By Ulf Sandmark, B Sc Econ.
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The
article is reproduced here upon the kind consent of the author. |
The fight for civil rights in Sweden has
for years focused on protecting the family unit. The enormous Swedish
bureaucracy armed with all-encompassing rubber paragraphs is dominating all
walks of life. The protection of the family has been chosen by civil rights
activists as the battleground because the state's kidnapping of children (i.e.
the state's "right" to take children away from their real families)
is the ultimate infringement on civil rights, just short of executing someone.
A group of Swedish lawyers have brought this fight to the European Court in
Strasbourg several times because they could not find any justice in Sweden.
This has put the Swedish state on the record as the state with the most human
rights violations in Europe.
These cases involving state kidnapping of
children are just the tip of the iceberg, under which are concealed even more
violations of human rights in Sweden. Yet Sweden still has the reputation of
being a champion of human rights. Imagine yourself believing in this mythological
paradise of justice and therefore seek political asylum in Sweden. That is what
a Ugandan father did, fleeing from the dictatorship of Obote in Uganda.
After much struggle he succeeded in 1985
to bring his four children from Uganda to Sweden just to find that the Swedish
social welfare authorities in 1990 took them away from him. They have now paid
out more than 100.000 USD to "take care" of them only and finally
have given custody of them to a Swedish woman who is bringing his 16 year old
daughter to a restaurant where massive prostitution is going on.
The social authorities claimed that it was
"best for the children" and that they would organize the
rehabilitation of the family. But the nicely worded treatment plan and the talk
about family reunion were just empty words. For almost two years the Ugandan
father has been prevented from meeting his children, except for two short
meetings at the social welfare bureau. The mother made a special trip from
Uganda to Sweden to meet her children but was not even allowed to see them.
Instead the Swedish authorities have taken
the partisan position entirely on behalf of a Swedish woman, a former neighbor
who was a friend for a year with the Ugandan father and his children. The
Ugandan broke the relationship with her, when she brought his 16 year-old
daughter for late night visits to a Stockholm restaurant Monte Carlo, which the
father did not like because there was massive prostitution going on there.
The Ugandan’s children have, at the cost
of the Swedish tax payers been given a higher living standard, three times more
pocket money, extra money for clothes and vacation trips, something which he
could never match despite his working three jobs. The children are told that
they will loose all these financial benefits, if they meet their father. The
children are simply bought off with a higher living standard and the freedom to
roam the city without control, something which is not good for the character of
young people.
On one occasion, when the daughter came home
after midnight: Her father quarreled with her. She went to her father’s former
girl friend, who the next day, took the rest of the children to her apartment.
She then instructed the children to lie and say that their father had beaten
them ever day for two years. The social authorities then made their clumsy
intervention and ruled that the children should be immediately taken away from
him. They thereby aggravated the disruption in the family relations in a way
that might never be possible to repair. When the
children discover that the state have cheated them of their family, they
inevitably will be ashamed of what they have done to their father and for
having been bribed. The more the time passes, the more difficult it will be for
the children to reestablish contact with their daddy.
If the state intervention is not to the
benefit of either the family or the children, one could easily realize that the
real explanation behind all this is the blatant corruption that is sticking out
so clearly. This same woman, who started the proceedings against the Ugandan
father and his children, is now earning money off the children.
The placing of children in foster homes
has become a huge moneymaking business for a stable of beneficiaries of the
social welfare authorities. During the past 23 months the foster families for
the Ugandan’s four children have received 550,000 SKR (the equivalent of
100.000 USD) in expenses and remuneration. The families receive 4.203 SKR per
child as a monthly remunerative salary plus 3.526 SKR per child to cover
monthly expenses, for a grand total of 7.729 SKR per child per month. The
lawyers in the court proceedings got 69.487 SKR. On top of all this are undetermined
expenses for daily transport by taxi for the kids to and from school across
town, costs for 30 bureaucrats who all have been directly involved in the case,
doctors' fees, four meetings with politicians deciding on the case and two
trials among other things.
This is a "money making
business", using children as sacrifices to the bureaucracy, just as the
Phoenicians a long time ago sacrificed their children to the god Moloch. But
this modern slave trade cannot be explained without taking into consideration
the political pattern which also is clearly visible in the Ugandan’s case.
The woman who was allowed to take the kids
away from the Ugandan father, is an employee of the social democratic party
controlled trade union magazine, Kommunalarbetaren. She is therefore clearly
part of the nomenclature of the party apparatus that has more or less
controlled Sweden for the last 60 years. This explains why the social
authorities totally disregarded all the witnesses who could testify that the
father is an extraordinarily good father.
Among these witnesses there were Swedish
psychologists and Red Cross personnel, clearly not party hacks, who had stayed
in close contact with the Ugandan father and his family all the years they had
been in Sweden. The Ugandan father himself had also made clear to everybody,
that he did not support the social democrats, the same party which supports the
government in Uganda. He is a Ugandan freedom fighter and is a political
refugee.
What the Ugandan father did not know, when
he fled from the dictatorship in Uganda, was that by coming to Sweden he ended
up in another kind of dictatorship, a dictatorship with a democratic face. The
social welfare authorities, with the help of taxpayers' money, have created not
only a parasitic bureaucracy but also a whole clientele. Together with a whole
apparatus for unemployment make-work projects and re-schooling as well as tax
funded cultural associations and other controlled activities and jobs, the
Swedish welfare state has made a whole section of the society financially
dependent upon them, and therefore a powerbase for continued rule by this
nomenclature. This is a modern variety of the bread and circuses of the Roman
Empire to ensure voters for the ruling elite.
The Ugandan father clearly was on the
wrong side politically. He worked regular jobs to make a living for his family.
He simply refused to become an Uncle Tom, who lived on social welfare and voted
for the social democrats.
The Ugandan father waged a fight for his
children in court, but the Swedish justice system is also
politicized. There is no jury or other mechanisms to ensure the independence of
the courts. It is rather the same rule by political apparatus, that had
sanctioned the attack against his family in the first place. The laymen in
court are politically appointed party members and every one of the judges in
the highest courts are recruited on political merits from the government
ministries.
The result is a lack of legal rights,
which have forced Swedes to go abroad to find justice. The European court has
seen many Swedes coming there to defend their civil right to bring up their own
children. This route is however closed for the time being since the Swedish
authorities do not follow the rulings of that court. They acknowledge that they
did wrong when they kidnapped the children, but they don't give back the
children in any case. The claim is that the children now have settled in for so
long a time in their new foster family that it would not be "good for the
child" to move a second time. One Swedish family has been forced to go
through the time-consuming process of going back to the European court, a
second time, to challenge this practice.
This system, "the Swedish
model", is the background for the absurd and terrifying experience of the
Ugandan father. The result is that the woman who brings his teenage daughter to
the "hunting ground" for prostitutes, is given custody of the
children. Such a system can only be defeated in a political fight for
human rights that is fought both in Sweden and internationally. A special
committee has been formed to save the Ugandan family. The Ugandan father is
cooperating with the political resistance fighter within the social democracy
in Sweden, Dr Alf Enerström, whose own son for political reasons was kidnapped
1974 by the state. The Ugandan father is also in cooperation with the
international movement for civil rights that sees the American political
prisoner Lyndon LaRouche as the heir of Martin Luther King.
The civil rights issue is as important for
Sweden as for the eastern European countries when they fought to bring down the
Berlin wall. However a system is not only changed from within. Civil rights
have to be defended for all peoples, as civil rights leader and vice
presidential candidate James Bevel put it: "This planet cannot permanently
endure half slave and half free!"