FactualSince the start of the year, 44 young people have been killed in clashes between rival groups. In the northern districts of Stockholm, particularly affected, residents believe they have been abandoned.
“Before, I used to list the results of the schools. Now I count the dead and the injured. “ Kufi embroidered with flowers, a matching scarf, Mohamed Hagi Farah, 69, tireless voice of the northern districts of Stockholm, takes out a pink plastic pouch. He keeps letters and newspaper articles there, retracing twenty years of mobilization. On a piece of paper, he wrote down the names of the six neighborhoods that make up the Järva area. Below, columns of numbers, with a s for ” skadad ” (injured) and a d for ” dod ” (dead).
Since the start of the year, nine young people from Järva have been killed and two injured, in a settling of scores between rival groups. Mohamed Hagi Farah attended all the funerals. On October 22, he also traveled to southern Stockholm, to participate in the rally, organized by residents of the Hammarby Sjöstad neighborhood, after the murder of rapper Einar.
Real name Nils Grönberg, the 19-year-old artist was shot dead about twenty kilometers from Järva. But for Mr. Farah, “It does not make a difference: he was one more victim”. Since then, residents of Hammarby Sjöstad have come to do night patrols with the inhabitants of the northern districts: an unprecedented encounter between two worlds that rarely come together but have found themselves facing this spiral of violence, which has already killed 44 people and a hundred injured this year in Sweden.
According to a report published in May by the Crime Prevention Council (Bra) in Stockholm, no other European country has experienced such an increase in gun violence over the past 15 years, while crime has declined. A phenomenon “ very connected to the crime scene in disadvantaged neighborhoods ”, specifies the report, and which concerns almost exclusively men aged 20 to 29 years.
“Poorly organized” groups
Criminologist Sven Granath lists a combination of factors: “The massive influx of guns and drugs over the past two decades has helped fuel an illegal economy, where conflicts are resolved by shooting each other. Added to this is digitization, which is very advanced in Sweden and used by criminal groups to develop. And then, the inequalities widened. We have seen the emergence of parallel societies, with an immigrant population that is not always well integrated. ”
Researchers, however, cannot explain why Sweden stands out so much: “All these factors exist in other countries, without leading to such an increase in violence”, observes Klara Hradilova Selin, Bra investigator. In the Järva area, where 87,000 people live, spread across the cities of Rinkeby, Hjulsta, Tensta, Akalla, Kista and Husby, around 30 murders have been committed since 2015.
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