Iranian-born Mina Dennert is leading a movement that challenges racial hatred in Sweden
She woke up with her hair cut off and her body covered in Nazi symbols. She was 14 years old. In the white, rich and apparently peaceful area of Kullavik, south of Gothenburg, Sweden, Mina Dennert had become a girl who posed a threat to the white race.
“Not being Swedish had never even occurred to me,” Dennert admitted, 26 years later, as she reflected on how you go about taking back control of your own life after such a devastating event. The social climate back then and its consequences, which resulted in the humiliation and rejection of that particular teenage girl in the suburb of Kullavik, meant that Dennert almost ceased to exist.
Today, at least, there’s an answer. Dennert is the founder of #jagärhär, the Swedish movement known in the UK as #iamhere. The aim of the #jagärhär movement is for nobody to be exposed to hate speech or threats, and for nobody to have to face hatred alone.
All of this seems immediately relevant in light of President Donald Trump’s disparaging statement on European immigration, likening immigrants to terrorists and calling it “very negative” to historically white European countries.
But let’s take another look where it all started, back in the early 1990s. There was a recession both in Sweden and throughout the Balkans. Sweden accepts 84,000 refugees. Over a 12-month period, 117 refugee camps are attacked. In 1991, an election year, a new political trend is on the rise. An anti-immigrant group, composed of young, uneducated men, which argues in favor of reduced immigration, grew in size. As it did so, it brought together an increasing number of younger people – the section of the electorate that has traditionally had a more open-minded attitude. During this time, Sweden’s population as a whole became more negative in its attitude toward immigrants. Opinions continue to shift, despite the fact that fewer refugees were arriving and fewer permanent residence permits were being granted.
Ian Wachtmeister and Bert Karlsson travelled around the country, stacking beer crates on top of each other to symbolize what they claimed immigration is costing society. This attitude affected practically all of the parliamentary parties, whose policies become more restrictive, and the political rhetoric changed from being welcoming to discussing the ways in which refugees and immigrants are a burden on Swedish society. The New Democracy party entered Parliament.
During the same period, a network named White Aryan Resistance embarked upon a violent hate campaign against immigrants, Jews and homosexuals, by making threats and carrying out acts of violence accompanied by white power music. They had no ambitions for parliamentary influence. Their sympathizers – right-wing extremist skinheads in bomber jackets and boots – were visible on Sweden’s streets.
The Keep Sweden Swedish, or BSS party dissolves in the late 1980s. In 1988, the Swedish Democrat party is created, and its members include former members of BSS. The party retains the BBS slogan “Keep Sweden Swedish” until the late 1990s. The party seeks parliamentary influence and wins its first mandates in municipal councils in 1991.
In the meantime, Mina Dennert was growing up in the white and relatively affluent suburb of Kullavik, south of Gothenburg. She is an adopted child, born in Iran and brought to Sweden as a 1-year-old.
In 1989, she was 14. It is at this time that she became closely acquainted with the effects of radicalization on her group of friends: suddenly she found herself in a situation where her very existence is questioned. “I have a very clear memory of the first time I heard of ‘Keep Sweden Swedish,’” she says. “It was the last Saturday of the summer holidays. A guy walked past, looked at me and just said it out loud. My whole world crashed down around me. I just didn’t understand. Wasn’t I Swedish? I’m as Swedish as they come!”
Dennert was a girl who loved black pudding, ate jam on everything, who knew the official flowers of all the Swedish provinces, was a nerd about her country’s history and who wanted to preserve its traditions. “If I wasn’t Swedish, what was I?”
Everything changed that summer.
“The guys who used to hang out by the youth center with their mopeds suddenly became neo-Nazis,” Dennert said. “And everyone went along with them.” Her boyfriend dumped her and denied that they’d ever been together. A love letter that she wrote to him was photocopied and spread all over the school – covered in swastikas and neo-Nazi propaganda.
“I just wanted to run home and hide,” Dennert says. “I was sitting there at the bus stop one day with a friend when a man came up with his gang. It felt like there were several hundred men, but we just stayed there. We had nowhere to go, and so me and my friend decided to go over to Billdal, the next suburb over.” Dennert said laughing. “Go over to Billdal! That’s where the people who were against the neo-Nazis lived. They met up at the bus station and fought each other on the weekends.”
Dennert laughs often, even when she is telling the worst parts of her story. “It’s only now, looking back, that I see all the stuff I put up with, how bad it was and how significant it’s been in my life,” she said. “One of my best friends was black, too. It was pretty much just him and me. And he couldn’t cope. He died a few years back, after many years of drug abuse. Even though he did it to himself, it was the racial hatred that drove him to it.”
In the 1990s, a string of violent crimes and murders were committed that had neo-Nazi and extreme right-wing overtones. Eleven people were shot in Stockholm between 1991 and 1992 and the victims had what was described as being a “non-Swedish appearance.” The most extensive police investigation in Sweden since the murder of Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister assassinated in Stockholm in 1986. After some time, the man known as “The Laser Man” was caught and sentenced to life for one murder, 10 attempted murders and nine bank robberies.
Within a few years, West Sweden was shaken by two additional murders, of which neo-Nazis are found guilty: John Hron was tortured to death in Kode and sculptor Per Skogsberg was beaten to death in Gothenburg. John, a 14-year-old, was killed because he refused to praise Nazism and Per was murdered because of his sexual orientation.
In just one year, #jagärhär has gone from being a small group on the Internet to being a well-established association that holds talks, workshops, forms opinions and is involved in dialogue with the government, the mainstream media and social media giants alike. Dennert is currently the only employee. The association has received praise and financial support and has been mentioned as a good example in the Swedish Government’s action plan, “In defense of free speech,” which presents measures to combat threats and hatred directed at journalists, elected representatives and artists.
#jagärhär will be launching its forthcoming book, “Courage” (“Mod”) at the Gothenburg Book Fair.
Almost 76,000 people are members of the organization’s Swedish Facebook group. The movement is also spreading beyond Sweden’s boundaries: The German group has nearly 40,000. Its members take action online in threads where hate, fake news and racism thrive. They do this not by entering into the controversy, but by standing up for reasoned dialogue or simply by demonstrating their presence.
“I’ve always felt ‘racified,’” Dennert says. “What does that mean? Different people have different interpretations, but for me it means being subject to, or in the danger zone for experiencing, racism – either physically or mentally.” The #jagärhär movement started on May 16, 2016, when Dennert saw that a Facebook friend was sharing racist material. She followed the thread and found herself on racist and anti-immigrant pages. She started to ask questions in the comments in response to what was being posted, asking “Is this likely?” and “Is it true?”
“It wasn’t Internet hate, but it was clear that they had a world view based on one insane claim after another,” she says. It was then that she had an idea: to do a kind of patrol online. “A bit like a kind of Neighborhood Watch,” Dennert says. “I asked a few friends what they thought of the idea. The strategy is simple. We tag things so that it’s easy to find each other and we like each other’s comments, so that what we say gets placed at the top of the thread. We show that we’re there, so that other people feel able to speak out.”
We start talking about why #jagärhär is important. “There’s a power in daring to speak out,” Dennert says. “You become stronger when you see that you aren’t alone. Being the victim of hate means that you’re filled with shame. It’s embarrassing to be different; to be a victim. They say, ‘You’re stupid, you’re disgusting’, and then it’s all about you, and not about the fact that they’re neo-Nazis, for example.”
Dennert has no need to discuss things with right-wing extremists but said that it’s important that it’s not only victims who are expected to protest and try to change things: it’s the responsibility of the whole majority of society. “We should make room for those who aren’t allowed a voice,” she said, with an intense look on her face.
She laughed again and twisted her hair into a knot on the top of her head. After a little while, the knot unraveled itself and her hair fell down again. This is the hair that the neo-Nazis shaved off when, at the age of 14, she drank too much at a party and passed out. When she woke, she found tufts of hair in her underwear and her friends trying to wash neo-Nazi graffiti, swastikas and the letters VAM and BSS from her body. They didn’t want her to have to see them.
I asked Dennert where the adults were when this happened and whether she told her parents.
“I was ashamed,” she said. “I just couldn’t tell them. I tried saying some stuff, but I didn’t get a good reaction. Nobody was listening. That’s how it was then. Everyone knew who the guys were and said, ‘Oh, they’re just like that’. And everyone just went along with it. There were swastikas all over the neighborhood.”
Her parents tried to alleviate the situation by asking her to change her behavior. “I couldn’t see how to do that,” she said sighing. “I mean, this is how I look; this is how I am. I speak out about things. Even now, we’ve never talked about it – not with my family or with my friends. It still feels like something that it’s impossible to talk about.”
It’s hard to avoid the link between Dennert’s experiences as a teenager and her mission today – to create a world where there’s a place for everyone. “Back then, we could only deal with what was going on. We had to put up with loads of shit,” she said. “We couldn’t escape; there was nobody else to hang out with. We were just there, and we just had to suffer.”
Today, she’s tired. There’s so much more to do. The process of launching #jagärhär outside Sweden is underway, but it’s a lot of work. Everyone who wants to join the group has their Facebook account reviewed, to avoid admitting trolls. Everyone needs Dennert to do something. This isn’t a job that has an eight-hour working day. A missed train on the way to a talk in Tierp on her birthday was enough to leave her in tears on the platform. Keeping up an online presence is a 24/7 job and it’s hard to switch off. But Dennert is proud. She believes that #jagärhär has achieved change, and that personal attacks and the amount of hate and threats posted online has decreased.
One thing that has increased, however, is the spreading of rumors, fake news and instances of people twisting the truth. Members are called terrorists by their opponents and some of them are victimized by having their addresses, telephone numbers and personal information exposed online. Strangers ring up their children and families at all hours of the day and night. “It’s one thing to attack those of us who represent the group. But members’ kids? That’s so low,” Dennert said, as we stand together on the escalator in the Swedish Exhibition and Congress Centre.
September 2017 was a month of crisis management, marching neo-Nazis and the Gothenburg Book Fair. The extreme right-wing newspaper Nya Tider has a stand just a few meters from #jagärhär’s. Nya Tider’s much-discussed presence resulted in authors and publishers boycotting the fair. But Dennert nodded toward their stand in the corner and said, “They’ve been over and said hello and we’ve talked a bit.”
Despite all that she’s been through, Dennert is happier now. She is more open and is braver. She said that #jagärhär has made her ashamed of her own prejudices. She has also seen the most unexpected people stand up against sexism and for feminism. Her former boyfriend, the one who was radicalized and who spread her love letter all over school, congratulated her for winning the Anna Lindh Prize. The honor is an annual prize awarded to someone fighting injustice and protecting human rights, which was set up in honor of Anna Lindh, a prominent Swedish politician who was assassinated in 2003.
“Everyone handled the situation when I was a teenager differently,” Dennert said. “They didn’t understand. But maybe I wasn’t as alone as I felt. Before, I often saw racism in the things other people did and I took on the role of victim. I felt powerless and saw conspiracies everywhere.
One rule in the #jagärhär group is not to interpret things. If you’re not sure what someone means, ask: ‘Have I understood you correctly?’ Doing this creates a dialogue instead of polarization.”
“We aren’t politically united,” Dennert said, when I ask her about what distinguishes #jagärhär from a left-wing or right-wing movement. “We aren’t actually united on almost anything. The only thing we agree on is that we must discuss politics and social issues in a sensible way. We must respect human rights and not discriminate against anyone.” She also views #jagärhär as being a tool useful for maintaining a living democracy. “We can’t have the right to vote if we don’t accept the responsibility to find out the facts – otherwise, we might as well just live in a dictatorship. Think of Brexit! The day after the vote, people were Googling it to find out what it was, not to find out what was going to happen next! They’d voted without knowing what they were voting for.”
At the moment, Dennert’s life consists of #jagärhär. So much is happening so quickly and, at the same time, there’s so much still to do. It’s frustrating and she asks herself if she’ll ever become someone with normal hobbies, like gardening or motocross. “But I have actually done something else: I’ve dealt with a major nuisance,” she said and smiled. “And, I think, I’ve perhaps taken back control of my life.”
Translated from Swedish by Jane Davis Courtesy of Street Roots’ sister paper Faktum / INSP.ngo
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