The Sami persecution revealed

Sikku recounting how he would be punished when he spoke his mother tongue in a nomad school. — AFP

AFTER centuries of persecution, Sweden’s indigenous Sami people are beginning to provide testimony about the injustices they experienced in a recently launched “Truth Commission” probing the country’s discriminatory policies and their consequences.

Experts have since February been gathering the often-painful accounts from Samis, formerly known by the pejorative term Laplanders or Lapps.