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 Paraguayans shouldn’t have to pay taxes to maintain an out-of-date way of living that can’t support itself.”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