Kids, drugs and Swedish gang wars

So I’m sitting there in my girlfriend’s apartment in Gävle, some 200 kilometres north of Stockholm. It’s the summer of 2010, and the weather is unbelievably hot up on the fourth floor in the tiny apartment with no AC. I’ve just finished my MA, and have a good bit of cash saved up while waiting to get my foot in the door at the PhD programme down in Uppsala, the next major town down south, so I’m looking forward to a few leisurely weeks ahead.

The area where we live is this strange combination of garish concrete “projects” and an almost idyllic countryside town, immersed in pinewood forests, fields and streams. You could stray through the woods for hours, never crossing the same path, while still remaining just minutes from the little suburban centre.

This was five years before the “immigration crisis”, but the area was designated for social housing, so just like in most other Swedish cities, immigrant families were here clustered together with the poor, the sick, the insane and the social rejects, at a safe distance from the better parts of town and their fragile property values. I think the area’s population was about 40% non-European way back then, which increased to a distinct majority in the following years.

Nonetheless, it was a very pleasant place to live. It was peaceful, friendly, and much like the rural village, it fostered these organic connections between people and their respective communities such that what you could call a little hybrid culture eventually began taking shape. You learned a few words of Somali and Ibo, you were invited to outings by elderly neighbours, and got treated to the curious cuisine of countries previously unheard of. Which got paid back in kind with the horrors of Scandinavian food.

At the gym, I became friends with a former police officer from Afghanistan, who was also a veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war. He survived almost a decade as a tank operator, which I can’t say I envied him. Coming to Sweden in his late 50s, at that time he couldn’t even read his own language. But in just a few years, he was quite fluent in Swedish. I brought him with me to a forest barbecue and invited him to partake of my home-made mead (I’d picked spruce shoots to flavor it, weird stuff but rather nice) and some surströmming. He said he’d tried the latter before, and enthusiastically loaded up his plate. The look on his face as the… scent got to him, revealed he’d made a terrible mistake.

Everything wasn’t perfect, of course. Something I distinctly remember from that particular hot and humid summer was the horrendous screams of children seemingly reenacting The Lord of the Flies in the narrow courtyard between the aurally amplifying buildings. They were let out without supervision early in the morning and rampaged until late at night, an event interspersed with only a couple of feeding breaks, and the near lack of darkness enabled the process to restart after just a few hours. But there were earplugs, of course. And loud black metal to combat the noise – which once provoked the neighbour beneath us to violently hammer at the outside of our tin-clad balcony with a large broom, producing some impressive dents.

Some of the kids were sweet, though. I remember this one sulky little girl, about nine years old, who in jest asked if she and her friends could have the soda cans I was bringing home with a couple of pizzas one afternoon. Of course they could, and she never did look quite so sulky whenever I saw her after that. And when we were out walking our french bulldog, many of the kids of the area came up to pet him, always asking very politely, often a bit scared of the weird-looking creature but too curious not to interact.

Most of the children came from broken homes, in one way or the other. Dead or absent parents. Not so few were quite familiar with poverty and addiction problems.

And drug abuse was really rampant. Cannabis was common, of course, yet what was worse, the then-legal synthetic kinds thereof generally known as “spice” were widely consumed, a new form basically marketed each month to stay one step ahead of the ongoing judicial process of drug classification. Synthetic hallucinogens were also in vogue, and kids way down in their early teens sold prescription narcotics around the little satellite town centre seen to the left in the picture above.

I became friends with two guys from Somalia that same year. One of them was in his 40s, the other one about 17 years old, and they started this little business dealing sub-par weed at just a little less than the advertised weight. The venture lasted for a surprisingly long time, but eventually, a certain level of “customer dissatisfaction” became too much to handle, and the younger one actually felt it best to leave the country. This endeavour was probably a prospect hard to resist for either of them, though. The mainstream world wasn’t exactly their oyster from where they were standing.

The place wasn’t violent back in 2010, but there was something vaguely sinister that began creeping up almost unnoticed around the end of that summer. An outdoor rape took place just a few blocks away from our apartment. Suicides started to become a bit more frequent, and there were a few pretty strange disappearances that never got solved. And soon after, proper organized crime started moving into the area, piece by piece.

This process of the social institutionalization of the criminal enterprises was also coincidental with the emergence of Swedish gangster rap, which from quite humble beginnings around 2011 astonishingly quickly grew into a lauded mainstream industry. Huge awards in mainstream media. Lots of attention, applause, and not so little exoticism around racist stereotypes reproduced by the targeted group. The genre effectively served as a propaganda and recruitment platform for the expansion of the ethnic criminal gangs – and, of course, it got established just around the time when a pretty huge amount of refugees started arriving in Europe, courtesy of US imperialism and its methodical devastation of mainly Libya, Syria and Iraq. Lots of young men whose world wasn’t really their oyster either.

I think we had our first locals turning “IS warriors” and shipping off to Syria and Iraq around 2014. A handful of guys from the vicinity went there, at least a couple of which I must have encountered a number of times at the combined gym/cultural centre/library I frequented, back when they were chasing girls, playing pool, and imagining themselves to be gangsters over the sale of some Percocet they nicked from grandma’s medicine cabinet.

The radical right grew rapidly during the same time period, throughout the West in general, but with a quite influential hard-line movement in Sweden and Scandinavia that also made a significant mark in parliamentary politics and the overall public discourse (which is not least visible in the recent EU parliamentary election result).

Tensions grew. Vicious spiral. Social rejection of non-white immigrants increased. Organized and semi-organized crime consolidated along ethnic lines. The shootings in that little part of Gävle began pretty soon thereafter. There was this gaunt old drunk who took two .44 slugs to the chest in some weird apartment brawl, but miraculously survived (to live out the rest of his days in a wheelchair). Others were less lucky. Our downstairs neighbour (and aspiring “gangsta rap artist”) stabbed his friend to death in the local convenience store over $30 and a borrowed PlayStation console, producing a brand new little girl orphan. Last year, the apartment building just across from where we used to live was demolished by a “powerful detonation” connected to organized crime.

Up to a thousand people have so far been murdered in the ongoing Swedish gang conflicts.

And just a week ago, I read in the paper how a Swedish teenager has been sentenced to death in Iraq over an assassination he carried out at the behest of one of the Swedish drug gangs. A bit further down, the article states he grew up right there in Gävle. He was one of those kids bashfully coming up to pet the dog back in 2010. Five years old at the time.

I don’t know. It’s the little things. It’s easy to say that you make your own choices in life, and that nobody forces you to join a militant jihadist group or to become part of a criminal gang. Sure. But the little girl who became an orphan after her daddy got stabbed to death on top of the fucking bread rack in the neighbourhood convenience store didn’t really choose that either. Some of us don’t really get the best start.

And what if instead of just giving them a couple of sodas and feeling smug over that little gesture, I’d have taken those kids out to play soccer once in a while?