A reporter for Swedish television broadcaster SVT was attacked while filming a programme in the heavily Somali-heritage populated Tjärna Ängar neighbourhood of Borlänge which aired this week.
A clip from the programme “Uppdrag Granskning” shows locals reacting with anger to the reporter and television crew filming in the area, which has a high population of migrants originally from Somalia.
An unknown person threw a rock at the crew while shouting “fuck SVT” and, later, masked individuals approached the crew, asking why they were filming in the area, newspaper Expressen reports.
“You have to say good things about this area if you’re going to record,” one of the men told the camera crew.
Tjärna Ängar is what the Swedish government identifies as a “vulnerable area“, known colloquially to many across Europe familiar with such neighbourhoods as a ‘No Go Zone’. While the name does not necessarily suggest the area is totally inaccessible to the forces of law and order, they are areas associated with “high crime rates and social exclusion” and where police officers would be required to travel in groups of two or more, even when off-duty.
Top cop Torsten Elofsson explained what No Go Zones meant in the Swedish context in 2015, when he said: “…police can go to these places, but you have to take precautions. Years ago you could go with two officers, no problem. Now you have to send four officers and two cars – if the fire brigade want to go, they have to take a police escort. They throw stones and try to stop the fireman from putting out fires.
“They sabotage the police cars. You can’t leave them unguarded – when you come back to it you find the windows smashed and the tyres deflated.”
The attack on the Tjärna Ängar camera crew is just the latest on a member of the press in a Swedish no-go area in recent years. In 2016, an Australian television crew were attacked in the Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby, known as “Little Mogadishu” for its high population of Somali migrants.
A year later, a photographer for the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter was also attacked in Rinkeby during a riot, saying he was punched and kicked by a group of up to fifteen men.
According to a report from SVT, police in the area have been concerned over the development of a parallel society in the area and have noted that girls with Somali backgrounds are often forbidden to hang out with Swedish-background girls, who are often labelled as “whores.”
“The area police describe that Somali young girls are not allowed to socialize with Swedish girls. The reason is that the Swedish girls are described as ‘whores’ based on their lifestyle, including the style of clothing,” a 2019 police report states.
“I think it’s parents who have prejudices, everyone has prejudices. I believe that foreign-born parents have prejudices about the Swedish young people just as the opposite is the case and that they want to try to protect their own daughters in this case in their own way,” local police officer Marie Edlund said.
Regional politician Mursal Isa, who is from a Somali background himself, previously worked in the Tjärna Ängar area and said any radical policies to solve integration issues are difficult to propose as those implementing them will likely be labelled racists.
Isa was also interviewed by Uppdrag Granskning and claimed that some Somalis in the area do not bother learning Swedish, do not work and do not testify in court against criminals for fear of repercussions.
Listed as a “vulnerable area” in 2015, Tjärna Ängar saw only 40 per cent of the population working a job in 2019, the lowest in all of Borlänge.