LETTER FROM MALMÖ

On March 7, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson was in Washington, to present US Secretary of State Antony Blinken with the documents formalizing his country's membership of NATO. That day in Stockholm, the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society, Svenska Freds, gained 600 new members. It had 5,600 members at the beginning of 2022. Today, there are 15,000 of them. A thousand people joined just after Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin said on January 7 that "war could break out in Sweden." Two thousand took out new membership cards in July 2023, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he was ready to approve Sweden's NATO membership.

"We have become a refuge for all those who do not recognize themselves in the great transformation Sweden is undergoing, and who want a voice for peace and disarmament to continue to exist," said Kerstin Bergea, president of the association founded in 1883. Today, this voice has become almost inaudible in a country that, after 210 years of peace and military non-alignment, has joined NATO and is preparing for war.

Until the spring of 2022, the peace movement and its many organizations, many of them over 100 years old, were well respected in Sweden. It helped make the kingdom an influential player in international negotiations on disarmament and non-proliferation. "But when Russia invaded Ukraine, voices for peace were immediately called into question," said Bergea. "We were much less in demand. The experts were now the uniformed military, who talked about war and little about peace."

When organizations are invited to appear on television, they find themselves up against five or six guests, all of whom are in favor of the country joining NATO. Each intervention in the media is followed by a tidal wave of emails and phone calls: "Always from men, who wanted to tell us how upset they were by what we were saying," said Malin Nilsson, general secretary of the Swedish branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (IKFF), founded in 1919, and whose membership (just over 1,000) has increased by 35% since the spring of 2022.

NGOs are accused of being Moscow's "useful idiots" because they oppose Sweden's membership of NATO and criticize arms shipments to Ukraine. "In reality, as a pacifist and feminist organization, we fight against everything Putin stands for," said Nilsson. Lotta Sjöström Becker, general secretary of The Swedish Fellowship of Reconciliation, an association founded in 1919 by two priests, agreed: "We don't question international law or the right of countries to defend themselves, just as we believe that Ukrainian civil society should be listened to, and should decide when it wants to start negotiating and under what conditions."

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