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| Rosengård in Malmö, south Sweden. Photo. Wikimedia |
A new study from Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies (CATS) states that radical Islam is a reality and a threat to some people in the area Rosengård in Malmö.
The study shows that a group of individuals with an extreme interpretation of Islam have a big impact on the local community. Some individuals harass woman who do not want to wear veil and sometimes prevent boys and girls in the neighborhood to play with each other. They also stop girls from participating on stage at local cultural days. Social workers who have tried to distribute information about women’s rights have also been threatened and harassed.
Another conclusion in the report is that many new families in Rosengård get visits from radical groups who tell them “about the rules in Rosengård”. Some families have said to the respondents that they were freer in their former country than they are now.
Many girls in the area are sent back to their parents’ former country when they are 13-15 years old to get married, some returns and some not. Or they are married by local Imams.
In the study, they have interviewed 30 persons who are employed in the local school, police, the Swedish Security Service, in the academic world and social workers about their perception of the situation.
Twenty-nine of the thirty respondents say they have noticed an increased Islamic radicalization in the area during the last five years. A majority of the respondents say that too little is done about the problem and that the public debate about it is non-existing. Some of the respondents say that there are teenagers in Rosengård who are born there and have lived their whole life there but never left the area, not even to go to another part of the city.
No direct interviews with the residents have been made, something that has been criticized. Some also point out that the report does not say much about the width of this behavior. The authors of the report do write that we know to little about how big the problem is in terms of number of radical Islamists. Some people who live in Rosengård say both to the Swedish public service television and TV 4 that they do not recognize the reality described in the report.
Andreas Kostadines, social democrat and chairman of the district committee in Rosengård says however to TT that he shares the report’s conclusion that there are radical Islamists in the area. One problem, he says, is that no one know how many people who live there. The real population is bigger than what is official, since the secrecy law prevents the Migration Board from informing the city of Malmö about newly arrived immigrants.
The Swedish Minister for Integration and Democracy, Nyamko Sabuni, says to the Swedish television that the situation is totally unacceptable and that a number of measures have to be enforced to deal with a situation that has no simple solution.
The whole report, which is made by Magnus Ranstorp and Josefine Dos Santos, is available in Swedish here.
Facts: 22 262 people are officially listed as residents in Rosengård in Malmö. Rosengård is a very multicultural area with people from one hundred eleven countries and fifty languages. The unemployment is much higher and the average wage much lower than in Malmö and Sweden as a whole. Since 2002, about half the population has moved away from the area and about the same number of people has moved in, many of them new immigrants. (Source: The city of Malmö)
Tommie Ullman
tommie.ullman@stockholmnews.com