How would we tell the events that led to the death of an eighteen-year-old Somali Finn youth last Sunday at the Kannelmäki railway station?
According to one account, supposedly the victim’s witness that experienced the whole horrific event, which has shocked many, especially Somalis and other black people.
According to one account, the victim and his friend walked down the stairs when they encountered the two suspects. The witness says that they weren’t acquaintances.
The victim was an eighteen-year old Somali Finn. Why was his life cut so short?
Something was said to the two that walked down the stairs. The witness didn’t answer back, but the suspect did. The stabbing happened so rapidly that the witness though the victim was joking when he said he was stabbed.
The blood gave away the gravity of the situation and the witness called 112.
The witness believed that the two young men were drunk. Even so, being drunk or having a criminal record does not absolve you from committing a hate crime.
Was it a hate crime? Do the suspects belong to a hate group like the Skinheads? These are some of the questions debated on social media forums right after the death of the victim.
Apart from investigating the crime like seeking the testimony of other witnesses, the police have also at their disposal CCTV cameras.
One of the questions that some Somalis and other black people are asking is if what happened was a hate crime, or that the attack and death of the Somali Finn youth were due to his ethnic background.
While such questions need to be thoroughly investigated by the police, some white Finns may not consider them to be necessary even if the opposite is true of some visible minorities and migrants. Why? Because many of them face racist harassment and microaggressions daily.
Many feel that they live in a racist society and have the psychological, some even physical wounds, to prove it. Too many believe that the police and society aren’t serious about tackling a social ill like racism.
Disagree?
What about if the crime at Kannelmäki were committed by two blacks and the victim was a white Finn? We have seen a lot of social media lynch mobs during the years, especially when sexual assault cases come to public light, as was the case recently in Oulu.
If one remembers what happened in Oulu, the police, the media, and politicians – all-white – were fueling the fires of suspicion and labeling the whole Muslim community in the process.
Since we strive to live in a society that solves problems, one matter that the police should show now is leadership by contacting the Somali community and hold a meeting to calm down fears. Present at such a meeting should be representatives of Victim Support (Riku), the police hate crime unit, sociologists, NGOs, and others.
The usual answer, “this was not a hate crime” with no further explanation will not do. It is not enough and will only increase suspicion of the police’s credibility in resolving such crimes.
One Somali Finn put it in the following words: “Is the police going to sweep the issue of racism under the rug? Are they going to conclude that the suspects had mental issues? Were they [the suspects] under the influence of alcohol or drugs? Are they hardened criminals? Or did they grow up in broken homes?”
Distrust of the police shows that such a public service still has a way to go before winning the trust of Finland’s culturally diverse communities.
The death of the Somali youth could be a good place to start.
Coronavirus infections at the Luona-managed Nihtisilta reception center in Espoo now stand at 97, according to Luona’s Business Director Suvi Salonen.That compares with two cases at the beginning of April and up to 25 during the middle of the month.
This angry asylum seeker accused Luona of “negligence” for allowing the number of infected people to rise to “more than 100 people (sic).” Luona states that the situation is under control and the total number of infected asylum seekers is 97.
“We tested 207 people [of the Nihtisilta reception center] on Monday and Tuesday and 72 tested positively [compared with 25 previously],” said Salonen.
The Luona business director said that the asylum reception center is in quarantine.
“I would like to commend the workers at the [Nihtisilta] reception centers who are on the frontline [protecting the asylum seekers and themselves],” she concluded.
Salonen said that the Vantaa Robert Huberin tien asylum reception center has two coronavirus infections.
What is the worse matter about the coronavirus pandemic? Social distancing? Or US President Donald Trump?
In my opinion, President Trump and his shoddy leadership and outright lies are far worse than the coronavirus pandemic.
His latest lie was contradicting his country’s own intelligence on the origin of the coronavirus.
Trump’s suggestion that bleaches or beams of light could kill the coronavirus suggests that something isn’t right in his head.Source: Facebook. Thank you, Alberto Coronel, for the heads-up.
Mark my words: Trump is such a sociopath that he will not think twice by waging a new World War if it means that it will get him reelected.
The US president, his family, his political, and billionaire cronies are a much greater threat to the world than the coronavirus.
There are pictures and names of the two suspects killed by knife stabbing an eighteen-year-old Somali on Sunday. The police are tightlipped and have not given any other information than “the investigation is ongoing.”
If, and there is a big if here, the identity of the suspects is correct and have Finnish last names, the police should mention and investigate if what happened was a hate crime.
I’d ask the police as well if the suspects belonged or hung around some white supremacist group.
It is not the first time that I have covered such a case. One of the great sources of the anxiety of the police is reprisals by members of the victim’s ethnic group.
This was the case during Black February when for over three weeks in 2012 we read about the death of three Muslims , a suicide and a Perussuomalaiset (PS)* councilman who offered a medal to a white Finn for killing one of these victims in an Oulu pizzeria in cold blood before shooting himself.
He said that apart from not expressing any empathy for the parents’ grief, it was difficult to get any information from the police about the crime.
It is a fact that the victim was an eighteen-year-old Somali Finnand no confirmation that his attackers had Finnish surnames and belonged to a white supremacist group.
“We were treated coldly and felt like we were the criminals,” he said. “The police appeared to be more concerned about keeping the case under wraps because they feared a revenge attack by Somalis.”
A more recent case involves Rashid H., a Pakistani migrant who was stabbed up to thirty times in February 2018. The wife said that after crime took place on Friday, a police officer called her and said that it wasn’t a hate crime.
I interviewed the investigating officer concerning Rasheed’s case who told me that he spoke to the three suspects and “concluded they weren’t racists.”
The police have asked the migrant community not to publish anything about the Kannelmäki case for fear of spreading false rumors.
If one remembers the Oulu sexual assault cases of minors in December 2018-April 2019, the Oulu police was especially active in putting out statements, labeling Muslims, and helping the media to uncover the nationality of the suspects.
The actions of the Oulu police, the media, politicians, the Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s government and President Sauli Niinistö were well below par. If anything, it showed that these institutions are no friends of asylum seekers and Muslims.
And who could forget in August when the Islamophobic PS tried to exploit again for its political aims the case oftwo gunmen who shot two police officers in Porvoo? PS politicians were demanding the ethnic identity of the suspects because they believed they were Muslims and/or asylum seekers.
The PS ended up looking like a horse’s ass when it became clear that the two suspects were Finns who lived in Sweden.
The tragedy that took place in Kannelmäki has impacted especially hard the Somali community because they fear what happened to the Somali Finn could happen to them.
While I hope that the perpetrators will be brought to justice and pay for their crimes, the police has a good opportunity as well to raise its credibility in the eyes of the Somali and visible migrant community.
One member of that community asked if the police are going to sweep what happened under the rug by sanitizing the crime’s racism aspect? “Are they going to conclude that the suspects had mental issues, were under the influence of alcohol or drugs,” she said, “or that they grew up in broken homes?”
The following days will provide an answer to that very crucial question.
After two coronavirus cases to mid-April, Helsingin Sanomat reported Monday of 22 infections at the Luona-managed Nihtisilta reception center in Espoo.
Haidari Ehsan is an asylum seeker at the Nihtisilta reception center, which houses 410 refugees.
“I’m not happy with the way Luona has informed us about the outbreak at the reception center,” he said. “The only way we are in touch with the supervisor is by phone.”
Ehsan lives in a room with another person and fears that he might be infected with coronavirus because, according to him, “he has all the symptoms.”
He said that the coronavirus-infected asylum seekers are quarantined on the third and seventh floor of the building but can move wherever they want in the building.
“The majority of the people at the reception center do not feel any symptoms due to coronavirus,” he continued. “Most of them work during day and night shifts and since they don’t have cars, they use the train instead. This may be a dangerous way of spreading the virus.”
Ehsan recommended that everyone at the reception center should be quarantined for some weeks until we know for sure if they have the virus or have recovered from it.
“Those who are infected are recovering, and some are no longer in quarantine,” he concluded.
An 18-year-old youth was killed by two suspects Sunday at 10.30 pm at the Kannelmäki train station of Helsinki, according to a statement by the Helsinki Police. The two suspects are allegedly skinheads and stabbed the victim, who is a Somali Finn, eight times.
The police did not confirm by midday the ethnic background of the victim or the suspects.
The family of the young victim, who was the eldest child, suffered another death when their newborn child died at birth.
Read the original Helsinki Police statement (in Finnish) here.
The 18-year-old victim.
An interesting matter to watch from the case is how long it will take for the police to determine if what happened was a hate crime or not.
One Somali Finn told Migrant Tales that there are two versions of what led to the death of the young man. One of these is that it was a gang fight and the other was that he was attacked and killed by two skinheads.
Some are asking as well how the media and police would react if the victim were a white Finn and the suspects to members of Finland’s racialized community.
Migrant Tales will continue to update readers when new news is available.
The Islamophobic and populist Perussuomalaiset (PS) is a party that attempts to revindicate far-right racists on the rampage and its leader, Jussi Halla-aho, is US President Donald Trump’s enthusiastic cheerleader.
Halla-aho, who has a conviction for ethnic agitation, breaching the sanctity of religion and being a racist smartass, stated his undying admiration for a president who is a chronic narcissist and defies science.
On June 4, 2019, Halla-aho tweets: “I dig. him. Trump is the best thing that has happened in a long time to the United States and to the Western world.”
As we all heard Thursday, President Trump suggested that a beam of light and a disinfectant like bleach, if injected in the body, could help kill the coronavirus.
Halla-aho’s and his party’s admiration of Trump reveals the kind of country they’d want Finland to be.
This blog entry is dedicated to the late Donald Fields, Helsinki correspondent of the BBC, The Guardian, and Politiken to 1988.
As a journalist writing from Finland for some of Europe’s biggest dailies in the 1980s like the Financial Times, there is one matter that stands out from those days: censorship.
The censorship that Finland imposed on its media was overpowering and near-complete. Even writing about topics like EU – then EEC – membership was out of the question. Foreign policy was the sacrosanct topic reserved for only a few “wise” men.
As one example out of many, in 1992 I wrote an editorial for Apu magazine about the scrapping of the treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance (YYA) with the Soviet Union. At the last moment, my editorial was taken down.
The only matter that remained of my editorial on the page was a black-and-white picture of Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signing the YYA agreement in 1948.
The then editor of Apu, Matti Saari, warned me: “I’m the only one that writes about such topics in editorials.”
Whenever I wrote a story that was critical about Finnish-Soviet relations, I’d get a call from the Soviet Embassy. Even the foreign ministry warned me that I would be blacklisted if I wrote critically as I once did for Spain’s leading news magazine Cambio 16 about the contraband of Bibles to the USSR.
A Finnish diplomat whom I knew in Madrid told me how furious they had been about what I had written. She said outright that if I continued to write about such topics, then I would be blacklisted by the foreign ministry.
Mike Hofman published in 2014 his thesis on media censorship during the cold war.
Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signing in 1948 the treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Agreement. Source: Yle.
Some of these “wise” men who guided Finland’s sacrosanct foreign policy during the cold war was the late Max Jakobson (1923-2013). I found out many years after his death that we were distant relatives. Our great great great grandfather was Jacob Weikain, who moved to Hamina in 1799 and was the first Jew to get a residence permit.
Believe it or not, history books in Finland to the 1970s still claimed that Finland was populated by two races, the Nordic and East Baltic. Eugenics was a big pseudoscience in Finland.Source: J.E. Aro, J.E. Rosberg, I Arvi F. Poijärvi, Koulun maantieto, WSOY, 1941. p.32.
Jakobson, like some of the hardliners of the foreign ministry, and associations like Finnfacts, whose job was to invite foreign journalists to Finland so they’d write positive things about the country, did not accept anyone diverging from the official interpretation of relations with Moscow.
In the minds of many foreign ministry officials, Finlandization, foreign policy dictated by the USSR, did not exist.
In the summer 1980 edition of Foreign Affairs, Jakobson wrote: “As a result, Finland is forever at the mercy of the itinerant columnist who after lunch and cocktails in Helsinki is ready to pronounce himself upon the fate of the Finnish people.”
The attitude that Finns never mind foreigners should see the country’s relations with the USSR from its perspective, reveals today Finnish exceptionalism. Foreign journalists and scholars should not give their opinion because they don’t understand our reality.
This exclusive attitude is highlighted by S. Muir and H. Worthen in “Finland’s Holocaust.” “Even when there was something written about Finland, the perspective of the foreign researcher was often criticized for hopeless objectivity and the blindness towards the specifically Finnish war-time historical context. In many cases, this has been more than justified (our emphasis).”[1]
How have the cold war years impacted Finland today? Is it evident in its immigration and asylum policy and the general suspicion of foreigners? Can we trace its impact to the rise of a racist party called the Perussuomalaiset (PS)?* What about the explosive increase of hate speech and racism?
As S. Muir and H Worthen as well as other scholars, it is clear that the roots of Finnish racism are rooted in its history.
They continue: “The myth of an ideologically unified Finland isolated from the attitudes and practices of its ally, the Third Reich, and generally unsullied by antisemitism has become an insupportable burden for contemporary Finnish historical and cultural studies, and indeed for contemporary Finnish society; the insensitivity toward these silenced histories provides a condition of continued racism and antisemitism. [2]
Cold War and Human Rights
My Finnish relatives are a source that helps me to understand the source of racism. It is right under my nose almost completely whitewashed by hostility and history.
Part of my grandfather’s family changed their surname in 1931 to Harvo from Handtwargh. Even if I never asked my grandfather why he changed his surname, I suspect it had to do with the rise of fascism and anti-foreign sentiment, which was fed by anti-Semitism.
While matters like my family’s Jewish background took decades to figure out, one of my greatest disappointments, when I moved permanently to Finland in December 1978, came when an Aliens’ Office official said that I wasn’t a Finn.
Citizenship in Finland is determined by the parents’ citizenship (jus sanguinis). Even so, I was not considered a Finn because my father wasn’t a Finn.
Even if people in this country are quick to point out that women where the first in Europe who won the right to vote in 1906, it was not until 1984 when they had the right to pass on Finnish citizenship to their children.
A year before women won such a right, the country had in force its first-ever Aliens Act. Before the act, foreigners were treated by the aliens’ authorities on a one-to-one basis. You had no rights and could be deported without the right to appeal.
The treatment of foreigners, especially Soviet refugees, was disgraceful during the cold war.
Migrant Tales has written onSoviet asylum-seekers in Finland in the past and how they were returned against their will to the USSR to suffer a gruesome fate in psychiatric wards and prisons. One of these that I met was Aleksandr Shatravka, who visited my home in 2011 with his wife Irina. Thanks to Aleksandr, whom I met thanks to Migrant Tales, I published in February 2010 in one of Finland’s first-ever extensive human- interest stories on a former asylum-seeker who was forcibly returned to the Soviet Union in 1976.
If Finland was hostile to refugees and suspicious of foreigners, the country was ruled until 1992 by the Restricting Act of 1939.
The Act prohibited foreigners from owning real estate and acquiring a majority stake in Finnish companies—limiting this to 20% normally and 40% under special permission. The Restricting Act stipulated that foreigners could not own shares in sectors like forestry, securities trading, transportation, mining, real estate, and shipping. Foreigners weren’t allowed to establish newspapers, never mind organize demonstrations, and be politically active.
If history shows us some of the roots of our racism and anti-Semitism today, it also sheds as well light on our restrictive asylum and immigration policy. It explains why the Finnish Immigration Service operates in the way it does and why it has been the object of much criticism.
One positive step in cutting the roots and sources of our racism was an independent investigation that confirmed in February that Finnish volunteers of the Waffen-SS Wiking Division engaged in violent acts against civilians and Jews in Russia.
Considering that the aim of the SS in Russia was a war of annihilation and genocide against Jews and other enemies of the Nazis, the conclusions of the investigation should not come as a surprise.
The big surprise, however, is that it has taken almost 85 years to connect the volunteers of the Waffen-SS dots to the genocide that took place in Russia during World War 2.
[1] Finland’s Holocaust: Silences of History, edited by S. Muir, H. Worthen, pp. 25-26.
According to Yaron Nadbornik, president of the 1,100-strong Jewish Community of Helsinki, the Finnish authorities acknowledge that there is anti-Semitism and it is a problem.
“The authorities have recognized during 2018-2019 that there is an anti-Semitism problem in Finland,” he said. “Before it was [for them] pretty unclear if such a matter existed.”
According to Nadbornik, the shift in attitude happened due to the activities of neo-Nazi and far-right groups in Finland.
The head of the Jewish Community of Helsinki said that hate speech continues to be the fertile ground for anti-Semitism and racism in Finland.
“More efforts [by the authorities] should be taken to address hate speech,” he continued, “because it is from there where terrible things happen.”
Nadbornik complained in an interview in 2017 that the government of Prime Minsiter Juha Sipilä was not doing enough to clamp down on online hate speech.
“Anti-Semitism has become more systematic and organized [since 2017],” he said, adding the groups use different online platforms to spread their hatred.
Nadbornik agreed that politicians should show more leadership against hate speech and social ills like anti-Semitism and racism.
“Politicians do speak out against hate speech but a lot more could be done,” he said. “President [Sauli] Niinistö’s speech denouncing anti-Semitism [and condemning neo-Nazi groups] was important because it reaffirmed that there is a problem [in Finland and steps must be taken to eradicate it].”
President Niinistö’s condemnation came after the Turku Synagogue was the target of vandals on Holocaust Remembrance Day in January.
Nadbornik said that the Synagogue of Helsinki was also vandalized several times in winter with paint and stickers.
“The coronavirus [pandemic] has fueled racism against the Chinese and Jews in Central Europe and the United States,” he concluded. “We haven’t seen this problem in Finland, and I hope I never will.”
