Tide of grief sweeps through Sweden

The great wave that wreaked disaster round the Indian Ocean has brought its first cargo of death to the northern shores of Europe.

The first of what may be hundreds of coffins were flown to Sweden from Thailand and greeted at Stockholm's Arlanda Airport with desperate, private grief and solemn, public mourning.

A Swedish military transport aircraft, carrying six coffins draped in blue and yellow flags, was met by King Carl Gustaf, Queen Silvia and Prime Minister Goran Persson.

"We have just seen the beginning of a road of pain and sorrow," Persson had said earlier.

"We don't dare to think how many of those confirmed Swedish missing are dead."

Sweden faces a final toll of at least 1000 dead and possibly approaching 2000 - at least half of whom are thought to be children.

It looks likely to pay by far the largest price of any country outside the immediate region.

A nation that once prided itself as a coddled sanctuary from misery is facing - not for the first time in recent years - the realisation that Swedes do not enjoy a charmed immunity from the perils and evils of the world.

Although the list of Swedish dead and missing remains confidential, press reports suggest that the tsunami will have torn a gaping hole in the professional and business classes of the country.

It emerged yesterday that one of Sweden's most successful businessmen, Mats Savstam of the Manpower company, died in hospital in Thailand three days after the disaster from the effects of pneumonia and exhaustion after searching in vain for his two missing teenage children.

His 15-year-old son and his wife survived.

Similarly heart-rending stories have been surfacing every day.

"We have children who have been obliged to come home without their parents, who have no idea what has happened to their parents," said Vibeke Eriksson, 52, director of three schools in Bromma, a suburb of Stockholm.

"We have parents who have had to come home without their children."

The disaster has brought the best out of the Swedes - and the worst. There has been an impressive outpouring of national solidarity, expressed not just in cash but in a determination that every grieving Swede, adult or child, should not have to grieve alone.

Despite the calamitous toll of Swedish known dead (52), known missing (702) and unaccounted for (1201), there has been enormous sympathy for Asian victims.

But Persson and his Government have been attacked for allegedly reacting too slowly to the disaster.

It is almost as if Swedes, brought up to rely on a benevolent, all-seeing state, believe the Government should have foreseen the dangers of allowing a staggering 20,000 Swedes (from a population of 8 million) to abandon the deep-rooted tradition of a long, family Christmas holiday at home to flock to the warmth and light of Southeast Asia.

There has also been the startling admission by the Swedish authorities that they "dare not" publish the list of the dead and missing.

If they did so, officials say, the homes of victims might be burgled and looted (as happened after the Estonia Baltic ferry disaster, which killed 551 Swedes in 1994).

As the Prime Minister suggested, the worst of Sweden's grief, and the worse of the recriminations, may be yet to come.

Outside Olofslund primary school in Bromma yesterday, a group of 7- and 8-year-olds were playing ice-hockey on a frozen playground.

From the classrooms there was a beautiful vista over suburban Stockholm, wooden houses in pastel colours separated by clumps of pine trees.

Bromma is not the richest part of the city but the home of the comfortable, professional and administrative classes, just the kind of Swedes who have flocked to resorts in Thailand in recent winters, re-discovering a country visited in their student backpacking days.

"We have a plan that all schools must adopt in situations of this kind," said school director Eriksson, gently tapping with her finger a large black and yellow folder marked "Katastrophe".

"We will place lit candles and beautiful coverings on the desks of missing or dead children.

"We will talk to the pupils and explain what has happened. We will say poems and play music ...

"There is a problem, however. This plan was devised to cope with the death of children, not with missing children ...

"Has the wave taken them forever? Will their bodies ever be found? It will be very hard. There is no closure."

Churches, offices, factories and community centres nationwide have thrown themselves into an effort to reach out to the bereaved - or the probably bereaved - whether individuals or family groups.

Sweden is a profoundly secular society but tens of thousands of people - personally touched by the catastrophe or not - have visited Lutheran churches in the past 10 days to join prayer groups or light candles.

Sweden's sense of immunity - its belief that it had found the route to a rational, secular paradise - has already been much shaken in recent decades.

Two leading politicians have been assassinated; there have been corruption scandals; and there was the Estonia disaster in 1994.

The welfare state has been rolled back and a sometimes harsh market economy has been unleashed.

It is new for Swedes to travel abroad in great numbers in the winter.

The fact that thousands of Government officials were - and many still are - away from their desks explains the sometimes clumsy initial reaction to the calamity.

There has been savage criticism of Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds, who went to the theatre in Stockholm soon after the tsunami struck, saying she would keep her cellphone on.

After a stumbling start, there is no hard evidence that Stockholm's reaction has been less efficient than those of other governments.

But Swedes weaned on public service and lulled by a sense of private immunity, expect the state to deliver miracles, even in a faraway ocean on the other side of the globe.

- INDEPENDENT