SHARE
COPY LINK

MILITARY

Female conscript forced to bathe naked with 30-man platoon

A conscript in her first year of a mandatory military service had to bathe in the nude with 30 men after a military exercise near the northern town of Bodø, Norwegian newspapers have reported.

“I cried and felt sick, and I had problems looking at the male recruits right in front of my eyes,” said 23-year-old Alice Asplund to newspaper Avis Nordland.

“I can not recommend that other girls go off to the military when it's like that,” she added.

On a September evening, the platoon leader gave the order that everyone should bathe naked together. Asplund’s request to put on sports shorts or bathe at an alternate spot nearby was turned down by the lieutenant in command of the platoon.

Asplund, the air-defence platoon’s labour representative, said a showdown with the lieutenant led to the humiliating scene.

“I said: you can’t force me to bathe naked with all the boys, but then he said that he could,” she said.

Before quitting her military service in the air-defence force she reported the scene to police who could not find evidence of a punishable offence. Local officers of the 132nd Air Wing in Bodø reportedly said the case would be handled by the military’s own system of justice.

The newspaper questioned whether a “moment of field hygiene” required that the woman bathe in the nude with the 30-man platoon.

F-16 fighter-bombers from air force unit 132 in 2011 bombed Libyan targets in support of insurgents attacking forces loyal to Muammar Qaddafi. The squadron’s base, Bodø, is “Norway’s most important defence town,” Defence Minister Grete Faremo said in August.

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.

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