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SWEDISH HISTORY

Strange but true: North Korea owes Sweden millions for Volvos from the 1970s

Sweden is no stranger to odd stories, but the tale of how North Korea owes the Scandinavian nation millions in unpaid bills for items including a thousand Volvos from the 1970s is definitely one of the weirdest of all.

A 1970s Volvo in North Korea in 2010.
A 1970s Volvo in North Korea in 2010. Photo: Roman Harak/Flickr. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The story goes that back in the mid-1970s the Swedish government saw the potential to trade with North Korea, and companies like Sandvik, SKF and car giant Volvo were encouraged to court it as a new export market, off the back of the Asian country’s economic strength in the 1960s.

Volvo received an order for 1,000 of its 144 model and promptly started shipping the cars out to North Korea in 1974. But it very quickly became apparent that Pyongyang was not paying for the goods that had been shipped.

In fact, they never did, and the debts have stood ever since. Adjusted for inflation, they now amount to the equivalent of millions of dollars.

The Local thought the story had to be an urban myth, but Sweden’s National Export Credits Guarantee Board (EKN) has confirmed that it’s 100 percent true.

The authority, which promotes Swedish exports by insuring export credits, are now the ones owed the money.

“It’s true, it’s still the case. The debt now amounts to just over 2.719 billion Swedish kronor ($302 million),” Carina Kampe from EKN told The Local in 2017.

“At the time EKN insured the companies’ export credit, and when North Korea didn’t pay, EKN had to pay out to the export companies under the credit insurance. So after that, EKN took over the claim, and with the passing of the years the debt as grown,” she said.

Even though it looks unlikely that Kim Jong-un will cough up the cash any time soon, as a formality EKN still has to ask for the bill to be paid every year, as it does with all debts on its books.

“How it works is we have this claim, and like all claims we have, it’s on EKN’s books, so we continue to ask for it to be paid,” Kampe said.

“People have even claimed to have seen the cars driving in North Korea nowadays, even though the last ones were sent in the 1970s. That’s why they’re still getting publicity.”

So the positive side of the story, if there is one, is that Volvo clearly built pretty solid cars in the 1970s.

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SWEDISH HISTORY

INTERVIEW: ‘Sweden viewed the Sami as a lower form of culture’

On February 6th Sami communities all over Sápmi – an area spanning the northern reaches of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia’s Kola peninsula – gather to celebrate Sami National Day. To find out more about the past, present and future of the Sami in Sweden, we speak to Charlotta Svonni, a researcher on indigenous education at Umeå University.

INTERVIEW: ‘Sweden viewed the Sami as a lower form of culture’

Before national borders were drawn in the Nordics, Sami hunters and fishers populated the area now known as Sápmi, and Sami National Day has become an important annual event for the celebration of Sami cultural traditions.

The date was chosen to mark the occasion of the first Sami Congress, held in Trondheim, Norway, in 1917 and reflects a desire among Sami communities for greater self-determination.

An estimated 20,000-40,000 Sami live in Sweden (the figure is uncertain since Sweden doesn’t gather data on ethnicity) and Sami languages are spoken across the region. A Sami parliament was established in 1993 to represent the interests of the Sami, who are one of the country’s five official minorities. 

Charlotta Svonni lives with her family in Umeå but is originally from Kiruna in the far north and belongs to the Sami village Laevas.

She recently completed a doctoral thesis on the ‘nomad schools’ instituted by Sweden to educate the children of reindeer herding Sami families and is well-versed in the colonisation and discrimination faced by the Sami over the centuries.

“If we start with the 1600s, the Sami religion was viewed as pagan and the crown wanted the Sami to be Christians,” she says. “Also, the crown wanted the Sami to pay taxes so that they could claim the land.”

In the decades that followed, Sweden encouraged more and more settlers to move north, dangling tax exemptions and freedom from conscription as very attractive incentives, she adds.

Relations between the Swedish authorities and the Sami frayed further as the nationalist ideologies proliferating in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe in the 19th century brought with them notions of racial supremacy.

“They viewed the Sami as belonging to a lower form of culture and that they were not able to take care of themselves. The view from the majority perspective, or the crown, was that if Sami people didn’t work with reindeers, they would die, they wouldn’t be able to live in Swedish society.

“But this was not for all Sami. One really important thing is that the crown of Sweden only wanted to preserve the reindeer herders that were in the mountain region, that were called the nomads.”

Sweden’s increasingly strict definition of the Samis’ role in society led to an exotification and segregation of the indigenous population, Svonni says. The mountain reindeer herders were expected to always wear traditional clothing and live a nomadic lifestyle in traditional tents, or kåtor. By contrast the forest-dwelling reindeer herders and other Sami were to be assimilated into Swedish society.

The nomad schools – boarding schools created for Sami children – further solidified this segregation, she says.

“They were not allowed to go to schools with the Swedes. They were not allowed to go to schools with other Sami people. So these reindeer herders went to the nomad school. This was created in 1913, around the same time period as the Racial Biology Institute, which was created in 1922. These were the kind of ideas flourishing in Sweden.”

Her voice cracks as she recalls a dark period of overt racism that affected many Sami, including her own family.

Svonni recommends anyone interested in this period to watch the 2016 film Sameblod (Sami Blood). The film tells the story of a girl attending a nomad school who, like many other Sami at the time, was subjected to degrading experiments at the hands of the Uppsala-based institute.

The nomad schools were finally shut down in 1962.

While relations with the state have improved immeasurably since the 1930s, Svonni says that “extractivism on Sami land” remains a central area of conflict.

“Just take all the mines. You have this big state company, LKAB, that’s situated in Kiruna, and there are always problems with that. You have this issue with Rönnbäcken in Tärnaby, if they are allowed to mine there or not. You also have the windmill parks and forestry. These are all big state companies but they don’t regard the Sami village or the reindeer husbandry people’s voice in this.”

Her claim is backed up by the fact that United Nations experts routinely chastise Sweden for its failure to adequately involve its indigenous population in consultation processes. But this criticism is also grounds for cautious optimism, says Svonni.

“I see some steps that are going in the right direction, and that is also due to the global indigenous issues moving forward. This puts pressure on Sweden, so I think it will become better in the future.”

A ‘truth commission’ established by Sweden to investigate abuses against the Sami is expected to present its findings in late 2025.

Hear more from Charlotta Svonni in the latest episode of The Local’s Sweden in Focus podcast.

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