How did we forget the clans?

Published 16 November 2024 at 12.01

Book. It has been four years since the debate about the clans came and went. But behind the seemingly chaotic gang violence, there are still well-organized criminal families who are taking over the country. That's what Jonas De Geer writes after reading the book Clans by policeman Jan Persson and reporter Johannes Wahlström.

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Book

Klans : the crime that threatens the system.

Authors: Jan Persson and Johannes Wahlström

Publishing: Mondial 2024 (paperback)

Number of pages: 187

Price: SEK 79

It has hardly escaped anyone's notice that crime has escalated sharply in recent years, with rapidly expanding drug trafficking and spectacular shootings and explosions. The media usually say that it is “gangs” or “networks” that are behind it. They like to describe, not infrequently with romantic overtones, a criminality linked to a youth culture born from the exclusion of the suburbs. It is certainly not completely incorrect, but gives a very incomplete picture of organized crime in Sweden today.

The clans: the system-threatening crime is written by former security police Jan Persson and Johannes Wahlström, award-winning journalist. The book was published last year and is now available in paperback. It consists of a series of case studies that show that today's serious crime is not only carried out by rapping desperadoes from “the locality”, but that it is well organized, deeply rooted in the parallel societies created by mass immigration and with ramifications in the political apparatus, authorities and banks.

The authors write at the beginning:

“During the work on the book, we have mapped the majority of all serious crimes involving narcotics, murder, explosions and extortion in Sweden that have been prosecuted in the past five years. After perusing hundreds of thousands of documents, a never before told picture of the present emerges. /…/…an overwhelming part of organized crime is carried out within what can be described as large hierarchical families where the members help each other within their respective social positions and professional fields and in return share in the profits. These families are not inherently criminal because far from all of their members commit crimes. On the other hand, the criminal acts are centrally sanctioned and benefit the clan as a whole.”

The late police chief Mats Löfving caused a stir when he said in an interview in Ekot four years ago that there are about 40 families who came to Sweden with the aim of committing crimes. The confused reception showed that the existence of clans, or “family-based networks”, was an unfamiliar and difficult concept for Swedish authorities and mass media; politically sensitive, but also difficult to understand.

The police have of course been aware of the problem for decades, but have generally chosen to keep quiet about it. The mass media have also sadly covered up and lied about the criminality among first and second generation immigrants, because they saw it as their mission to save the populace from becoming “xenophobic”. In Sweden, we should not pretend about ethnicity, if it does not involve something positive. It certainly does not only apply to the mass media, but is a politically virtuous blindness that has been imposed on the entire Swedish people for half a century. Statistics Sweden, for example, never registers ethnicity, but only covers “born in Sweden”. It is really only in recent years that this programmatically color-blind paradigm has begun to lose its grip a little.

For Swedes, “family” more or less means grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. One does not have any social or financial obligations towards the family, except towards one's own minor children. In other societies, the extended family, the clan, is the most important social and political unit. That's how it was in Scandinavia during the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages. The Scottish Highlands were a distinct clan society until the latter part of the 18th century, when it was brutally crushed by British rule. Similar structures have also characterized, for example, southern Italy, Sardinia and not least, of course, Sicily, but also Corsica and Albania. Clans are thus not just a Somali phenomenon.

Clan structures generally seem to have survived mainly in rugged regions where central power has had difficulty establishing effective control and perhaps particularly among religious or ethnic minorities. Distrust of external authority is deeply rooted in these societies. It is regarded as not only foreign but hostile and justice is administered as much as possible internally, according to its own code.

In Sweden, the people of the criminal networks within various institutions fall essentially into two categories: on the one hand, they are pawns from their own family who have been trained as, for example, economists, lawyers or accountants, and on the other hand, outsiders are recruited. The clans are strongly established in the pub world and run nightclubs and casinos, establishments that are good to have for business. Not only for the drug sales, one of the cases described is a recently divorced, alcoholic customs official with a gambling addiction who frequents such a place. Everyone can figure out the rest.

Otherwise, what is depicted is all kinds of crime: arms trafficking, human trafficking, online fraud that is operated from Nigeria where it is a billion-dollar industry, drugs, murder, extortion, fraud . Rubbed.

An unusually unsavory case concerns a Turkish criminal ex-policeman who immigrated to Sweden in 2006, called Cemil. When he came to Sweden, he was wanted in Turkey for, among other things, extortion and bribery. In Sweden, he starts several companies mainly in the construction sector to which he recruits workers from Romania and Uzbekistan with the promise of board and lodging and a good salary. Instead, they are treated brutally, effectively as slaves, and go home poorer than they came. He bribes or threatens building inspectors and the police know that the money he has invested in his construction companies comes from drug trafficking, but they can't get him; his network includes building permit officers, accountants and lawyers. Eventually, however, he is sentenced to eight months in prison for, among other things, accounting offenses and money laundering.

After falling into conflict with a Syrian clan, he retreats a bit and devotes himself to politics. Together with the former mayor of the Turkish city of Kulu, he gets involved in the election campaign for the Swedish parliamentary elections. Kulu, with twenty thousand inhabitants, is the home of around ten thousand Swedish citizens entitled to vote. Since the mid-sixties, approximately fifty thousand Turks have immigrated to Sweden from Kulu in particular and mainly settled in Botkyrka. Many return to their hometown after retirement. Fredrik Reinfeldt visited the town before the 2010 election. Wahlström and Persson summarize:

“Ahead of the 2022 parliamentary elections, three Swedes with roots in Kulu are running in the Swedish parliamentary elections. With the help of private funds and the local political administration, the village is wallpapered with the Swedes' election posters. One of the candidates is named Mikail Yuksel and is the former mayor's son. After accusations of having connections to the gray wolves, he is excluded from the Center Party and instead he is running as leader of his own party, Nyans. Despite a strong election results, Yuksel fails to enter the Riksdag. Instead, the two who campaign in Kulu do. One of them is checked in for the Social Democrats and the other, a man who has been repeatedly convicted of assault, is checked in for the Center Party and immediately runs then to the post of party leader.”

The authors mention almost no names, barely even place names, but it is usually called “in a suburb of a city in southern Sweden…” and the book has no source references. It may be seen as a weakness, but is completely understandable; it is not harmless to write about these things, especially not to single out people or families by name.

Now, the book was written last year, before the unprecedented wave of violence of the late summer and autumn began in earnest, when the foxtrot still meant an old couple dance, and nobody knew about the “strawberry” or the “Kurdish fox”. Otherwise, it would have been interesting to know something about the relationship between a network like Foxtrot and the clans described in the book. Is the gang war going on where mostly younger, in some cases very young, people are both perpetrators and victims really a conflict between different clans? Is their activity at least sanctioned from a higher place? Do such connections exist or do the criminal networks that have been talked about and written about so much in the past year consist of younger freelancers who have opened their own?

Since these networks have been established through the great immigration, it would also have been desirable if the authors had at least somewhat problematized the status of the clans within their respective ethnic groups. The criminal elements are certainly a minority, but what power do they have within the larger group? How much do they make up and how are they viewed – with fear, admiration, or a bit of both? Many within these groups do not like them, but say nothing – is it out of fear or does ethnic solidarity get the last word? Another thing that should have been given more space in that context is the role of the various religious communities, both Christian and Muslim.

Nevertheless, The Clans is an urgent book, which is also compelling and well-written. The authors warn that the clans' grip on society can grow into a threat to the social order itself, when the state's monopoly on violence is seriously challenged. They write that the taboo that has prevailed around the issue for decades must be broken in order for it to even begin to tackle the problems at all.

That is absolutely true. Some of us warned that it was five past twelve for Sweden already in the 90s. The twelve strokes have long since passed, but also the time when these kinds of issues were taboo has passed.

In the government office, a number of bills are now being prepared on things such as increased deportations, the possibility of revoking the citizenship of criminal immigrants and harsher punishments for gang-related crimes. It's admittedly far too little and far too late, but for those of us who remember how it used to sound just ten years ago, it's clear that the public is quickly moving in the right direction. The Swede may be bruised, humiliated and robbed, but at least he is alive.

JONAS DE GEER

Jonas De Geer is a freelance writer

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