Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

MILITARY

Swedish officers reported for ‘force feeding’ conscripts

A lieutenant and a captain at the Air Combat Training School in Uppsala in central Sweden have been reported to military authorities for ordering young conscripts to eat food in humiliating circumstances.

Published: 16 February 2010 12:17 CET
Swedish officers reported for 'force feeding' conscripts

The two officers now risk an official warning for forcing the national service recruits to eat very large portions of food, as well as to drink tomato ketchup and eat packets of butter and dried spices.

The officers’ superiors at the Air Combat Training School have forwarded the complaints to the Swedish Armed Forces Disciplinary Board (FPAN) and recommended that they be served with a warning over their future conduct.

The report details several occasions when the recruits were ordered to eat large quantities of food, often mixed together, and often in short periods of time. Many of the young soldiers subsequently threw up.

On one such occasion in Uppsala, the platoon was given 5-7 minutes to prepare lunch. Two soldiers were selected to prepare the food and the remainder of the platoon was ordered to stand in a line. The soldiers were then ordered to eat a meal consisting of a mix of soured yoghurt, Salisbury steak, a packet of butter and various other foodstuffs.

On another occasion, after a soldier threw up his meal in his mess portion pack he was ordered by one of the officers to eat it back up, with no relaxation of the rules. A report would follow if he failed to obey orders.

While the reporting senior officer recognised that both the lieutenant and the captain had strong qualities and were capable, ambitious officers, they were both considered to be lacking judgement and unresponsive to group feedback.

As both officers had struggled to control their behaviour with regard to the conscripts on their own volition, the commanding officer recommended that they be served with an official warning to remind them of their responsibilities.

According to the report to the disciplinary board, a third officer has also been investigated over two further incidents but no action will be taken.

Sweden operates a peace time system of national service. Legally, under the Total Defence Service Act, all Swedish citizens between the ages of 16 and 70, including those of foreign origin resident in Sweden, are liable for service, either military, civil or general.

Conscription for military service applies however in practice only to men aged 18-24 and is open to women on a voluntary basis. Most conscripts undergo military service over two periods of a total of around 11 months.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

NATO

Erdogan links Swedish Nato approval to Turkish EU membership

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday he would back Sweden's Nato candidacy if the European Union resumes long-stalled membership talks with Ankara.

Published: 10 July 2023 12:35 CEST
Erdogan links Swedish Nato approval to Turkish EU membership

“First, open the way to Turkey’s membership of the European Union, and then we will open it for Sweden, just as we had opened it for Finland,” Erdogan told a televised media appearance, before departing for the NATO summit in Lithuania.

Erdogan said “this is what I told” US President Joe Biden when the two leaders spoke by phone on Sunday.

Turkey first applied to be a member of the European Economic Community — a predecessor to the EU — in 1987. It became an EU candidate country in 1999 and formally launched membership negotiations with the bloc in 2005.

The talks stalled in 2016 over European concerns about Turkish human rights violations.

“I would like to underline one reality. Turkey has been waiting at the EU’s front door for 50 years,” Erdogan said. “Almost all the NATO members are EU members. I now am addressing these countries, which are making Turkey wait for more than 50 years, and I will address them again in Vilnius.”

Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, is due to meet Erdogan at 5pm on Monday in a last ditch attempt to win approval for the country’s Nato bid ahead of Nato’s summit in Vilnius on July 11th and 12th. 

Turkey has previously explained its refusal to back Swedish membership as motivated by the country’s harbouring of people connected to the PKK, a Kurdish terrorist group, and the Gülen movement, who Erdogan blames for an attempted coup in 2016. 

More recently, he has criticised Sweden’s willingness to allow pro-Kurdish groups to protest in Swedish cities and allow anti-Islamic protesters to burn copies of the Quran, the holy book of Islam.

In a sign of the likely reaction of counties which are members both of Nato and the EU, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that the two issues should not be connected. 

“Sweden meets all the requirements for Nato membership,” Scholz told reporters in Berlin. “The other question is one that is not connected with it and that is why I do not think it should be seen as a connected issue.”

Malena Britz, Associate Professor in Political Science at the Swedish Defence University, told public broadcaster SVT that Erdogan’s new gambit will have caught Sweden’s negotiators, the EU, and even Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg off guard. 

“I think both the member states and Stoltenberg had expected this to be about Nato and not about what the EU is getting up to,” she said. “That’s not something Nato even has any control over. If Erdogan sticks to the idea that Turkey isn’t going to let Sweden into Nato until Turkey’s EU membership talks start again, then Sweden and Nato will need to think about another solution.” 

Aras Lindh, a Turkey expert at the Swedish Institute of Foreign Affairs, agreed that the move had taken Nato by surprise. 

“This came suddenly. I find it hard to believe that anything like this will become reality, although there could possibly be some sort of joint statement from the EU countries. I don’t think that any of the EU countries which are also Nato members were prepared for this issue.”

SHOW COMMENTS