In my former blog post, I wrote about the fact that Stellan Bojerud and his colleagues in the Sweden Party had to use coded messages and change places in order to mislead the groups that are pursuing members of this young party, aiming at seats in the Swedish parliament according to several public opinion polls lately.
This is not a unique situation for Stellan Bojerud just because he and his party members live in the neighbourhood of Stockholm. Here I will give you examples that many more persons have been seriously harassed and attacked because of their membership and political work in the very same party.
First, I will describe the groups of people who keep on harassing these politicians by making them victims of attempts in order to sabotage their political work. The perpetrators adhere to an organisation called AFA, which stands for Anti Fascist Action (Antifascistisk Aktion), founded in 1993. This is an extreme leftist organisation and in spite of the name, where they pretend to fight against fascism, they are a flagrant example of fascism themselves.
AFA documents and even brags about its sabotaging the election process at several places. The last weeks before the election in 2006, they systematically removed the SD’s election posters from the streets. They systematically removed the SD’s election propaganda from libraries. They even took out the party’s election of people’s mail boxes. The election candiates of the SD were sent personal threatening letters to withdraw from the elections, and some actually withdrew because they couldn’t stand the pressure. Here they have even made lists of the politicians to harass with names, adresses and social security number.
The most serious thing, i.e. a flagrant example of undermining democracy, is that they systematically removed all the voting ballots from the polling-booths, both on the day of the election and before. This last move has even caused the Danish member of the EU parliament Morten Messerschmidt to request that the EU sends election observers to Sweden during the election in September. He says:
“I do not want to discredit the general commitment to democracy in Sweden. But now the picture of Sweden’s way to handle smaller parties – and especially parties critical of the immigration policy – to become so blurry, ambiguous and surrounded by rumors that it must be in Sweden’s best interest to get the system checked by independent observers.”
More to mention and just as horrid is that stones have been thrown through windows of the SD members by AFA activists. Axes have been planted in some of the SD members’ doors. Personal threats have been spray-painted outside their houses or apartments. Last summer the party’s press officer and his partner were brutally knocked down by a group of 20 persons. During the attack the perpertrators were shouting political insults.
This and much more is posted openly and possible to read in the links on their website. No criminal investigation has been done. The police remain passive. During the SD’s open-air meetings the police don’t intervene more than necessarily. On one occasion the police didn’t even prevent bloodshed. This passiveness is also characterizing the press, that stands back with its criticism.
One daily newspaper, The Gothenburg Post (Göterborgs-Posten), has examined the violence of the extreme left, though. Out of 180 cases in western Sweden that the newspaper has examined, the police and the public prosecutor have only succeeded to bind someone to the crime on one single occasion.
Given this background, it would be very interesting to know if the Swedish elections would be accepted as democratic by independent international observers.
N.B! Extra link inserted 11 February. This is a link of a list of all the crimes and harassments committed against memebers of the Sweden Democrats in recent years. The link is only in Swedish, though.