Awaiting the spring

A serene white sea outside the window welcomes me back to life after a night full of dreams on which my sexual appetite never seemed to be fulfilled. I usually dream about other things – most of them of the nasty kind: assassins who try to kill me; a sin force chasing me through the jungle; one of my bosses forcing me to lick the chief editor’s shoes clean…

Sexually charged dreams are a feature of the arriving spring. That’s why I was a bit disillusioned this morning when I saw the veil of snow covering Sweden. I was expecting a greener view, more joyful black birds on the roofs and to fill my lungs with the fragrances of the fruitful dark soil surrounding the city where I live.

But the weather is just as crazy and unpredictable as we humans are. And the spring is not longer loaded with promises of a better, warmer destiny. Spring is an untrustworthy season, as Robert Fisk recently pointed out in The Independent. The good thing is that my biological clock hasn’t noticed it and I still have my dreams.

Not only a hammer is missing in Arboga

More than a week has gone since the brutal killing of two children in the Swedish city of Arboga and the police still have not a murderer to show to the public. Today, surgeons at Uppsala’s university hospital worked hardly for hours on the children’s severely injured mother. Surgery went well, according to the woman’s father, Mr Roland Jangestig.

I hope she wakes up soon despite it certainly is the most terrible nightmare she will be forced to confront. A nightmare worsen by an appalling police investigation, which reminds me about that one conducted by the police in the town of Linköping after the killings of 8 years old Mohammad Ammouri and 56 years old Anna-Lena Svenson.

They were stabbed to death on the street on October 19, 2004. The latest we heard about it was last autumn when the daily Östgöta Correspondenten told us that the police had done about 650 DNA-tests and 4,500 interrogations, but still do not have a single clue about who the killer is. The man leading the investigation in Linköping is Mr. Benniet Henricson.

Bo Forsman is the police chief of Västmanland’s regional crime investigation unit. He does not think big mistakes have been made in the hunting of the child killer in Arboga. No, they have the investigation just under control…(?)

– It goes forward and I’m optimistic, Mr Forsman declares in an interview published today by the daily VLT.

But the police do not know where the main suspect, a German woman, is right now. She lived in Stockholm; she “probably” visited Arboga the same day the children were killed; she travelled then to Germany and got temporary arrested by the police but released short after…

And time goes by… I think the 25 or so police officers working with the case are not only missing a hammer… And I have the creepy feeling that Mr. Benniet Henricson and Mr. Bo Forsman went to the same police school… Is it stupid to expect better results? I’m not the only one feeling deeply dissapointed. Read for instance Peter Kadhammars column on Aftonbladet.

Only fools seat and wait…

Suspected child killer on the loose

Prosecutor Frieda Gummesson is having a hard time. The German woman suspected of being the killer of two children in the Swedish town of Arboga was released from police custody late on Saturday night.

The reason: prosecutor Frieda Gummesson and her team of crime investigators within the police force in Västerås have been unsuccessful in producing enough evidence to connect the German woman to the crime scene.

This failure makes it impossible for the authorities in Germany to keep the suspect behind bars. It makes the Swedish public of course doubt about the skills of Gummesson & co. It also serves to question the precision of the Swedish judicial system, which allows the courts to consent to have people arrested for long time despite few evidences against them. It’s that really right? Really effective?

I don’t want of course to have suspected killers on the loose, but I think it is positive for the rule of law that Swedish prosecutors and police officers understand they must become more efficient when dealing with sensitive and media exposed cases like this one.

Every minute counts, as Criminology Professor Jerzy Sarnecki points out in an interview with Aftonbladet.  Flaws, even tiny ones, can play a big, unhelpful role when a child killer is to be trapped. Are we about to witness a judicial tragedy?  I hope we do not.

New award to racist journalists

The international organisation Survival’s award to the “most racist article of the year” goes to the Paraguayan newspaper La Nacion. The honored article, published on 13 september 2007, says among other things: 

“The Indians need to become civilized, to become Paraguayans, to forget this stupid idea of trying to preserve their backward, withered culture, and in so doing live like people who pay their taxes. Either that, or return to the depths of the jungle and carry on living with the animals. There’s no alternative. Paraguayans shouldn’t have to pay taxes to maintain an out-of-date way of living that can’t support itself.” 

As Survival’s director Stephen Corryin points out, such media racism must be counter-fought not because of political correctness but because it has very real consequences for peoples’ livelihoods, land and, ultimately, their lives… 

The Paraguayan racists are not alone; you can without difficulty find this kind of academic and accepted racism in the European media. In Sweden for instance citizens’ with immigrant background (by the white majority called: “svartskallar”) are used to read racist discourses about them in the daily press.

We could give such a prize every single week! I think I will start doing that. Help me monitoring the Swedish press and send me any racist article you find! 

The winner of the Survival’s award will receive a certificate inscribed with a quotation from Lakota Sioux author Luther Standing Bear: ‘All the years of calling the Indian a savage has never made him one.’

Do you would like to pass on your congratulations to La Nacion? Call the paper +595 21 512 520 or email to their newsdesk: redaccion@lanacion.com.py