Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is concerned about the series of Koran burnings that have been carried out and announced in his country.
Kristersson said this at a press conference in Stockholm on Thursday at which he announced that, in view of upcoming protests, he has ordered 15 state bodies and administrations, from the army to the tax authorities and the police, to step up their vigilance against terrorism.
In the coming week, new protests are planned, during which Koran burnings could take place, Kristersson said. Whether these are allowed to happen is in the hands of the police. “If they are approved, we have a number of days with the clear risk that serious things could happen,” he added.
Islamophobic actions, generally the work of small hate groups, have heightened tensions between Sweden and the Muslim world. Iraq decided, for example, to expel Sweden’s ambassador from the country while protesters set fire to the Swedish embassy in Baghdad.
Sweden’s domestic intelligence agency Säkerhetspolisen (Säpo) had warned on Wednesday of an increased security risk as a result of the Koran burnings.
Stockholm blames the tense situation not only on extremists on both sides, but also on outside interference. For instance, Swedish Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin claimed on Wednesday that Moscow was behind an anti-Swedish disinformation campaign.
Last Saturday, a planned burning of the Bible by a Muslim activist outside Israel’s embassy in Stockholm, which had drawn widespread protests, was cancelled after he had changed his mind. In his application to the police he had called the burning “a symbolic gathering for the sake of freedom of speech”.
In fact, he only wanted to draw attention to the recent burning of the Quran outside a mosque in Stockholm. “I wanted to show that we have to respect each other, we live in the same society,” the person was quoted as saying outside the embassy. “If I burn the Torah, another the Bible, another the Quran, there will be war here. What I wanted to show is that it’s not right to do it.”
He criticized Sweden’s legislation which allows burnings of books that are sacred to religious communities. “There is a fine line between freedom of expression and hate crime. I can criticize the Quran but it's not freedom of expression to burn it".
