Rosengård: Integration in the eye of the storm
Malmö suburb Rosengård has come to symbolise Sweden's struggles with integration. AFP's Marc Preel examines a community grappling with its identity after a winter marred by rioting and clashes with the police.
Believers file quietly out of a mosque into the cold night in Rosengård, a neighbourhood at the centre of a heated debate over Sweden's failure to integrate immigrants amid reports that radical Islamists now control the area.
"How does society expect us to integrate when we are so segregated?" asks Sami Touman, a 21-year-old mechanical engineer student whose
family comes from Gaza.
Around 86 percent of the some 22,000 people who live in the towering, grey, 1960s concrete structures that make up the heart of this Malmö suburb in the south of Sweden are first or second generation immigrants.
Traditional Swedish names like Svensson, Larsson and Andersson have gradually disappeared from the metal buzzers, replaced to a large extent by the names of Muslim refugees who have fled conflicts in places like Iraq, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Afghanistan.
"When I first got here 15 years ago I had Swedish neighbours. Today, there isn't a single one left," says Anis, a 33-year-old of Bosnian origin who only gives his first name, as he eats a kebab at the large shopping centre that is Rosengård's main meeting point.
(..)
Kenneth, a 56-year-old unemployed truckdriver, agrees that Rosengård is basically just your average community.
"Rosengård is a fairly nice neighbourhood. You find everything here, except a Systembolaget," the state-run liquor store, the ethnic Swede jokes as he sips coffee with a friend at a shopping centre cafe surrounded by oriental stores interspersed with Swedish supermarkets.
"It's true that we are a minority here, but we don't really think about it in those terms. We have so many immigrant friends," he says.
Maxime Camara, who heads the Rosengård's refugee welcome committee, however laments that increasingly influential Islamic groups have further isolated the already over-populated and under-employed neighbourhood.
While Sweden's official unemployment rate stands at around seven percent, nearly 40 percent of Rosengård working age residents are jobless.
"A lot of young people here are out of work... Their parents don't work, and they get their only social interaction in the Islamic milieu, which complicates integration," says Camara, originally from Guinea.
"They spend their time speaking Arabic," he says, adding that "at heart they don't really want to be Swedish. They tell me so themselves."
Even the imam (preacher) at Rosengård's largest mosque complains that some immigrant communities here are not as open as they should be to Swedish society.
"That is a problem for us, for Europe, having some communities always looking to the past," says Bejzat Becirov, who gives his sermons in Swedish.
"So here we are with an Islamic football club and table tennis team," he adds.
(..)
Pernilla Ouis, an expert on Islam in Sweden at Malmö University, however maintains that a heavy Islamic influence makes it more difficult for immigrants to fit in in Sweden.
"The Muslim communities say they want to help, and that's fine, but their behaviour towards the non-Muslim society is not normal," she says.
The unrest was therefore in fact a good thing, insists Ouis, a Swedish citizen who herself wore the Muslim headscarf for 18 years.
"What happened this winter has brought attention to the problem that we couldn't talk about before without being accused of racism," she says.
(more)
Source: The Local (English)
Malmö suburb Rosengård has come to symbolise Sweden's struggles with integration. AFP's Marc Preel examines a community grappling with its identity after a winter marred by rioting and clashes with the police.
Believers file quietly out of a mosque into the cold night in Rosengård, a neighbourhood at the centre of a heated debate over Sweden's failure to integrate immigrants amid reports that radical Islamists now control the area.
"How does society expect us to integrate when we are so segregated?" asks Sami Touman, a 21-year-old mechanical engineer student whose
family comes from Gaza.
Around 86 percent of the some 22,000 people who live in the towering, grey, 1960s concrete structures that make up the heart of this Malmö suburb in the south of Sweden are first or second generation immigrants.
Traditional Swedish names like Svensson, Larsson and Andersson have gradually disappeared from the metal buzzers, replaced to a large extent by the names of Muslim refugees who have fled conflicts in places like Iraq, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Afghanistan.
"When I first got here 15 years ago I had Swedish neighbours. Today, there isn't a single one left," says Anis, a 33-year-old of Bosnian origin who only gives his first name, as he eats a kebab at the large shopping centre that is Rosengård's main meeting point.
(..)
Kenneth, a 56-year-old unemployed truckdriver, agrees that Rosengård is basically just your average community.
"Rosengård is a fairly nice neighbourhood. You find everything here, except a Systembolaget," the state-run liquor store, the ethnic Swede jokes as he sips coffee with a friend at a shopping centre cafe surrounded by oriental stores interspersed with Swedish supermarkets.
"It's true that we are a minority here, but we don't really think about it in those terms. We have so many immigrant friends," he says.
Maxime Camara, who heads the Rosengård's refugee welcome committee, however laments that increasingly influential Islamic groups have further isolated the already over-populated and under-employed neighbourhood.
While Sweden's official unemployment rate stands at around seven percent, nearly 40 percent of Rosengård working age residents are jobless.
"A lot of young people here are out of work... Their parents don't work, and they get their only social interaction in the Islamic milieu, which complicates integration," says Camara, originally from Guinea.
"They spend their time speaking Arabic," he says, adding that "at heart they don't really want to be Swedish. They tell me so themselves."
Even the imam (preacher) at Rosengård's largest mosque complains that some immigrant communities here are not as open as they should be to Swedish society.
"That is a problem for us, for Europe, having some communities always looking to the past," says Bejzat Becirov, who gives his sermons in Swedish.
"So here we are with an Islamic football club and table tennis team," he adds.
(..)
Pernilla Ouis, an expert on Islam in Sweden at Malmö University, however maintains that a heavy Islamic influence makes it more difficult for immigrants to fit in in Sweden.
"The Muslim communities say they want to help, and that's fine, but their behaviour towards the non-Muslim society is not normal," she says.
The unrest was therefore in fact a good thing, insists Ouis, a Swedish citizen who herself wore the Muslim headscarf for 18 years.
"What happened this winter has brought attention to the problem that we couldn't talk about before without being accused of racism," she says.
(more)
Source: The Local (English)
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