Racial Time Bomb

Andrew Young may have been on to something after all.

Two months ago, Washington's Ambassador to the U.N. infuriated Swedes by calling them "terrible racists." He later explained, a bit lamely, that his comment was just a general observation about the presence of racism everywhere. This summer, however, Sweden has been hit by a small but ugly wave of racial incidents, which suggests that America's most celebrated un-diplomat may have been nearer to the mark than Sweden's defenders had thought. In June a rat pack of young Swedish ruffians clashed with a group of Assyrian immigrants from the Middle East in Soedertaelje near Stockholm; it was the third such encounter of the year. Last week, in the southern port of Malmo, another bunch of toughs set out to terrorize 300 gypsy families, most of them from Czechoslovakia and Russia, who live in a local development.

The violence at Malmo erupted when a gang of youths wheeled up to the apartment buildings, picked a few fights with young gypsies, and wound up kicking in the door of an elderly couple. Later, a 70-car caravan of hooligans headed toward the area, only to meet a cordon of police armed for a riot. Brandishing clubs and bicycle chains, the youths battled police for an hour.

Racial resentment against dark-skinned foreign workers--including expatriate American blacks--is spreading through Sweden, which has a slumping economy and rising unemployment. The prime targets are 6,000 or so Assyrians, mainly refugees from the civil war in

Lebanon and Greek-Turkish clashes on Cyprus. Their bitterest enemies are a group of restless thugs between the ages of 16 and 25 known as Raggare (for their habit of cruising around--ragga in Swedish--in big old American cars). According to one Raggare, the Assyrians are "blackskulls" who deserve to be attacked because "they live off welfare. They sleep until 2. They chase after our Swedish girls." Along with the gypsies and other immigrant groups, they pose the threat of social change, something that neither the hard-drinking, working-class Raggare nor many law-abiding Swedes are willing to face.

Clannish Refugees. Yet the problem will not go away. The government has pushed through liberal immigration reforms aimed at assimilating newcomers into Swedish society. Trouble is, many of Sweden's 700,000 to 800,000 immigrants--now 10% of the population --have resisted attempts to sprinkle them among the population. When Assyrian "ghettos" began to form last year, the government tried to break them up, but the clannish refugees simply moved back together. David Schwarz, a Polish-born naturalized Swede who edits the Journal of Immigrants and Minorities calculates that if the immigrants keep arriving at the current rate of about 20,000 a year, nearly a third of all Swedes will be of foreign descent by the year 2000. Warns Schwarz: "The big problem will come in the next decade when 100,000 to 200,000 immigrant children will be coming out of the schools without cultural pride but still without being Swedes. These people will not accept the menial jobs their fathers did. They will want to become judges and generals when the society is not ready. It is a real social time bomb."

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