BY DAG TIRSÉN AND DANIEL AHL
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - "They took me because I'm a Sami and a
reindeer keeper," said Sami leader Lars Jon Allas, vice
president of the Sámediggi or Sami parliament. He was
arrested along with a friend by Kiruna cops May 10, accused of
killing and decapitating three bears north of Kiruna the
previous week.
"This is made up by the Great Swedes to slander us Sami," said a friend of Allas quoted in the press. Allas went on a hunger strike that lasted until the two were released three days later. Their homes and camp sites in the mountains were searched during the confinement. Although the cops found no evidence whatsoever, local prosecutor Bertil Isaksson declared that charges of "grave unlawful hunting" have not been dropped. In 1987 Isaksson led an investigation against current Sami parliament president, Lars Wilhelm Svonni, and jailed him for one year on charges of illegal hunting.
"I know my people," Svonni said when he was informed of the arrest of Allas and his friend. "No Sami would ever decapitate an animal." On May 12, the front page of the liberal daily Expressen featured a picture of Allas in traditional Sami clothing along with the headline "Sami leader arrested for the bear slaughter." Later that day, a death threat directed against Allas was received by the Samefolket (Sami People) newspaper.
This is less than a month after the attempted cop frame-up of Sami leader Olof T Johansson (see the April 19 Militant). Allas and Johansson are both outspoken fighters for the rights of Talma and Tossasen, their respective Sami villages. Each village is made up of a group of Sami families that collectively organizes the reindeer keeping, with each family owning their own animals. Recently, Allas was involved in a trial that won the right for his village to control a large part of the hunting of elk within its boundaries, provoking fury among members of the Swedish Hunter's Association.
Hunting rights is an important issue for the Sami communities, where some 3,000 reindeer keepers today see their livelihood threatened by the increasing number of big carnivores such as bear, wolf, and wolverine. The southern Sami communities are fighting for their grazing rights in conflict with Swedish capitalist forest owners.
The Sami (sometimes called "Laps" by Swedish chauvinists) are the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, which they call Sapmi. Some 77,000 Sami live in Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Institutionalized racism in the Swedish part of Sapmi often portrays the existing land rights of the Sami nationality as "privileges."
"We think we're the ones best suited to estimate the number of carnivores in our area," said Allas in a phone interview with the Militant May 18. "The authorities' policies have led to a big concentration of carnivores in areas were our reindeers are."
Recently, the Swedish government threw gasoline on the fire when it stopped a joint proposal by Sami and government representatives to compensate reindeer owners for killed reindeer. This makes it easier to put the blame for illegal hunting on reindeer-keeping Sami instead of Swedish hunters on Sami territory. (A single bear skin can be sold for 10,000 crowns.)
"Earlier the restriction on our hunting carnivores wasn't implemented very closely, but modern technology, like helicopters and snow-scooters, has changed the situation," Allas said." When the Swedish Hunter's Association put a prize of 100,000 Swedish crowns for catching an illegal hunter, and local Social Democratic politicians gave statements about the need to `keep watch over the Sami,' we feel like we're the target of bounty hunters. We're being watched day and night."
Allas concluded that the recent arrests of him and other Sami have not been caused by harsher government attacks, which have been going on for a long time, but the fact that "now we won't accept it anymore and fight for our rights."