Much of Finland’s hostility towards asylum seekers and visible minorities lies on President Sauli Niinistö, who hosts today his last Independence Day gala. For some, like me, this is good news. Hopefully, Finland’s next president will have a greater understanding of migrants, cultural diversity and peace-building.
Ahti Tolvanen, who is a member of the Migrant Tales board, believes that President Niinistö failed in his job number one.
“One of the areas that President Niinist failed was maintaining Finland as a peacekeeping nation,” he said. “He just walked away from decades of a tradition in The Helsinki Spirit.”
The Helsinki Spirit was the basis of Finland’s foreign policy grounded on détente and non-involvement and not taking sides in conflicts.
President Niinistö dancing with his wife Jenni Haukio at the Independence Day gala.
During the past eight years of his mandate, President Niinistö has shown his hostility towards asylum seekers, especially Muslims, and other people of color. He was never a friend of such communities.
President Niinistö’s prejudices and apparent ignorance about racism are one source that feeds Finland’s hostile environment against migrants and minorities. Some of his comments and stances (see below) leave some scratching their heads.
Why is the dual citizenship issue being raised again by Yle? According to a survey of MPs, 34 would block dual Finnish-Russian citizenship, while 36 said they would not. Twenty-six had no opinion.
Is it surprising that the majority of MPs who want to restrict dual citizenship are members of the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* and National Coalition Party?
The whole issue of dual citizenship should be seen as another step in the road of insularity and xenophobia. It’s concerning because if the government succeeds at excluding Russians from enjoying dual citizenship, other nationalities will follow. What else could you expect from the present government?
The government of Prime Minister Petteri Orpo plans to tighten citizenship laws. Some of the measures include raising the residence requirement for citizenship to eight from five years. Are there plans to do away with dual citizenship rights as well?
After the Cold War and joining the EU in 1995, Finland passed a number of laws that aimed to make the country more inclusive. With the tightening of immigration laws and the hostile view of outsiders by the present government, some believe that Finland wants to return to the days when the country did everything possible to exclude and make life difficult for foreigners.
Since 2011, Finland has found a powerful political force in racism. If the country heads down the path of Hungary, it will do so with fearmongering about migrantsand how such people abuse and use social welfare at the cost of white Finns.
Even if the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* don’t hide their disdain for migrants and admiration of authoritarian regimes like the one in Hungary, parties like the National Coalition Party are helping to turn the country on its autocratic side.
Human Rights and the present rule of law guaranteed in our constitution are being targeted.
The following red lights are flashing loudly. Prime Minister Orpo can only utter “that the government has a good program.”
Media, high pillar of civilization, pride of the developed world, crown jewel of any democracy, far (rightly) from being biased, “fair”, “free” and “ethical”… The title is addressing you.
You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming.
Pablo Neruda
As we navigate daily “a” distorted gallery, the glaring contrast between the spotlight cast on some and the shadows shrouding others becomes an uncomfortable tableau. The dichotomy echoes the oppressive silence enforced by the Western media that “beautify and nose-powder”, confining information and strangely by selectively applying censorship. In this unsettling narrative, objectivity is the art of selective disclosure that taints a casualty and information. As we traverse (ironically) the landscape of double standards, let’s pick some of the information and look it up from the mainstream.
While it only took 49 days of genocide and 8,000 children killed to get an article like the one below from the New York Times, and a change of heart in some other outlets, the media in Europe is a far cry from the noble Western values for human rights, at least the same way it glowed when it was about Ukraine. It’s worth reminding that Germany, for example, charged Russia with war crimes for ONE indiscriminate missile attack that killed 22 people. Israel has done this approximately 1,000 times.
The full article of the New York Times here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html
There are a few many things that don’t comply with the proclaimed Western values when it comes to this matter: Journalists from there aren’t that much valued, supported, or protected by their “colleagues” in Europe. The number of journalists that have been killed (67) is practically a record that has never been recorded before, and the silence about it is no less significant.
Finland’s Perussuomalaiset (PS)* interior minister, Mari Rantanen, has pulled another fast one on the media. Anti-immigration politicians usually make outrageous statements that are then rebuffed by the media. It is a course in Fake News 101.
Even if Interior Minister Mari Rantanen admits her claim, that millions of migrants are coming to Finland, to be “a childish mistake,” it is far from that. Politicians constantly make outrageous claims. It does not matter if the politician admits to the mistake later because the news is already out there with their followers. Source: Yle
On Tuesday, Rantanen claimed on A-studiothat “millions of undocumented migrants” could come to Finland.
On Wednesday, the following day, she admitted to the “childish mistake.”
“I meant that in Russia there are around 10 million foreigners of which 1-2 million are residing illegally,” she added.
Jussi Lassila, a researcher at the Finnish Institution of Foreign Affairs, said that it was an exaggeration to talk about all the undocumented people in Russia when considering the number of people who might come to Finland.
I have always said that if there were another government, preferably without the National Coalition Party (NCP) and Perussuomalaiset (PS)*, the decision to shut the Russian-Finnish border would have some credibility.
Source: X (formerly Twitter).
The decision to close the border is first and foremost a political decision. It is a good way to shift attention from the painful austerity measures Prime Minister Petteri Orpo plans to implement.
The closing of the border also reinforces what we’ve known for a long time: the PS and NCP don’t care about human rights.
According to the Guardian, Annika Sandlund, the UN refugee agency’s representative to the Nordic and Baltic countries, said closing all border crossing points would be “contrary to international law”.
Radical right Perussuoalaiset (PS)* chairperson, Riikka Purra, like Interior Minister Mari Rantanen, loathes Muslims and other minorities. Slamming and suggesting that Deputy Chancellor of Justice Mikko Puumalainen is a”liberal moron,” exposes her hatred and desperation.
Purra, the one who said she’d shoot migrant youths on a train in 2008, now takes out her crystal ball and claims to be a clairvoyant.
She writes that the people coming from Russia to the border “are not genuine asylum seekers,” adding that they “have nothing to worry about and are not fleeing [war].”
If Purra claims that these people aren’t real asylum seekers, we could say that her concern about “national security” due to a few hundred asylum seekers coming to the border is hogwash. In 2015, we had thousands of asylum seekers entering Finland from Iraq and Afghanistan and nobody raised serious outcries about national security. As we can see, it is all a political stunt by Purra and her party.
But here is the question: Why is Purra so eager about trashing our international agreements that are protected, according to her, by “liberal morons.”
In order to expose the lies of Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s government, just look at the flagrant denials and outrageous claims. There are two that fit the far-right playbook to a tee: (1) We can shut the Finnish-Russian border and deny people the right to asylum; and (2) Vladimir Putin can get political asylum in Finland.
Both are false claims intended for public consumption.
When it comes to migrants, the far-right playbook works in the following manner:
Make an outrageous claim like we can shut the whole eastern border and deny asylum.
Even if the media will disprove your claim later, it does not matter because the news is already out there.
Your followers have received the fictitious claim.
The government is now offering two lies for the price of one. First lie: We can shut the whole Finnish-Russian border and tell asylum seekers to go fly a kite. Second lie: Vladimir Putin can get refuge in Finland by simply mentioning the magic word, “asylum,” at the border.
The first lie, that the government can shut the border to asylum seekers, is a campaign promise made by the National Coalition Party and PS, whose leader Riikka Purra falsely misled voters to believe that her party’s get-ough stance on migrants meant denying their rights to asylum.
The government has adopted far-right rhetoric. In this ad, the government claims that its measures at the border are to “stop illegal migration.” The claim is as absurd as labeling people as “illegal refugees.” Is there such a thing? The spread of misinformation is as full wing.
Many mainstream politicians have adopted and amplified the language of the far right
On the far right, Geert Wilders of PVV looks on during the last debate in the Dutch parliamentary elections on 21 November, 2023 in The Hague, Netherlands. Photo by Patrick van Katwijk/Getty Images
Dutch far-right and anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders’ success in this week’s elections in the Netherlands has been widely described as a “shock” result. It is nothing of the sort.
Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), whose manifesto calls for bans on mosques and the wearing of Islamic headscarves in government buildings, won 37 seats in the 150-seat parliament, more than doubling its previous number.
Instead, sections of the media described Wilders as “charismatic” and failed to challenge him, even as he called Moroccan migrants “scum” and said Islam is “the ideology of a retarded culture”. He was also courted unashamedly by Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, leader of the liberal VVD party, which has been in power for the past 10 years.
The shock for those of us who have observed the resurgence of far-right politics in Europe is not that Wilders may become Dutch prime minister. It is that today in Europe, for people of colour, there appears to be no hiding place.
Almost all of Europe’s mainstream politicians — in varying degrees — have adopted and amplified the racist, xenophobic, anti-migration and Islamophobic views of Wilders, France’s Marine Le Pen and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
