Facebook: Don’t lose hope no matter how wrong the Finnish government is

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Hi people,

I know it is really hard for you now, with forced deportations, and all this bullshit that our stupid government is trying to do at the moment, and trying to hide at the same that they are doing it… I just want you to know that don’t worry.

We now have proof that the government breaks the law (The 1951 Refugee Convention) and that their plan is to try scare Iraqi and Afghan people to leave the country, by forced deportations. The police puts electrical belts on people (illegal?) and refuse to give their names to the deportees, when asked. They also desperately try to hide from the public what they are doing… omg what idiots ? (sorry..you should not call someone an idiot.. I am just angry, that’s why, sorry :D) But we have an informed press, and of course, there are about 100 000 or more Finnish people who know you personally and know your stories. We know what is going on (and we are pretty angry about it, especially the sweet old ladies). There’s no way that the authorities can do this unnoticed and there is no way they can hide what they are doing. Finnish people will NOT accept this bullshit. I mean our own government is sending people to their deaths, and tries to cover it up. C’mon don’t be so stupid! You cannot do that in Finland!

Anyway, the racist politicians, who are behind this, also play you guys against each other. The system in Iraq is obviously made so that no one can trust anyone, and some people try to stay safe by trying to please the people in power. There is a network of lies and mistrust and computer hacking, the secret service and bullshit strategies, and all this kind of weird stuff. But guys: Finland doesn’t work like this! For real!

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(Asylum Corner) Reporting on migration: magnifying glass or distorting lens?

Posted on by Migrant Tales

On January 25th, the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) brought together a large group of experts and well-known panellists in Brussels to debate the ways to balance the narrative on migration on both sides of the Mediterranean. During the event, which relates to the scope of the EUROMED Migration IV project, Aidan White, director of the Ethical Journalism Network (EJN), presented the first report on the study he is currently conducting on behalf of ICMPD about media and migration in the Mediterranean area.

Read original posting  here.

The EUROMED Migration IV project aims to support all EU Member States and all European Neighborhood Instrument (ENI) Southern Partner Countries (SPC) in establishing a comprehensive operational dialogue and cooperation framework, with a focus on strengthening tools and capacities to shape coherent migration and international protection policies. Within this broad set of goals, understanding media dynamics when reporting on migration on both sides of the sea and promoting more truthful and unbiased information on the topic, together represent an ambitious but very much necessary objective for the project.

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Kerstin Ögård: Hallituksen turvapaikkapolitiijasta ei ole mitä järkeä

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Aamun ajatus: ymmärrän että hallituksemme ajatus vain oli suojella suomalaisia, tiukalla politiikallaan. Tänne tuli yhtäkkiä 30000 arabia, jotka tunnetusti ovat väkivaltaisia, raiskaavat ja ryöstävät, suunnittelevat terrori-iskuja, haluavat soluttautua Suomeen ja tehdä tästä islamilaisen valtion. (?)

Hallituksemme paniikkireaktio on täysin ymmärrettävä, ja varmaa on, että he ajattelivat vain suomalaisten parasta. Meidän tulisi ymmärtää tämä. He tekivät vain minkä kokivat siinä tilanteessa oikeaksi.

Nyt kuitenkin, puolentoistavuoden jälkeen, voidaan nähdä että arabit ovatkin yllätykseksemme sopeutuneet tänne ja länsimaalaistuneet. Väkivaltatilastot eivät ole nousseet, vaikka poliisilaitos näin ennusti. Arabit ovat, odottamisen sijaan, aktiivisesti ja oma-aloitteisesti hakeutuneet työ- ja opiskelu-elämään. He ovat ystävystyneet suomalaisten kanssa, ja heistä on tullut osa heidän arkea. Suomalaiset ovat huomanneet, että he ovat rauhaa-rakastavia ja hyvä-sydämisiä ihmisiä. (No, joka kansassa on omat vihaajansa. Onhan meillä suomessakin esim. nuo rasistit. ) Mutta suurin osa heistä on aivan tavallisia ihmisiä, jotka vain haluavat elää rauhassa, tehdä töitä, perustaa perheen, vain elää normaalia elämää. He ovat iloisia päästessään pois kotimaansa sodasta ja ahdistavasta kontrolloivasta sosiaalisesta ilmapiiristä elämään länsimaisessa vapaudessa. He kokevat että täällä voi hengittää, täällä voi olla turvassa, ja he ovat hyvin kiitollisia siitä tavasta miten monet suomalaiset ovat ottaneet heidät avosylin vastaan, ja auttaneet uuteen elämään täällä.

Hallituksen turvapaikkapolitiikka, sen lakia ja eettisyyttä rikkova linja, sen voi tietyllä lailla ymmärtää, mutta jos ollaan loogisia ja katsotaan asioita tämän päivän faktojen valossa, voidaan nähdä että tuolle politiikalle ei enää löydy mitään järjellisiä perusteita. Yleinen mielipide on sillä kannalla että turvapaikkapolitiikka ei noudata ihmisoikeuksia, tämä on Suomessa kuitenkin tärkeä arvo. Uskon että hallitus itse pian ymmärtää tämän, eikä enää väkisin runno läpi politiikkaa, joka ei tuotakaan heidän haluamaansa lopputulosta.

Annoin muuten palautetta (Paula) Risikolle, kommenttina hänen blogikirjoitukseensa turvallisuudesta:

Lähde: Sisäministeriö.

“Anteeksi että sanon mutta mielestäni sisäministeriö on epäonnistunut turvallisuuden luomisessa. Minulla on ennen ollut Suomessa turvallinen olo, mutta nyt asiat ovat dramaattisesti muuttuneet, turvapaikanhakijoiden takia. Jostain luin että heitä on nyt maassa 4000 laittomasti, ja he eivät suostu lähtemään takaisin Irakiin. Näitä paperittomia tulee ennätysmäärä kevään aikana. Poliisi yrittää väkisin karkottaa heitä mutta ei onnistu tehtävässään. Monet maassa piileskelevistä yhteiskunnan ulkopuolella olevista turvapaikanhakijoista kärsivät post-traumaattisesta stressistä ja pelosta joka päivä, ja tämän lisäksi vihaavat Suomea ja varsinkin Suomen hallitusta ja Migriä.

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A week in an asylum seeker’s life in Finland: legal limbo and deportation

Posted on by Migrant Tales

From good news like with the release of Hayder Al-Hatemi on February 1 this week is characterized by extending the detention of an asylum seeker and two deportations.

Let’s start off with DH, who was detained in Pori on January 22. His fiancée wrote a letter asking without any luck Prime Minister Juha Sipilä to free her fiancé from detention. She wrote:

My fiancé was torn from life without any warning when he was detained. The door shut coldly in front of me and there were no chances even to say goodbye at the first place he was detained.

DH was transferred on January 26 from Helsinki’s Metsälä immigration removal center to Lappeenranta. Over the weekend, DH and her parents made a long six-hour trip from Pori to Lappeenranta by car to visit her fiancé on Sunday between 9am and noon.

DH and her fiancée posing for a selfie from detention center in Lappeenranta on Sunday.

DH’s fiancée was hopeful that he’d be released after a judge heard her on Tuesday.

“They are not going to release him because the police fear he’ll go into hiding,” she said by phone, who didn’t know what was the next legal challenge her fiancé faces.

Deportation #1

Kerstin Ögård, who wrote an inspiring post on Migrant Tales last week, took the case of twenty-year-old Aziz Khalaf, who was deported Tuesday noon to Iraq.

The young Iraqi asylum seeker writes:

“I came to Finland because I had read that it is a country that has freedom and humanity…Just please focus on this word ‘humanity,’ what does this word mean to you? Please let me stay here for the sake of humanity if nothing else.”

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A Finnish asylum policy that is doomed to fail

Posted on by Migrant Tales

It’s been well over a year since tens of thousands of asylum seekers came to Finland from countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and others. An important watershed in the history of these asylum seekers took place in May, when an assessment by the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) saw parts of countries like Iraq are safe to return asylum seekers.

The decision by Migri in May very much defined the government’s asylum policy on what it would do to the majority of refugees that came to Finland. The new policy would tighten immigration policy and pass laws in parliament that would make family reunification near-impossible and undermine asylum seekers’ due process by, for example shortening appeal times.

While the government and Migri are doing everything possible to get rid of as many asylum seekers from Finland, it’s clear that many refugees cannot return back to their home countries because it’s too dangerous.

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Finns have finally woken up to a lie and bully called the Perussuomalaiset party

Posted on by Migrant Tales

After bullying, labeling and scapegoating migrants and minorities for a number of years, the Perussuomalaiset party (PS)* appears to be returning to the minor one-digit political leagues, if a recent poll by Helsingin Sanomat is true. Those groups that the PS has attacked and spread lies about will have the last laugh. 

While there is still a long way to go before the parliamentary elections of 2019, the municipal elections are just around the corner on April 9.

A poll commissioned by Helsingin Sanomat shows the Perussuomalaiset in the minor one-digit political leagues with 8.6% Source: Helsingin Sanomat.

Some analysts believe that if the PS does poorly in the municipal elections, which would mean below 10% of the votes, it may prompt the party to exit government. Depending which party replaces the PS or if new elections are called, it could even mean an about-turn in immigration policy.

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Ahmad Liath: “I left Iraq because I long for freedom”

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Ahmad Liath was twelve years old when he left Iraq in 2005. Two years before that year, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 and in 2004 his father was killed.

After the invasion by the United States and its allies, thing didn’t get better but worse in Iraq. A testimony of the latter is the violence and death that we commonly read in the news from Iraq today.

Like thousands of other Iraqi asylum seekers, Liath, who lives in the city of Tampere, located 178 km north of Helsinki, came to Finland in the fall of 2015. Like many of his fellow countrymen, he too got a rejection for asylum from the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) in January. His mother, however, who came with him to Finland, got a positive decision from Migri ten days before his rejection.

Eleven years is a long time for anyone to be on the road. Liath first moved from Iraq to Syria in 2005 and stayed there until 2010, when fighting in that country’s civil war got worse. He moved to Turkey and then in 2015 to Europe.

“Even if I have lived most of my life in Syria and Turkey, I still don’t know what having a home means,” he continued. “I’ve been called a lot of names during my travels like asylum seeker, tramp, bum, hobo, and wanderer. I’ve taken a lot of insults, suffered racist attacks and seen my human rights trampled,”

Liath said that one of the matters he learned after being on the road for such a long time is that you learn to mistrust everyone, especially your countrymen.

“In Austria I got a negative decision for asylum because the interpreter, who was an Iraqi, told the immigration authorities that I wasn’t a real asylum seeker,” he said.

Liath says that despite his fears and mistrust of people, he’s able to stay focused on his long journey. “I left Iraq because I long for freedom,” he said.

Liath stated that if he can settle down in Finland he’d like to study a profession like computer science and work for a company.

“It’s been difficult to go to school for me since we’ve been near-constantly on the move and I’ve been obliged to work in order to help my mother and sister,” he added.

Before coming to Finland, the young Iraqi asylum seeker moved to Germany, where he stayed at an asylum refugee center in Karlsruhe, after being in Austria and Hungary. He too took the so-called “road of death” that hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers took in 2015 through Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, and Hungary.

“The worst place that I visited was Hungary and in Serbia they treated us like animals,” he said. “I was locked up [in Hungary] for a month for crossing the border.”

Around 1,300 people lived in an asylum center in Karlsruhe, Germany. “Imagine what the WC looks like or when you have wait in long lines for food or get you phone charged,” he said. Picture by Ahmad Liath.
The food served at the asylum center in Karlsruhe in Germany. Picture by Ahmad Liath.

“We were 12 people in a tiny cell that was only 15 square meters,” he said. “We had to take 4-5-hour shifts sleeping because all of us couldn’t lie down on the floor at the same time. We were locked up for 22 hours and allowed to go outside for only two hours a day.”

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Epälojaalisuus ei riipu kaksoiskansalaisuudesta

Posted on by Ana María Gutiérrez Sorainen

Nicaraguan passini on nyt vanhentunut, mutta voisin koska tahansa hakea uuden. Sain Suomen kansalaisuuden 1998. Olen siis yksi Suomen kansalaisista, jolla voisi olla myös toisen maan passi. Vaikka käyn noin kahden vuoden välein Nicaraguassa ja soitan säännöllisesti äidille ja siskoilleni, minulla ei ole muita siteitä Nicaraguaan. Rakastan paikkaa, jossa olen syntynyt, mutta myös nykyistä perheeni kotimaata.

Tarinani on vain yksi tuhansien joukossa. Tilastokeskuksen mukaan yli 95 000 suomalaisella on jonkun muun maan kansalaisuus.

Ymmärrän huolet ihmisten lojaalisuudesta eri suuntiin tässä uudessa kansainvälisessä tilanteessa. Oletus on, ettei kaksoiskansalaisiin voi luottaa tietyissä asioissa. Tämän on sanonut pääministerikin. Ja tähän perustuvat Trumpin operaatiot kieltää tiettyjen muslimimaiden kansalaisia saapumasta Yhdysvaltoihin.

Perussuomalaisvetoisissa ulkoministeriössä ja puolustusministeriössä on nyt ilmennyt tapauksia, joissa kaksoiskansalaisia ei ole otettu töihin. Näin on toimittu vaikka kyse on selkeästi kansalaisuuteen perustuvasta syrjinnästä.

Lain mukaan kaksoiskansalaisuudella ei saisi olla merkitystä rekrytoinnissa. Jokainen kaksoiskansalainen on Suomen kansalainen. Suomen kansalaisten lakisääteinen eriarvoinen kohtelu edellyttää perustuslain muuttamista.

Enemmän kuin kansalaisuus tai kaksoiskansalaisuus, ihmisen lojaliteettia määrittävät hänen sidosryhmänsä. Esimerkiksi dosentti Johan Bäckman olisi vuosia sitten saanut tehdä töitä armeijan ja ulkoministeriön tehtävissä, koska tiettävästi Bäckman ei ole kaksoiskansalainen. Jos hänet olisi tuommoiseen virkaan valittu, mihinköhän suuntaan hänen lojaliteettinsa olisi osoittanut?

President Niinstö and Prime Minister Juha Sipilä believe that dual nationals pose threat to Finland’s national security

Posted on by Migrant Tales

The debate on dual citizenship in Finland became headline news again on Thursday when President Sauli Niinistö was quoted as saying on YLE News that dual nationals could pose a security threat to the country. On Friday, YLE published a poll where 66% of the respondents agreed that dual nationals shouldn’t be hired to work for the defense forces and foreign ministry. 

One of the interesting questions we should ask is why has dual citizenship become such a burning national issue at this moment?

Source: YLE News.

Apart from this week’s scoop by YLE, which revealed that the defense forces places restrictions on conscripts who are dual citizens of Finland and Russia, it appears to be as well one of President Niinistö’s favorite topics. In 2014, he started to gather information about dual citizens.

According to Thursday’s Helsingin Sanomat, a person with Finnish and Russian citizenship was also turned down a job in the foreign ministry because he was a dual national.

Another reason why dual citizenship has hit the headlines in Finland again is because municipal elections will take place on April 9. This may be a good way for government parties like the anti-immigration Perussuomalaiset*, which have seen their poll numbers plummet, and its partners, the Center Party and National Coalition Party (NCP), to bolster support in the upcoming elections.

Another politician that was in favor of placing restrictions on dual nationals from getting jobs at the foreign ministry and defense forces is Prime Minister Juha Sipilä of the Center Party.

Before being elected as head of state, Niinistö was an NCP member.

Plans to discriminate against dual nationals in Finland may have also a lot to do with the present negative immigration and anti-cultural diversity climate in Finland, which has put pressure on political parties to scale back and water down laws that stand up for human rights and diversity.

Source: YLE News.

After Finland became a member of the European Union in 1995, it passed a number of liberal laws that fostered respect for diversity and human rights.

One of these new laws was the Constitution, which replaced in 1999 the former one that was in force since 1919. Section 6 of the present Constitution states:

“No one shall, without an acceptable reason, be treated differently from other persons on the ground of sex, age, origin, language, religion, conviction, opinion, health, disability or other reason that concerns his or her person.”

Matti Jutila of the Finnish League for Human Rights believes that it will be difficult to draft a law that sees dual citizenship as an “acceptable reason” to exclude people from being hired at the foreign ministry or defense forces.

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