Swedes spooked as government, military say to prepare for war
STOCKHOLM—Realism or fear mongering? Calls from Sweden’s government and military urging Swedes to be ready for war has triggered panicked buying, frightened children and a fierce debate in the Nordic country.
While Sweden has contributed troops to international peacekeeping missions, the country has not been directly involved in an armed conflict since the Napoleonic era.
The realities of war are therefore foreign to most Swedes.
“There could be war in Sweden,” minister for civil defense Carl-Oskar Bohlin told an annual defense conference on Sunday, warning Swedes against complacency.
Days later, the sentiment was echoed by the commander of Sweden’s armed forces Micael Byden, who showed pictures of burnt out and bombed houses from Ukraine.
“Do you believe that this could be Sweden?” Byden asked the audience, later explaining that the question was not a rhetorical one.
“Russia’s war against Ukraine is a step, not an end goal, for the ambition to establish spheres of influence and tear down the rule-based world order,” he added.
Russia invasion
Ending two centuries of neutrality and military nonalignment, Sweden applied to join Nato in May 2022, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though its bid is currently held up by Turkey and Hungary.
In early December, Stockholm and Washington signed a pact paving the way for US forces to operate in Sweden.
Byden then went on to say that Swedes needed to “mentally prepare for war.”
The statements were widely spread by news outlets and social media.
Subsequently, children’s rights group Bris said it had seen a noticeable uptick in calls to its support hotline from children worried about the prospect of an impending war.
“Many children already have a level of anxiety that was made worse by this news,” Magnus Jagerskog, general secretary at Bris, said in a statement, adding that the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and more recently Gaza had already frightened children.
Crises itemsStore chains have also reported a sharp increase in purchases of items associated with crises, such as emergency radios, jerry cans and camping stoves, resulting in empty shelves in several shops.
The comments have also sparked a debate in Sweden about how plausible a full-scale conflict on Swedish soil is, or whether the warnings amounted to fear mongering.
“This is a serious situation but it’s also important to be clear that it’s not like war is at the door,” Social Democrat leader and former prime minister Magdalena Andersson told broadcaster TV4.
In an op-ed in the country’s newspaper of reference Dagens Nyheter, left-wing commentator Goran Greider said he believed the commander’s comments revealed “a secret longing to finally test the Swedish fighting forces.”
He also said the real message was more likely: “Give us more money.”
The same paper’s editorial board meanwhile said in a leader some of the critical reactions to the call were “absurd,” and that instead arguing that war was an impossibility was “nonsense.” —AFP
