Swedish Sami minister refuses to meet with the indigenous group this year

One of the country’s largest Sami – an indigenous ethnic group – organisations have been trying to arrange a meeting with the Swedish Minister for Culture and Sami Affairs, Parisa Liljestrand, since she took office last year, only to receive a negative reply from the minister’s office.

The Sami live in the northern parts of Sweden, as well as in Norway, Finland and Russia. In Sweden, they are recognised as an indigenous people and their rights and cultural heritage are protected by national and international law.

On 18 April, the Swedish Sami National Association (Svenska Samernas Riksförbund, SSR) requested a meeting with the minister responsible for Sami affairs, Minister Parisa Liljestrand. After several months, the SSR received a reply from the Minister, stating that she would not meet with the Sami representatives.

“Unfortunately, the Minister cannot book a meeting with you this year. The Minister receives many requests for meetings that could be valuable and interesting, but unfortunately, we have to decline this time”, the minister answered, according to an SSR press release.

The disappointment was high among the Sami community, as a number of important processes affecting Sami villages, reindeer husbandry, and Sami associations are currently underway, making the meeting with the relevant minister all the more important.

“For the Minister to announce after three months that she will not be able to meet with us this year is not only regrettable, it is an invisibility of our issues. It is a response we are far from satisfied with,” said Matti Blind Berg, Chairman of the SSR.

“We expect the ministers responsible not to duck our questions but to take the time to meet with us,” he added.

According to Jenny Wik Karlsson, Union Lawyer at the SSR, the Sami organisations always emphasised the importance of ministers meeting with Sami representatives in addition to the Sami Parliament, which has always happened in previous years.

“However, the current government does not follow this practice, which is worrying when so many major issues that affect us are on the table”, she said.

“You usually get between 30 and 45 minutes. If you can’t find that during a whole year … that’s not promoting the Sami language,” Karlsson, who has had meetings with several former ministers responsible for Sami affairs in the past, told Radio Ekot.

“The saying ‘if you don’t see it, you don’t have it’ seems quite valid in this context; in our case, it seems that our issues are not sufficiently valuable or interesting,” concluded Blind Berg.

Liljestrand replied to the Swedish media that she had met the SSR at a market in the northern town of Jokkmokk, a meeting that does not count for the SSR because it was brief and unofficial.

The current Swedish government is composed of a centre-right alliance of the Moderates, the Christian Democrats and the Liberals, supported by the far-right Sweden Democrat party.

(Charles Szumski | EURACTIV.com)