 1972, arriving in Södertälje two years later with the biggest wave of migrants.

"I was part of the first generation to grow up here and, like my contemporaries, I grew up with the federation and the holiday camps where we all got together. Football was a social thing," he explains.

"But the Swedish welfare state is not what it used to be," Aho adds, "and the churches and federation no longer play the same role. There isn’t the same sense of solidarity. Now there’s a serious risk that the Iraqis will remain second-class citizens."