On the 18th of December Jonatan, a 20 year old environmental activist, was sentenced to one year and three months in prison. He was sentenced for having admitted damaging a communication tower used by the Department of Defence, cutting the cables on a crane used in creating urban sprawl, and damaging a vehicle used in the logging industry. The damage is calculated to a total value of 4 000 €. Maybe not that much and not that serious. However, the Swedish Secret Police SÄPO was called in, since the local police considered the attack on the communication tower serious enough to be a threat to the nations’ security and its infrastructure.

On Yelah.net, Agneta Enström comments: A discussion on the legitimacy of political sentencing is urgently needed, as it gets all the more common in a world where more and more is at stake for each passing day and peoples’ actions are increasingly constrained. Not even the Secret Police and the judicial system will elude the fact that it is the opinions rather than the actions in politically motivated cases – though not in others (for instance in cases of domestic/sexist or racist violence) – that are being condemned and judged.

On his weblog, Jonatan writes: It is so tiresome, just as described in the documentary “Terrorists: The Kids They Sentenced” (portraying some of the people sentenced after the 2001 Gothenburg Summit protests and riots), having to go through political trials just to be depolitized in the media. There are reasons for me acting the way I did; many wellfounded reasons. And I’m being sentenced for those reasons, not for the actions. But I’m being depicted for the actions, not the reasons.

The Swedish government recently ordered the Secret Police to survey extremists and hinder the recruitement to extremist organizations – targeting both the autonomous left and the extreme right. By that reasoning, an environmetal activist like Jonatan is equated to a Nazi. This order, amazingly, was given just weeks after the Nazi arsons against the social center the Cyclops and the home of a family with a young child, in a suburb south of Stockholm. In other words: The government equates people who act in defence of human values, animals or the environment to fascists who are ready to murder their antagonists as well as their children.

The sentencing of an environmental activist with no prior record and the high priority the case received from the Police, indicates that Sweden is following the US lead, displaying a state of readiness for and harsher punishments of political actions generally and ecotage specifically. The so called Green Scare was first introduced in the US with the Operation Backfire, targeting and sentencing environmental and animal rights activists based on ideological and political motivations rather than the actual crimes they were accused of. In Sweden, activsts had to experience similar politically motivated repression after the protests against the EU summit in Gothenburg in 2001.

After his release from jail on the 26th of November, Jonatan learnt that the Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Network (ELP) is planning a support campaign for him, news that meant a lot to him. Now that the court has reached its decision, he’s got until the 8th of January to appeal it, which he plans to do. There is a very real possibility he may be returning to prison very soon, the ELP concludes. We therefore urge everyone to support Jonatan.

If you want to support Jonatan financially send money to:

IBAN SE12 9500 0099 6034 0873 8973
BIC NDEASESS
Nordea, Sweden
(To: ABC, Jonatan)