Even if Finland denies that it has a serious racism and fascism problem, the country cannot go forward and the situation for migrants and minorities in Finland will get worse until we get a grip of these social issues.
In the face of ever-incriminating evidence that Finland has the potential of becoming an Islamophobic country like Denmark or one that is at the alter with fascism like Hungary, it is a sign of cowardice that politicians and other community leaders in this country prefer to remain silent instead of challenge racism and its many poisonous forms.
The only way that Finland will be able to challenge these types of social ills is when parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* are sent back to the mini political leagues. Since they are in government and have power, it’s clear that racism and xenophobia will get worse, not retreat, in Finland.
Even if the PS has risen to become one of the biggest parties, they have done this with the help of mainstream parties that think like them but aren’t too vocal about it.
The rise of xenophobia and parties like the PS is proof why hostility towards migrants and minorities has grown recently.
Kitee is a sleepy city in Eastern Finland that had a number of families who moved to Argentina in the 1920s. Today it is a city where hate crime towards asylum seekers and the Roma happens.
Writes YLE:
Three men were given fines for harassing foreign students in Kitee. Among other things, they painted swastikas on the [students’ home] walls, urinated on their door and threw objects through the students’ window.
How many politicians have come out to condemn what happened?
An eerie cemetery silence prevails.
We at Migrant Tales want to shatter such silence and say that such racist behavior is unacceptable in our society.
Read full story (in Finnish) here.
* The Finnish name of the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The English names adopted by the PS, like True Finns or Finns Party, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and xenophobia. We, therefore, prefer to use the Finnish name of the party on our postings.