On Monday, we brought you “Massive Coverup Exposed In Sweden As Media, Cops Hid Migrant Sex Attacks [6]” in which we detailed an evolving story out of Stockholm where police and some members of the media stand accused of covering up a wave of sexual assaults that allegedly occurred at a festival in August of last year.
According to Nyheter Idag, a reporter for the prominent daily Dagens Nyheter had an opportunity to talk with police about the attacks but ultimately shied away from the story when it became apparent that many of the accused were migrants.
Just a day before the Nyheter Idag story was published, Dagens Nyheter ran its own account of the incident and blamed police for covering up the attacks.
That certainly looked like an effort to get out ahead of the Nyheter Idag exposé but whatever the case, someone (or several someones) apparently took it upon themselves to keep the festival assaults from getting publicized for fear of sparking an anti-migrant backlash. Here’s what we wrote on Monday:
If Nyeter Idag's allegations are true, it certainly seems possible that Dagens Nyheter was under political pressure to avoid the story if possible. Meanwhile, if Dagens Nyheter's account is accurate, it appears the police could have been under similar pressure. After all, it's the politicians that set the agenda, the media simply perpetuate it and the police simply enforce it, so it's difficult to believe that the media and the police conspired alone to cover up the attacks.
Long story short, the attacks in Cologne have made it impossible to sweep the Stockholm assaults under the rug and now, authorities and politicians are rushing to "investigate" what happened.
(a scene from the festival)
On Tuesday, the arrests began as a 15-year-old boy was taken into custody in connection with the fiasco. "A 15-year-old boy has been charged with assault and sexual assault at a music festival in Stockholm, after police were accused of withholding information about a string of attacks there," The Local writes [7], adding that "police said the boy had been charged with assault and sexual assault against two 14-year-old girls at the event." Here's more:
There were 38 reports of rape and sexual assault filed after the We Are Sthlm festival, which uses the postal abbreviation for Stockholm, in 2014 and 2015, according to police, who released the information on Monday after the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper suggested that there had been a cover-up.
The paper reported it had seen a memo from last summer, warning police ahead of the event that there was a known "problem with young men who rub themselves against young girls" at the festival.
Police would not say how many men had been linked to the alleged assaults, but DN reported that as many as 50 Afghan refugees who had come to Sweden without their parents were suspected to be involved.
The free We are Sthlm festival is put on every year for 12 to 17-year-olds and is held in various locations in the city centre, including Kungsträdgården, a large park close to Stockholm's Royal Palace. The programme in 2015 boasted a number of international dance companies and circuses alongside Swedish artists including Zara Larsson, who headlined the event.
Police said last summer that there had been "relatively few crimes and people taken into custody considering the number of participants" in the festival, however documents sent by police to DN and the AFP news agency showed allegations of a total of 17 sexual assaults and one rape during the 2014 music festival, and 19 sexual assaults and one rape in 2015.
"We should certainly have written and told people about this, no doubt. Why it did not happen I do not know," Varg Gyllander, a police press spokesperson, told DN.
Varg may "not know", but if we had to guess, the police determined that creating a media spectacle around the attacks wasn't worth it considering what the implications might be for other refugees living in the country and for immigration policy writ large.
As for Dagens Nyheter, the daily flatly denies allegations that it chose not to run the story last year in order to avoid inflaming tensions between Swedes and migrants. "The data on the DN would pursue blackout is mendacious: an important thing that young women are subjected to systematic abuse is an obvious novelty for DN to report," an amusing translation of a statment [8] from editorial director Caspar Opitz reads. Opitz goes on to explain that he was unable to get "confirmation of the molestations": "In our regular checking with the police and other channels and sources we received last summer no confirmation of these molestations." As everyone knows, the first rule of journalism is that you must always confirm your molestations. Here's a bit more from Opitz who apparently interrogated himself as the statement is presented in FAQ format:
But you did, according to information circulated on the network, a concrete tip that many people had suffered molestation and harassment?
- Yes, it came in August a tip to our ledarredaktion that there has been a series of systematic molestation at the festival. The tip came from a source who wished to remain anonymous. We took it very seriously, had contact with the source and tried to move forward with the tip, but failed to get it confirmed. An aggravating factor was of course that the police, who have the right government mandate to investigate crimes, not went out and talked about the incident. Therefore, reported virtually no media - established or alternative - if serious abuses in the Royal Garden last summer.
How could you fail there?
- We get hundreds of tips to the editor every day. We sift through them, make the most credible, devote time to some, prioritizes away others.The quality of the advice varies widely. In this case, made a number of calls and checks, but because we have not reached an acknowledgment that there was no article. There was, for example, information in the tips we got on that very many people had been arrested, that a check is not proved to be correct.
Seen how that works? It's the police's fault because if they had made a bigger deal out of it, the media would have been forced to report it.
Of course in reality it's the other way around. The media discovers a coverup, shares the details with the world, and then officials are forced to come clean. When the media doesn't do its job, that process never gets started.
It's also worth mentioning that the editor of Nyheter Idag is what The Local describes as "a formerly active member of the anti-immigration Sweden Democrat party," so clearly they had an agenda in reporting the Dagens Nyheter coverup.
"Growing frustration in Sweden with an asylum policy that will allow up to 190,000 refugees into the country this year is driving Europe’s self-declared 'humanitarian superpower' into the arms of radical nationalism," The Guardian wrote in November [9]. "The Sweden Democrats (SD), a nationalist party that emerged from the neo-Nazi movement and has been shunned by Sweden’s mainstream parties because of its far-right immigration policies, is now the country’s third-largest party with 49 representatives in parliament." Given that, it seems likely that someone from the country's "mainstream" parties might have "suggested" that Dagens Nyheter not cover the story and that police keep any investigations of the attacks to themselves in order to keep the issue from becoming free marketing material for an "undesirable" political party that's rapidly gaining popular support.
Now, that strategy has backfired. Anti-immigration parties will be able to point to the coverup as evidence to suggest that not only is Sweden's immigration policy dangerous, the politicians who support it are corrupt. We close with a quote from Daniel Poohl, editor-in-chief of Expo [10], a pressure group that charts fascist activity in Sweden:
“I think we have to be aware that the far-right didn’t disappear from Europe, it just had an enormous backlash after 1945. At that time democracy was the ID that destroyed society; today it’s multiculturalism that destroys the nation.”
