Migrant Tales publishes on and off Finnish tabloid ads* (lööppi in Finnish) from the 1990s. Taking into account that Finland’s immigrant population started to grow during that decade, it is easy at least through some of the main stories of tabloids like Ilta-Sanomat and Iltalehti to see how some of them reflected our xenophobic and racist views.
The billboard below shows that Ilta-Sanomat did sometimes have a heart for refugees as long as they were white Europeans. Somalis and other non-Europeans were apparently treated differently by the tabloids. Ilta-Sanomat promises to tell readers an eleven-year-old girl’s tragic story from the civil war that raged then in the former Yugoslavia.
Remember terms like “ethnic cleansing” that emerged from the civil war in the former Yugoslavia?
Some Finns saw refugees in a very negative light during the 1990s. People still have a difficult time even today to distinguish between what is a refugee and an immigrant.
*Migration Institute archive.
Category: Enrique
I think you are the one having trouble differentiating the two.
And where did you again invent racism? I failed to notice?
Correct me if I’m wrong but what Enrique does here in Mirgant Tales against Finnish people, would be illegal if instead of Finnish it was some other group of people. Finland is strange country as it’s justice system doesn’t treat Finns with same equality as other groups.
Farang, Allan
Have you ever seen a billboard headline by Ilta-Sanomat telling a sympathetic story about Somali or other African refugees during that period? Neither have I.
Enrique is not the one who made the billboards, the racial discrimination comes from Ilta-Sanomat. Ilta-Sanomat is a tabloid, not a person.
How dare you claim Enrique is doing something against Finnish people when he himself is a Finnish person with Finnish family roots dating back to the beginning of time? You expose your own racism!
Heh, BlandaUpp, sympathetic stories? So you don’t remember all the sob stories the SPR and pakolaisneuvonta cooked up to explain how these plucky “poor refugees” coming off the Moscow train were the same people that we’d seen on TV, only on TV it was fly-eyed kids starving. The newspapers were full of these, until the reality started to bleed through, and even then it was curtailed, like Kari was banned from HS. You really should ask your goldfish, its got a longer memory.
And BTW, after that sob-story of the Bosnian children, Finland agreed to take “child victims” from hospitals, and what we got were not 11-yar old girls, but hairy-arsed youngsters that were combat veterans. So much for that sympathy. Yes I do remember.