December 13-2013
. . . Swedish MP
One of the stranger of the many success stories of Iranians in the Diaspora belongs to Hanif Bali, who is now a member of the Swedish parliament but who began life as the child of members of the Mojahedin-e Khalq who sent him away from Iraq to find safety but a wandering life in Swedish group homes.
He now lives in the town of Solna—a suburb of Stockholm—which he represents in parliament.
The 26-year-old has been a member of parliament since 2010 for Sweden’s Moderate Party, which is part of the governing coalition. Before that, he was elected to the city council at the age of 19.
His parents sent him to Sweden for safety when he was just three years old. Politically active during Iran’s revolution, Hanif’s parents found they were under threat when the clerics around Ayatollah Khomeini consolidated power and turned on the Mojahedin-e Khalq.
“After 1980, everybody’s dreams and hopes of what they believed the revolution would be were shattered, kind of like what we’re seeing in Egypt right now. It didn’t become the democratic paradise everybody hoped,” he told Forbes magazine during an interview at a restaurant in his district.
After his uncle, also an activist in the Mojahedin-e Khalq, was executed in 1988 when Hanif was nine months old, his parents fled to a Mojahedin camp in Iraq. When he was three, Hanif was smuggled into Sweden and lived for a time in the Swedish headquarters of the Mojahedin-e Khalq.
Hanif described his childhood as a series of moves from one family to another with spells in group homes before finding a stable family to live with in Stockholm’s northern suburbs. Altogether, he lived with 13 foster families—mostly, but not all, Iranian.
He was one of the few immigrants in his elementary school. By the time he reached high school, the population was more evenly split.
“I lived in both worlds all the time,” he said. “I was searching for my identity asking, ‘What am I?’ because I was never totally fitting in with the Swedish kids.” After a time, he found a middle ground in which he kept a foot in both worlds – Swedish and Iranian.
By age nine or ten, he realized he would never go back to Iran, despite the promises of his family, and decided to focus on where he was rather than where he might want to be.
“I identify myself as Swedish, not only in the legal sense that I’m a Swedish [citizen]…. I used to be more strict about it, not even acknowledging that in some sense I’m Iranian.” After working so hard to create an identity with which he is comfortable, Hanif now feels he can be more inclusive. “I’m as Swedish as I can be so I can afford to be some Iranian, too. So I identify as Swedish-Iranian. I am a Swede, but I have a kind of spice,” he added with a smile.
Dr. Alireza Behtaui of Stockholm University’s Department of Social Anthropology has been exploring the journey of the children of immigrants in Sweden for several years. Himself an immigrant who came to Sweden in 1989 from Iran, he says his research shows that one factor which causes the income and achievement gaps between the children of immigrants and of native-born parents is the lack of diverse social and professional networks for second generation children. Because they often grow up in more segregated neighborhoods and schools, they lack the large social networks that are essential to success in a small country like Sweden.
Hanif seems to have made his own networks and thrived. He joined the Moderate Party, which is a center-right party in Sweden, at the age of 16 and the more he became involved the faster he rose up the ranks.
Hanif isn’t the only Iranian-born member of Sweden’s 349-seat parliament, the Riksdag. There are three others—all women, all older than Hanif, and all members of opposition parties, unlike Hanif.
Hanif stakes out his own positions rather than play the identity politics that he feels many on the left expect of an immigrant.
“Swedes are very open in what they identify as Swedish. If you speak the language, know the social codes, you’re Swedish,” he says. He notes that the only times he’s felt treated differently because he is an immigrant is from anti-racists. “They say, ‘How can you betray you’re people?’ Who are my people? I’m a Moderate! In Sweden, some people think that because you’re an immigrant, you should have” certain points of view. While Swedish society tends toward extreme politeness, much like Iranian society, the political sphere in Sweden can be rough and tumble—as in Iran.
“From the left they call me a ‘house nigger’—that I’m an animal that has been broken in some sense to do my master’s will—which is very strange because nobody says that to the middle class guy who is left [wing] or has his set of ideas. No one says to him, ‘How can you have these ideas? You’re betraying your class!’”
But Hanif believes Sweden is an open and tolerant society compared with most other countries.
“Sweden has been such a successful country because, when there’s something wrong, Sweden doesn’t point fingers to the US or Russia and say, ‘It’s their fault.’ Swedes look inside and say, ‘What did we do wrong and how can we fix this?’”
Sweden, once very insular, is quite open to immigrants, despite the occasional outbreak of anger and violence against immigrants. Today, more than seven percent of the children born in Sweden have at least one foreign parent.
Hanif will be up for re-election next September when the four-year term of the current parliament ends.
