Migrant tales - Page 345 of 535

Muslim woman wasn’t admitted to the Finnish police training school because she would refuse to take off her headscarf

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Migrant Tales

A Muslim woman, 38, was not admitted to the police training school because she would not take off her headscarf during working hours, reports YLE in English. The woman was so disappointed with the rejection that she even contemplated leaving Finland.

Read full story here.

“In the [police] interviewer’s opinion it was not possible to negotiate, and I didn’t get in to the school,” said the Muslim woman. “I have always wanted to join the police and now I’ve been forced to give up on my dream. The scarf is my identity and religion; I cannot give it up during working hours.”

Conservative Christian Democrat Interior Minister Päivi Räsänen, who mixes too often religion with matters of the state, added salt to injury by claiming that the police should “represent official power, not certain religious convictions.”

Räsänen doesn’t believe that the restriction to wear a headscarf has anything to do with religion and our cultural norms.

In neighboring Sweden matters are done differently.

“Scarves, turbans and Jewish kippahs are allowed because the Swedish police want people from different backgrounds to become police,” said Carolina Ekéus of the Swedish police. “In addition, allowing headscarves was seen as an equality measure.”

The point by Ekéus is key: Do people who come from different religions and cultural backgrounds in Finland have equal rights? Is this another example of how we speak of two-way integration but it’s actually ethnocentric one-way adaption?

The headscarf case shows clearly that Finland’s police still believes that it doesn’t have to change and adjust to our ever-growing ethnic and cultural diversity.

Migrant Tales reported recently about a Sikh busman’s struggle right to wear a turban at work and there was a even a case where a Muslim woman was fired on the first day of work for wearing a headscarf.

Finland’s Constitution and non-discrimination act state clearly that a person cannot be discriminated because of his or her background. Such laws have little meaning if a public employer like the police interpret the law to suit themselves.

Moreover, it shows a total disregard for the fact that Finland is today a culturally diverse country. It is a visible thumbs down by the police to this fact.

Anti-immigration populist parties are a menace to democracy, ethnic and cultural diversity

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Migrant Tales

Migrant Tales has never hid its criticism of parties that base their message on populism, scapegoating minorities and nationalism. If such political parties ever got power, it’s doubtful that they’d know what to do with it except polarize our society more than before.

Anti-immigration and nationalistic parties are masters at scapegoating because they are incompetent at doing anything right. Since they usually fail at what they do, they blame others for their failures.

Blaming migrants and minorities for unemployment and the recession are classic examples. It not only reveals who they are, but the fact that they don’t have any credible and workable political program.

How can a party that victimizes minorities and polarizes society be taken seriously?

There are already some disturbing signs what these far-right and right-wing anti-immigration parties would do if they got power. In Holland we heard Geert Wilders assure supporters that he’d make it possible that there would be less Moroccans in his country.

Ukip leader Nigel Farage, whom the Perussuomalaiset (PS) of Finland consider their political soul mate, has praised Vladimir Putin’s leadership in Russia and claims that the EU is undemocratic. He blames Brussels for the crisis in Syria and the Ukraine.

“As an operator, but not as a human being,” he was quoted as saying on the Guardian, “I would say Putin [is the leader I most admire].”

An editorial by Oulu-based Kaleva asks what PS chairman Timo Soini thinks about Farage and that if it wants to be a viable political force in Finland, the PS leader must distance his party and denounce what Ukip’s statements of support for Putin.

Read full story (in Finnish) here.

Such a suggestion by one of Finland’s largest dailies shows more naivety than real understanding of what the PS is and why it is a threat and menace to our democracy and peace.

The PS bases its recent success at the polls on isolationist-nationalism, anti-EU, anti-immigration and especially anti-Islam rhetoric.

Asking such a party to denounce the Ukip, which has become the third-largest political force in the country according to recent polls, would be synonymous to committing political hara-kiri.

Waiting for the PS to “change” into something credible is nothing more than wishful thinking based on self-deceit. It’s this kind of thinking that is already costing our country dearly.

Sweden’s white paper on the abuses and rights violations against the Roma will have a positive effect on Finland

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Migrant Tales

Sweden published on March 26 a white paper on abuses and rights violations against the Roma during the last century. The white paper is significant since it is the first time that the Swedish government has published and acknowledged Sweden’s long history of discrimination against the Roma minority. Should Finland follow Sweden’s example?

If sociologist and economist Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987) pointed out that “discrimination breeds discrimination,” contrarily positive concrete steps that challenge discrimination help undermine it. Myrdal referred to this type of knock-on effect as cumulative causation.

Read full story here.

Despite the white paper, discrimination against the Roma is still very much alive in Sweden. Migrant Tales reported last week that a Roma wearing her traditional dress was escorted out of the hotel’s breakfast room. The woman was an invited speaker at the event where the white paper was announced.

In Sweden, compulsory sterilization of the Roma took place between 1934 and 1974.

Already in the middle ages the Roma, which are the biggest ethnic minority in Europe with 6 million members, European states enacted laws that were specifically designed to marginalize and victimize them.

Writes the European Roma Information Office (ERIO): “In fact, a number of heads of state legalized the killing of Roma and anti-Gypsyism became widespread amongst the generation population across the continent. The long-held and socially ingrained prejudice

against Roma, culminated in the destructive and violent ideologies of the Nazi’s in the Third Reich…Along with numerous other

communities, the Roma were classified as Untermenschen (subhuman creatures) by the Nazi regime, and between 220,000 and 1.5 million Roma were systematically exterminated in the Holocaust.”

While the number of the Roma has been smaller in Finland than Sweden, today numbering about 10,000, greater official recognition pf the wrongs committed against the Roma in Sweden, effective anti-discrimination legislation and the role of education on cultural diversity play key roles in not only improving the lives of the Roma in this country but other minorities and migrants.

“This is a step in the right direction,” said a Roma official in Finland. “But there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.”

The new look of anti-immigration parties: Over-simplify complex social issues like cultural diversity and racism

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Migrant Tales

Observing for a number of years the language and behavior of how anti-immigration and especially anti-Islam parties operate in Europe, it’s clear that the codewords used by such parties has changed in countries like Finland. Eyeing power, the compromise that parties like the Perussuomaliset (PS) have made recently is to look more mainstream by toning down their hateful populist rhetoric.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that they have changed their views on cultural diversity and migrants, which they loathe and consider a threat to “their culture and identity,” but instead offer simplistic solutions to complex issues.

Thus it is in the simplistic solutions to matters like cultural diversity, racism, Roma panhandlers, youth unemployment, poverty and crime in general where the prejudice and racism of politician are exposed. This doesn’t only include the PS of Finland, but members of all political parties.

Over-simplistic solutions to social issues has always been a dead giveaway of those that house intolerant views. We should be worried especially today because those that house such views are appearing more mainstream.

Disagree? How many politicians from your country speak in favor of the Romany minority? Cultural diversity? Civil rights for everyone irrespective of your background?

What politicians aren’t defending is what is leading us on a slippery intolerant slope.

PS MP Maria Tolppanen, like so many of her anti-immigration and especially anti-Islam party, have become master trolls of simplistic solutions to complex social problems.

In the blog entry below, Tolppanen asks if forcing Romany panhandlers from registering with the police if a new law is passed by parliament, will turn these people into migrants and thereby be eligible to social welfare.

Read full blog entry here.

Other examples of simplistic solutions to our ever-growing cultural diversity were offered in 2011 by another PS MP, Teuvo Hakkarainen. He said that homosexuals, lesbians and Somalis should be relocated to the Åland Islands.

Another extreme example of a politician crossing the line and burning their fingers by simplifying a solution to cultural diversity is Geert Wilders of Holland, who told a crowd of supporters that he’d ensure that there would be less Moroccans in the country.

There are many examples I could cite about how anti-immigration parties like the PS over-simplify complex social matters. Why is this wrong? Because when we simplify a social issue we take our focus away from the real issues. Instead, we feed our prejudices, which in turn permits the plant of racism to bloom its poisonous fruits.

When we simplify a social issue we not only reveal our intellectual laziness and lack of resolve to challenge our own prejudices, we end up giving racism the benefit of doubt.

Migrants’ Rights Network: Why we need a new anti-racist movement if we are to secure the rights of migrants

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Migrant Tales

Don Flynn*

Anti-racism and the battle for the rights of migrant seem to have moved some distance apart in recent years. It is time to reverse that, and re-forge a unity between the two that will be able to take on the challenges that come from growing xenophobic moods.

The coalition of groups supporting the call to mark UN Anti-Racism Day on March 22^nd achieved a notable success in bringing out 10,000 people to the parade and gather in Trafalgar Square on that day.

It is clear that the strong anti-racists strands of public opinion that have been established in the UK over the past several decades are looking for leadership in the current political climate which does not seem to be provided by the mainstream parties.

There is a powerful sense that a catastrophe is not far away, with the examples of a resurgent xenophobic vote gathering momentum in a number of European countries. The advances made by the Front Nationale in local and regional elections over the last weekend in France are the latest in a salutary list of reminders of the knife-edge we might well be balanced on.

It has become common for current affairs commentators to offer up the view that race has ceased to be a salient issue in British political life and the anxieties which are pushing segments of the population to consider voting for parties with explicitly anti-foreigner messages are innocent of the sort overtones which were present in earlier times.

Racism still an issue

This is a dangerously superficial view of the situation. Whilst it is true that the determined battles against race discrimination which newly-arrived immigrants were obliged to take on back in the 1960s and 70s have recorded significant successes in changing the language and some of the attitudes which sustained racism in the past, we ought not to be fooled into thinking that the demon has been permanently exorcised.

Racism has shown itself to have some distinctly modular features, capable of being detached from the conditions which supported its original creation, and made available to other social and political movements aiming for the exclusion of the latest groups of victims. In Britain the anti-Semitism which was directed against the generation of Jews who arrived in the country in the decades around the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries moved on to embrace Chinese and Asian communities that established themselves in the seaport towns before the second world war, and then the larger group of Caribbean and Indian subcontinental nationalities who arrived thereafter.

It is true that the advances of scientific insight into what is known about what it is to be human have reduced the force of the old biological arguments which asserted spurious arguments about the superiority/inferiority on the peoples of the world. But the space left by their eclipse has been filled by ‘social’ claims about clashes of values and alleged inherent difficulties of people communicating with one another across cultures.

Shifted onto this ground the new forms of racism are capable of attaching themselves to new groups of victims, but added to rather than replacing the older species which emphasised the significance of colour. The net result is a sleight of hand in which, because other groups of Europeans are added to the list of people against whom aversion is held to be a reasonable reaction, then racism is no longer seen as the heart of the matter.

Election year challenges

MRN, as its name makes explicit, is an indisputable part of a movement for the rights of migrants, wherever they come from and whatever their ethnic group. But we regard our even deeper origins to be a part of the anti-racist movement that brought together the Commonwealth immigrant generations of the decades after the second world war and forged them into a movement that brought about change,

As we move into a year of election campaigning, which will undoubtedly feature claims by politicians across the spectrum that migrants are to blame for our present predicament, then it ought to be clear that we need as a matter of urgency a revival of the anti-racism of past decades. Just as that movement made progress by pushing back against the forms of discrimination that afflicted employment, education and the major public services, so the new anti-racism will lead arguments about the need for equality of treatment in relation to all the structures of society which underpin well-being and social security.

The groups who brought us altogether for the Anti-Racist Day on March 22^nd are planning a conference to continue the momentum towards the re-founding of a broad-based, campaigning movement fit for the challenges of the period ahead of us. It will be taking place on 14^th June. Put the date in your diary and plan to be there.

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

*Don Flynn, the MRN Director, leads the organisation’s strategic development and coordinates MRN’s policy and project work. He is a regular and sought-after speaker at conferences, seminars and lectures on behalf of MRN.

What Finnish school children from a small town think about racism?

Posted on March 30, 2014 by Migrant Tales

During the European Action Week Against Racism (March 15-23), I had the opportunity to visit an elementary and middle school in rural Eastern Finland. The event, which was organized by the Red Cross, asked elementary and middle school students to do a posters pointing out the good and bad things about Finland. Some did short plays demonstrating intolerance.*

Since the educational system in Finland is one of the best in the world according the Program for International Student Assessment (Pisa) results, we’re speaking of well-informed students.

Gathering from some of the posters that the students made, I’d be surprised if some of the students didn’t list prejudice as a negative factor about Finland. What do these posters reveal to us about some of the challenges we face in strengthening our Nordic values, which rest firmly on social equality and against all forms of intolerance?

Here’s some food for thought:

The posters don’t mention anywhere multiculturalism, or about our ever-growing culturally diverse society;
Insight: Cultural diversity is here and now. It’s not tomorrow or after tomorrow. What positive steps must we take in order that everyone, irrespective of his or her ethnic and cultural background, is treated with respect?
Since there are very few migrants in this town, its’s clear students see foreigners as refugees, which are a minority of Finland’s migrant population;
Insight: How do we change this image to show that migrants bring progress, hard work and new blood? Aren’t these new inhabitants going to pay taxes and some take care of our elderly?
The most revealing matter of the day happened at the cafeteria during lunchtime. The schools only foreign student was eating alone at the table.
Insight: What steps can be taken at schools to bring students together, even if they have different backgrounds?

Certainly the reason why the refugee student eats alone may be her fault as well. Even so, one of the complaints of some refugee students who attended the same school was their difficulty in making friends with Finnish classmates.

Some of the short 3-5-minute plays that the students performed showed how prejudice works. According to them, underestimating a migrant’s intelligence or language skills by speaking slowly like to a child were seen as clear cases of prejudice.

This poster lists unemployment benefits, free schools, associations like the Red Cross and refugee centers as “positive” factors about Finland, while cold winters, people with prejudices, cold winters, expensive country, unclear ingredients listings and language as negative factors.

This poster by middle school student listed free school meals, peace, free elementary school, nature, high educational level and other factors as reasons why migrants should move to Finland. Bad things were junk food and litter in the yard.

Some posters didn’t mention any negative things like this one above. According to this poster, landscape, school, health, lakes, security and food are factors why you should move to Finland.

This picture was added Monday. It is the only poster that claims racism as something negative about Finland. Other negative factors that it lists include prejudice, taxes, alcoholism. Some positive factors include brave people, beautiful nature, warm summers, health care, friendly people, free comprehensive school.

So what do Finnish school children from a small town think about racism?

Answer: It’s wrong.

Even if these children show that there is hope that we will be successful in building a society that based on respect for others, a lot of work still remains to be done.

* Even if it was the Action Week Against Racism, term racism was only mentioned once in a poster. They preferred instead to use prejudice as a synonym for the former.

Human Rights 101 (Argentine dirty war style)

Posted on March 29, 2014 by Migrant Tales

I’ve taught students the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Some had never heard of it. I had heard of it but never understood its meaning until one April overcast day in 1977 when I was arrested and thrown into a police cell. What happened to me on that Saturday afternoon changed my life permanently.

During the heyday of the dirty war (1976-83), when Argentina turned into a nightmare inhabited by phantoms and ogres that roamed the streets of the country with impunity, rule number one was that you never ever left your home without some ID.

At the time, US President Jimmy Carter had started his presidential term (1977-81) in January and announced a major shift in Washington’s foreign policy, which would pay closer attention to human rights. Such a foreign policy would have saved so many lives and suffering in the region. Declassified documents point to Washington’s complicity and that of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s in Argentina’s bloody coup.

After lunch I went for a walk with a friend and passed by an attractive house, which I discovered later was the home of the US consul. I focused the camera on the building but didn’t take a picture of it. Twenty yards later two policemen in civilian clothes stop us at the corner as they wave their pistols menacingly at us.

We’re escorted to the house where I pointed my camera on.

We’re asked for documents. I search for mine and discover that I forgot them at my friend’s house. The guards allow my friend to get my ID. He returns but soon a squad car arrives.

“What should we do with them?” one of the body guard asks the police officer who steps out of the car.

“Let’s take them down to the police station,” he responded.

This picture was taken just before I was put in a police cell.

Riding inside a police car in Argentina during the dirty war was an eerie experience because all the people who were outside didn’t notice you. They looked the other way as if a ghost car drove past them.

We’re put in separate cells and are ordered not to utter a word. There are stories in the Argentine media about habeas corpus but they won’t help me today.

Coarse dark walls with carved messages greeted me as the day was slowly turning itself off and making way for night. As the iron door shut and locked behind me, my eyes, as if drowning in water, ventured through a small iron-barred window that was big enough for a baby to climb through. I looked outside but was immediately stopped by coiled barbwire where a lone leafless branch hung just above it. Not knowing what was going to happen to me and for how long I’d be detained, I decided to rest my hopes on the leafless branch and image that if I were a bird I could fly to free.

Amid the backdrop of cold concrete walls and uncertainty, I remembered once again President Carter’s words about the importance of human rights in US foreign policy.

Two police guards opened the cell door and ordered me to a large office where I was told to sit in front of an enormous desk that took a few seconds for my sight to travel to a police officer who sat stoically at the other end.

”You’ve committed a serious crime,” he said after a long lapse of silence hinting at nothing. ”Do you have any idea what you’ve done?!”

I don’t remember what he said after that question but it sounded like the reasoning a soldier had just before he was going to bayonet an enemy soldier’s guts. This is what I interpret him saying:

”Let me give it to you straight: Only the meek have stayed on, the bare minimum to sustain military rule so we can still run our factories. Just enough people to make our cities, towns and villages not appear too deserted. This is going to be a long war against the terrorists but we’ll prevail in the end.”

Escorted back to the cell, I passed by another one that still intrigues me after 37 years. The cell that I passed was the only one that was lighted by a naked light bulb. As I passed it, I swiftly sneaked a peek through the barred door. I noticed a person sitting on a stool with their back turned against me.

The image of that person became an obsession. Who was it? Why was that person detained? Did the person disappear like tens of thousands of others during the dirty war?

If I didn’t like being a conscript in the Argentine army, I didn’t mind it that much now. If I didn’t return to the base on Monday they’d start looking for me.

After a long wait, the cell door opened again to a room with other policemen I noticed Major Echazú from the military base.

“Will that idiot step forward!” he yelled at the top of his voice. When my friend took the first step, the major yelled even louder: “No, I mean the other idiot!”

I was on the verge of having a nervous breakdown. I was arrested for not taking a picture, I got stopped at gunpoint, I was thrown in a prison cell and now this, being balled out and humiliated in front of everyone! But there was a certain sparkle in Major Echazú’s eyes that told me that he was just acting.

“What the hell is wrong with you?!” he continued. “Do you think you’re in Hollywood? You can take that camera and stick it up your ass!”

After being thoroughly yelled at, both of us were fingerprinted by the police. I was given a warning by them: If anything happens to the US consul, I would be directly held responsible.”

Just as we were going to leave the police station, I noticed my camera on a table. It was given back to me.

As we drove away with a very deep sigh of relief, Major Echazú said we were lucky. The police and the military are rivals and there’s usually no love lost between them.

How close was I becoming a silent and unknown victim of the dirty war? I’ll never know but one matter is for certain: If human rights were respected in Argentina, the military junta would have never committed so many atrocities as it did during its reign of terror.

Even so, how can a group of murderers respect human rights?

Institute of Race Relations: How the Swedish media bought into the myth-making of the far Right

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Migrant Tales

Maria Tjader

The leader of the far-Right Sweden Democrats wants to portray himself as the victim of anti-white racism.

Read full story here.

A televised interview on 23 February with Jimmie Åkesson, the leader of the far-Right Sweden Democrats (SD), has generated much controversy over the alleged claims made by Åkesson with regards to his childhood in Sölvesborg. The interview is part of a series called ’Nyfiken på partiledaren’ (’Curious about the party-leader’), which is broadcast on SVT (the Swedish equivalent of the BBC), and focuses on getting to know the leaders of the main political parties in Sweden ahead of the National elections in September this year. The idea of the format of the programme is to see a different side of the politicians, away from public opinion and political events. According to Åkesson, his experiences as a teenager of segregation and failed multiculturalism led him to become a member of the Sweden Democrats as a way of supporting Swedish nationalism. Åkesson describes his adolescence as a struggle between him and immigrant-gangs that beat up him and his friends. This picture paints Åkesson as a brave nationalist whose main goal has always been to protect Sweden, his beloved country, from the threat of the ’Other’.

However, these suggestions have subsequently been refuted by a large number of people who grew up with Åkesson and who worked at his old school. Major Swedish newspapers, television and radio have reported on the inaccuracies in Åkesson’s story and he has, consequently, been accused of distorting the reality of immigration in Sweden for political gain and legitimacy. Åkesson’s former head teacher has refuted the claims saying that there were no gangs made up of immigrants at all, nor were there any particular individuals who acted in a threatening way towards other children. Another of his former teachers suggests that Åkesson has a bizarre view on the history of immigration in Sölvesborg. This claim is supported by the statistics from SCB (Statistiska Centralbyrån/Statistics Sweden) that paint a very different picture than that of Åkesson. According to this statistic, there were 24 new immigrants in Sölvesborg in 1985 and although the number rose there were never more than 200 new immigrants per year. Furthermore, this does not take into account migrants who left Sölvesborg. This is but another insight into the strange workings of SD, who has had its fair share of scandals since 2010, but it also tells us something important about the role of media in creating and sustaining the myths of the nationalist far-right.

Arguably, the flux of information has radically changed with the power of internet and social media. There have been previous reports on how Germany’s new extreme right have been using social media to attract, notably younger, supporters through parties, gigs and under-18 events. Similarly, any news-search on google, relating to the far-right or racism violence, generates nationalist websites that blame everything on left-wing multi-culturalists. It cannot, thus, be argued that the far-right lacks a platform for its freedom of speech. The issue is when national media lowers itself that same level, prioritising everyone’s right to be heard and seen rather than taking responsibility for whatever consequences their reporting might have.

The issue of using freedom of speech as an excuse for people to vent extremist opinions has been highlighted by the IRR before. It is undeniable that certain individuals and groups take advantage of the laws on freedom of press and speech, however there are other instances which show the complexity of these issues. There were those who criticised the laissez faire style used in Åkesson’s interview, arguing that it portrayed media as serving as an uncritical forum where anyone can say anything. But after the programme was broadcast, other authentic voices were given space to refute Åkesson’s myth-making, and their statements were reported as facts. This gives hope for a return to reporting with a critical edge.

Read original story here.

This piece was reprinted by Migrant Tales with permission.

Acceptance and respect of cultural diversity is very similar to the gay rights struggles of the past

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Migrant Tales

It wasn’t too long ago in Europe and countries like the United States, Argentina and Australia that being gay was seen as a psychological disorder that could even be cured. Acceptance of cultural diversity, the right to be treated with respect irrespective of your background, is undergoing the same struggles that gays faced as they sought greater rights.

Cultural and ethnic diversity is like a forest. The more detail we can see, the greater strength and beauty if offers.

In many respects, the same attitudes that forced people into thinking heterosexuality was the only right sexuality, is being promoted today by those who don’t accept cultural diversity and somehow believe that a person who is other can be “cured.”

If the gay person was sent to a psychiatrist in the past, the same cure is being collectively prescribed to migrants and minorities. We’ll show you how to meet our expectations – they claim – even if they have no effective answer since their prejudices are the problem.

I believe that cultural diversity will gain greater acceptance and become the more the norm in the future just like gay rights did.

That is why gay rights is so interlinked with minority rights.

Romany minority discrimination case sparks government outrage in Sweden

Posted on March 27, 2014 by Migrant Tales

The Swedish government has called a crisis meeting due to a discrimination case of a Roma woman at Stockholm’s Sheraton Hotel, reports Helsingin Sanomat. The woman, who was invited by the government to speak at a seminar on discrimination of the Roma in Sweden’s capital, was escorted with her traditional dress out of the hotel’s breakfast room.

The government published at the seminar a white paper on the abuses and rights violations of the Roma in the last century.

The incident has received wide media coverage in Sweden.

The woman, Diana Nyman, is a native Finn who lives in Sweden.

“I felt so disgraced,” she was quoted as saying to Swedish news agency TT. “It was so embarrassing at the breakfast room where there were a lot of people who didn’t understand why I was being discriminated.”

Nyman said that as she while she was escorted out of the room, people must have thought she wanted to eat breakfast without paying.

Read full story (in Finnish) here.

Sweden’s integration minister, Erik Ullenhag, said that Nyman’s case shows that discrimination happens daily in Sweden and that there is a need to debate the issue.

One positive matter about Sweden is that the government does take a stand against discrimination and shuns the xenophobic and far-right Sweden Democrats.

Finland could learn a lot from Sweden on how to combat intolerance and discrimination.