18 hours ago
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We should have come out of the holiday season in Sweden jolly, rested and ready for a happy new year. But we didn’t. We should have finished the previous year with a sense of love and togetherness. But we didn’t. Everything bad has reached new levels and may well go even further.
We finished 2025, a year full of racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, with the right-wing Sweden Democrats still dominating the political discourse, Greta Thunberg being maligned for her political activism, and the government cutting 10 billion kronor ($1.09bn) in development aid.
Just in time for the holidays, a Quran with bullet holes was hung on the Central Mosque’s fence in Stockholm, while an Iranian couple – both assistant nurses who had worked for a decade in Swedish hospitals – and their children were slated for deportation to Tehran.
In the new year, we are facing an election where the toxic political rhetoric about expelling criminals and others who do not “behave” and “adapt” will likely determine the outcome.
What comes next in Sweden deeply worries me.
As a Bosnian Swede, I want both my countries to be the best they can be. I want them to be great again, to use this charged phrase, because I do not think they are that great now. Yes, I look at both with some nostalgia because I remember what they were in different periods of my life.
I want Bosnia to be free from the nationalist poison and be a proper democratic state like Sweden. I want Sweden to regain its spirit of empathy that once upon a time made it accept thousands of us Bosnians during its worst economic crisis. Sweden did very well, and we Bosnians are said to be the best-integrated and most successful minority.
Today, we no longer have people like the Swedish priest who jumped on a plane and delivered aid at Sarajevo airport during the violent siege of the Bosnian capital.
Land, unload, escape. A quick in and out amid shelling. I cannot imagine anyone taking such a risk today.
What is worse, we have developed a resistance to empathy, and we look upon anyone who tries to make a difference as a weird outlier.
Back then, countries refused to defend the Bosnians and let us defend ourselves. Nowadays, they help perpetrators.
I remember a different Sweden.
During the first two years of the war, I met a comic book collector in Banja Luka whose daughter had escaped to Sweden. He showed me a letter she sent him through the Red Cross. It was wintertime, and she was describing this place called Vargarda as a pristine Nordic landscape, so beautiful and innocent.
It would be my fate to come to the same refugee camp in 1993. I was excited – I was going to a place where I knew there would be a lot of comic books.
Shortly after our arrival, we were transferred to this military building in Uddevalla, where it felt like the constant wind blew straight through my mind. We were closed off but had some contact with Swedish high-school students. I tried to learn Swedish, but since we didn’t know if we’d stay, we had no Swedish classes yet.
I didn’t experience much Swedishness in the camp. It was just us Bosnians with PTSD, a mix of people from all parts of Bosnia, and it felt like we were from different cultures entirely. Same people, total strangers.
I had cousins – also refugees – who were stationed in Trollhattan. One winter day, before a transfer to Mullsjo, I decided to visit them. It snowed a lot, and the only shoes I had were fake Converse sneakers with holes in the soles. I arrived in this cosy little town with an address in hand. It turned out to be a P O Box. Boy, did I feel like a stupid little refugee lost in the beautiful streets of Trollhattan.
I was cold, so I went into a record store. The place smelled amazing. The most exotic smell I’d ever smelled. I didn’t expect that in Sweden. In Bosnia, we’re not exactly famous for exotic spices. We like things plain and simple. It was in Sweden I’d learn about the world.
The man who worked in the store saw I was cold and gave me mulled wine with Christmas spices, which I’d later learn was called glogg. It was hot and strong, and it blew my mind. This is the Proustian moment I will probably remember until I die. I couldn’t speak any Swedish, but somehow I communicated that I was looking for the refugee camp. The man showed me where to go.
I found the buildings and saw some Bosnians who told me how to find my cousins. They had already started integrating, probably because they were fewer and lived closer to the Swedes.
During my stay, my cousin made tiny cinnamon buns, which she froze. Her daughter and I would steal those and eat them frozen, while watching Married…with Children on Swedish TV. In a few days, I fell in love with glogg and cinnamon buns.
In the refugee camp in Mullsjo, in the Swedish Bible belt, I trained judo in a local club, the music of Nordman blasting in the background. Small place, nice people, with some standard prejudice about Muslims, but still driven by a sense of decency. I was always taken care of.
There was one Swedish guy who worked in the camp who was always looking for bad things to say about us. Once, when I complained about an electricity bill being too high, the guy said we immigrants were just using the system and should learn to respect the law. Go figure.
People like him were few back then. Now there are so many. Companies that did not want to give us jobs because we didn’t speak Swedish well were also few back then. Now there are many.
In my twenties, I moved to Stockholm, got married, and started working as a carer for an old Swedish man in a wheelchair. I was next to him for 11 years. He taught me how to have compassion and empathy and how to adore the sweet buns called “semlor”.
I respect the National Semla Day because of him. I developed a good relationship with his sister, whom we would often meet at IKEA for weekend breakfasts.
Eventually, breakfast at IKEA every Saturday became a tradition for my family, too. It was a place where you could see all kinds of people waiting impatiently outside for it to open so they could run in and grab a cheap breakfast: Two buns, some slices of cucumber, chicken breast, and cheese, and of course, unlimited coffee. That was the best coffee in town.
After a few months, we got to know the faces of many regulars, like the old Greek couple who were somehow always first in line, and if they were not, they were not happy. Or the old Arab who’d always sit alone by the window facing the motorway. Or all the young Swedish couples who’d explain things to their small children way too loudly.
With time, breakfast at IKEA started to change. It gradually turned into a brunch – a huge feast – but then they got stingier, and there was less on offer. Prices went up just as our kids grew.
At some point, breakfast at IKEA lost the sense of what it was supposed to be. It lost its identity in trying to be commercial; it was no longer about the diversity of families it attracted. And somehow, we lost that tradition.
I love change. And I hate it. Like everyone, I suppose. I love the fact that Sweden has come to offer a much richer culture, and I hate that it has grown increasingly colder towards “the other”. People like Greta now stand out and cause wonder.
I long for that glogg I tasted as a young refugee just as much as I long for those strong hearts and minds like that priest who delivered goods to Muslims under fire.
Maybe by the time I have grandchildren, things will change. I will go back to our family tradition of breakfast IKEA, one that will be richer and yet very much the same old, same old.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
