500 Swedish Conscripts Sent Home After 'Serious Violations', Abusive Behaviour
© REUTERS / Johan Ahlander
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The violations in question in one of the country's largest military units reportedly included lack of food, punishments, vulgar language, and compulsion to participate in activities despite injuries. Commanding officers also offended the personnel, including calling everyone who pushed less than 100 kilos in bench presses "gay".
Wholly 500 conscripts have been sent home from the Command and Control Regiment in Enköping after soldiers were subjected to serious violations in a scandal that has rocked the Swedish Armed Forces.
The violations in question in one of the country's largest military units include lack of food, punishments, vulgar language, and compulsion to participate in activities despite injuries, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported.
According to the Conscription Council, irregularities in the form of systematic collective punishment in one of the regiment's companies were also reported.
"Conscripts felt that the officers belittled the problem and waved them away as whiners when they pointed this out", Conscription Council communications manager Olof Wärmländer told national broadcaster SVT.
"It was physical stuff sometimes, one grabs you damn hard or shouts at you in the face", a former recruit told SVT. By his own admission, he himself was hit in the head by an officer. The same person allegedly also said that everyone who cleared less than 100 kilos in bench press was "gay".
The picture is confirmed by the regiment's communications manager Therese Timpson.
"Conscripts have experienced that there has been abusive behaviour and jargon, both among conscripts themselves but also by officers. We have addressed this for several years through training, but since the problem remains, we have now followed up with interviews and received a report last week. There we saw that conscripts experienced incidents that we need to investigate, but also that there are still problems with too short breaks, poor recovery, lack of food, and injuries that are not taken seriously", Timpson said.
"Conscripts have experienced that there has been abusive behaviour and jargon, both among conscripts themselves but also by officers. We have addressed this for several years through training, but since the problem remains, we have now followed up with interviews and received a report last week. There we saw that conscripts experienced incidents that we need to investigate, but also that there are still problems with too short breaks, poor recovery, lack of food, and injuries that are not taken seriously", Timpson said.
Asked how it has been allowed to continue, Timpson referred to "a culture of silence", in which such behaviour has been thriving unreported and not acted upon.
The "structural culture of silence" was also mentioned by the head of the regiment Johan Axelsson. Axelsson said that conscripts were exposed to "destructive leadership", getting far too little time for sleep, the wrong amount of food, and "a far too high job load related to their level of education", SVT reported.
The 500 conscripts in question have now been sent home so that employees can work out the said issues.
10 December 2021, 06:14 GMT
Sweden has had mandatory military service for men since 1901. However, peacetime conscription was abolished in 2010, only to be re-activated in 2017 in gender-neutral form, citing increased threats to national security.
With at least 4,000 recruits summoned annually for military training, roughly 4 percent of the relevant age cohort is enlisted. At the height of the Cold War, about 85 percent of Swedish men served in the army.
