Jyväskylä is (another) wakeup call to growing far right violence and intimidation

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Wednesday’s attack by neo-Nazi thugs at a book presentation in Jyväskylä is a wakeup call to the growing menace of far right violence in Finland. Was what happened in the central Finnish city a surprise? 

The answer is no if you ask researcher Vesa Puuronen of the University of Eastern Finland.

”When we consider recent political and ideidological developments in Finland and Europe,” he was quoted as saying on YLE in English, ”then this is by no means a surprising incident.”

Considering that a group of suspected neo-Nazi Suomen Kansalinen Vastarinta (SKV) members tried to disrupt a peaceful meeting where people were exercising their right to meet and express themselves is a cause for concern.

In many respects the rise of far right and neo-Nazi (see Hungary and Greece) are fuelling and emboldening likeminded groups in Finland. It would be naive to think that we are some island immune to their ideology.

One has only to go back to the April 2011 election, when the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party won a historic election victory to become Finland’s third-largest party in parliament.

While not all PS MPs and party members belong to the far right, a group led by MP Jussi Halla-aho  pretty much dictates policy on immigration and cultural diversity. Their view of on these issues is similar to other far right groups in Europe like the Sweden Democrats and Danish People’s Party.

As long as politicians, civil leaders, policy makers and the general public remain quiet and play down  the threat that far right groups in this country, we’ll be  emboldening them to new acts of violence. Racism, xenophobia and prejudice are some of the fuels that these groups thrive on to grow.

What happened in Jyväskylä is not only disgraceful, but a directattack against all of us who believe in the rule of law.

Suspected neo-Nazis attack book presentation event on the far right in Finland

Posted on by Migrant Tales

A group of men with bottles and knives barged in a book presentation in the central Finnish city of Jyväskylä on far-right extremism, according to Yle in English. The men, who called themselves ”patriots,” injured one of the body guards who was taken to hospital. The attackers fled the scene. 

Members of the neo-Nazi Suomen Kansalinen Vastarinta (SKV) are suspected to have attacked the book presentation.

Two of Äärioikesto Suomessa’s (Far right in Finland) three authors, Li Andersson and Mikael Brunila, were present at the event but weren’t hurt.

The police, who haven’t yet  caught the suspects, said that they are investigating the incident as aggravated assault.

MTV3 reported on the 10pm news that two of the attackers ave been identified but could not confirm if the police had apprehended them.

skvThis neo-Nazi SKV sticker was found in front of my home in spring.

The attack in Jyväskylä demonstrates that far right and neo-Nazi groups in Finland are getting bolder. 

Far right in Finland ‘s third author, Dan Koivulaakso, was attacked with pepper spray in June at a North Pride event in Oulu.

If the police would connect all the recent dots about the presence of far-right violence in this country, I’m certain that some would be concerned.

The same way that the police plays down the threat of these groups, it doesn’t appear too concerned either by the rising number of hate crimes and racism inflicting this country.

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I spoke with Alain Minguet, a Green Party city councilor and president of JoMoni, over a year ago that something like what happend in Jyväskylä  could take place, or worse.

Many who write about racism in Finland get harassed. The first story I wrote about how badly Somali’s were treated in Mikkeli in the early 1990s for a major Finnish magazine landed me two death threats by phone. There was a third caller who harassed and insulted me over the phone.

The death threats and threats in general haven’t stopped. I filed a complaint to the police last spring about such cases but haven’t heard a word from them. The policeman investigating the case doesn’t even answer my phone calls.

Believe it or not, the police in Mikkeli and Pieksämäki have told me that I should not report racist harassment cases to the police.

It’s time for the authorities to get tough with neo-Nazi and far right groups that use violence and death threats to get across their message.

 

What does Finland’s integration law reveal about our society and expectations?

Posted on by Migrant Tales

A good question we can ask about Finland’s integration act is what it reflects about our views and expectations of newcomers. Can any law integrate people effectively?  

If you want to speak of one- or two-way adaption, one should ask some of Finland’s oldest minorities like the Roma and Saami what memories such a law may evoke.

Considering that children who spoke Saami at school in the 1960s were punished in Finland, it’s natural that there are a lot of bad feelings and distrust of white Finns’ intentions.

If we look at second- and third-generation Finns, we don’t even know what these people were supposed to integrate to. It’s sad that the answer to this question has been in some cases society’s indifference and rejection.

Apart form the lack of resources that the present integration law faces, another challenge is if it offers a big picture of our ever-growing culturally diverse society. How, for example, does it promote acceptance as well as respect for new Finnishness and other new identities?

It would be too simplistic to claim that the integration law is a utter failure. For one it keeps those who are hostile to our ever-growing cultural diversity at bay. Its existence permits it to indirectly integrate Finns as well to the idea that we are becoming a culturally diverse society.

What does the act reflect about our views and expectations of newcomers? In many respects it reflects our expectations and too little of those that are being integrated.  Thus we speak of two-way integration but in practice it’s one-way.

Canadian Social psychologist J. W. Berry highlighted three important matters in order to manage successfully a culturally diverse society. Even if he speaks of multiculturalism, it can apply well to Finland, which accepts culturally diversity in its laws.

Writes Berry:

  • In our view there needs to be general support for cultural diversity as a valuable resource for a society;
  • There should be overall low levels of prejudice in the population;  
  • There should be generally positive mutual attitudes among the various ethnocultural groups that constitute the society;
  • There needs to be a degree of attachment to the larger national society.

Do you agree?

Labels that fuel discrimination and racism in Finland

Posted on by Migrant Tales

When will Finns drop this discriminatory term: Finns with immigrant backgrounds? Many, I suspect, are and should be proud of their background. I am but what happens if these labels and terms ensure that you will continue to be treated as something less equal? 

What do you do if being labeled in such a way undermines your career chances and competing with white Finns for the best jobs?

Fred Dervin, a professor of multicultural education at the University of Helsinki, said the usage of such labels create inequality, especially if the person was born in this country.

“It is dangerous because we create [a sense of] inequality, since not everyone is given the same treatment or opportunities,” he was quoted as saying on YLE in English. 

Kuvankaappaus 2013-1-28 kello 6.59.02Part of the problem aren’t Finns labeling “others” as eternal outsiders, but those who are being labeled accept it! Some of them fall into the trap  and actually believe they are somehow less equal, or don’t have the right to be on equal terms with a white Finn because of their immigrant background.

Some will struggle during their lives to be as white as possible without ever understanding the beauty of their roots.  A valid question we should ask about integration in Finland is what are newcomers supposed to integrate to?  

If Dervin makes a case for those who were born in this country, I would take it even further: What about those that came here as children and have lived most of their lives in this country?

Why are they still considered “foreigners?” How many generations must they live in Finland in order to be accepted as equals?

The same matter that happens in countries with immigrants is happening in Finland but in a different context.  It’s the same discriminatory standard  used to exclude others from being treated as equals in society.

Identity is a personal matter. You are who you think you are. If some have an problem with this, it’s their problem, not yours. 

No matter how you cut it, we should start to better identify and discard from our speech those terms that fuel discrimination and inequality.

 

 

 

 

Migrant Tales literary: How high must a wall be to contain hope?

Posted on by Migrant Tales
Dedicated to the EU and Donald Trump

By Leo Honka

No wall can contain hope.

It’s a fact but go and build your high wall

To hide the destruction you’ve reaped:

pillaging riches, pillaging hope

leaving people and whole nations

devastated, without future.

12.jpg (1024Ã?683)

Source: Westmonster.

Now we’re knocking on your door

With a sentence in the form of a key:

Let us in!

No matter how high the walls you build

so you can’t see us

you always will.

Don’t fool yourself

high walls can never contain hope – and our despair.

The social tragedy of the family reunification problem of Somalis in Finland

Posted on by Migrant Tales

The Finnish Immigration Service states in a report (see page 4) that at the end of 2011 there were a total of 6,100 family reunification applications by Somalis living in the country. Even so, only 329 family reunifications took place on average annually between 1999 and 2010, according to the Refugee Advice Center.

No matter how one looks at the figures, there are very few family reunifications taking place in Finland among refugees.

Migrant Tales has reported on previous blog entries about the challenges that Somalis face if they want to be reunited with their families.

The Somalis are not a small community. They are the fourth-biggest foreign group (7,421) living in Finland in 2011 after the Estonians, Russians and Swedes, according to the Population Register Center. There were a total of 14,045 people who speak Somali as their mother tongue.

In many respects, the situation of the Somali community resembles the discrimination (without the obvious Jim Crow laws) that black people faced before the end of Civil Rights Movement in the United States in 1968. Prejudice, racism and outright hostility are some of the threats that some Somalis face in this country on a daily basis.

Contrary to USAmerican blacks, the Somalis come from a Muslim country that has been at civil war since the early 1990s.

The family reunification issue facing the Somali community is a ticking social time bomb that aims to undermine, not strengthen, its roots with this country.

Look at the plight of the Somali community in the following manner: You flee to Finland as a refugee, are granted asylum but the high price you’ll have to pay is living without your family indefinitely.

Even if a fifteen year old is considered an adult in Somalia, in Europe he or she is still a minor. What kind of country offers asylum to a minor but refuses him the right to live with his immediate family?

What happens if you live separated for ten years from your loved ones? How does that change you as a person and what scars does it leave on your family and children?

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An article on Kouvolan Sanomat reports about the Somali family reunification problem and how some are getting organized to ask authorities to speed-up applications. The high amount of rejections has raised questions by the Somali community that tightened family reunification laws have been passed to hinder more Somalis moving to Finland, reports the Kouvola-based daily.

While the authorities will not admit it, the long application queues are intentional and offer only a short-term answer to an ever-growing social problem and tragedy, which is going to get worse.

Even if the authorities want to ensure that a person living in Finland can support his family, its wishful thinking that some refugee groups can make enough money to support their families any time soon.

Making torture and hate acceptable

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Even if the media in the United States speaks of torture as something recent, the truth is that it has been going on for a very long time. These type of barbaric interrogation techniques were widely used in the last century in regions like Latin America. The CIA and the United States trained and promoted torture and state-sponsored terrorism in places like the School of the Americas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4eLYXJIZfg

Torture is not only a part of my history, but the legacy of millions of Latin Americans, Africans and Asians who are gripped today by drug wars, violence and poverty.  Matters have got so bad in the underdeveloped world that people are ready to risk their lives to migrate and work for slave wages.

One has to connect the historical dots when looking at undocumented migrants and immigration in general. It’s the same story taking place over and over again: we colonize, enslave, pillage, support dictatorships; we reap the greatest profit by promoting poverty and underdevelopment in these regions.

If you devastate a country’s democratic institutions and make a mockery of human rights, how can you on top of it ask people to live in the destruction you created?

It is surprising, if not incredible, that politicians in Europe still stigmatize migrants and refugees as “welfare shoppers.” Apart from exposing their greed, these types of politicians are making a clear statement: You have no right to opportunity and a better life.

The George W. Bush era (2000-08) not only brought to light the ugly face of USAmerica when it comes to torture and meddling in other countries’ affairs, it has inspired some critics to claim that Hollywood is now condoning it.

I personally have not seen the movie but if one surfs the web, one will find arguments for and against it.

Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian cultural critic, wrote about Kathryn Bigelow’s film, Zero Dark Thirty,  on The Guardian:

”One doesn’t need to be a moralist, or naive about the urgencies of fighting terrorist attacks, to think that torturing a human being is in itself something so profoundly shattering that to depict it neutrally – ie to neutralise this shattering dimension – is already a kind of endorsement.”

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Even Republican US Senator John McCain, a Vietnam POW who was tortured, has condemned the film.

”The story is torture does not work, it is hateful, it is harmful, incredibly harmful to the United States of America. And to somehow make people believe that it was responsible for the elimination of Osama Bin Laden is in my view unacceptable.”

In the same way some try to sell torture as acceptable is the same reasoning being used to convince us that social exclusion and exploitation of immigrants and visible minority group is fine.

Greedy businesses, and politicians at the service of the latter, reveal to us why matters will get worse before they improve.

Racism, prejudice, discrimination and social exclusion is all about defending the privilege of certain groups at the cost of others.

Undocumented immigrants are welcomed to Europe because it’s profitable in the short-term.

In the long-term, however, such contradictions and values will end up destroying us in the same way we destroyed other countries.

 

Timo Soini and his pact with the devil

Posted on by Migrant Tales

The cracks in the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party are widening as the latest Kai Haavisto-James Hirvisaari scandal proves. The PS has reached a dead end with its present band of politicians. With the complicity of the near-silence of other parties, no other political group in modern Finnish times has created so much resentment and hatred towards others like the PS. 

No matter what the PS does, it is a rambunctious party ready to die by the sword after living so eagerly by the sword.

If I could paint a cartoon that would depict the present situation, I’d draw Haavisto and Hirvisaari as a two-headed stick of dynamite joined by a lighted fuse. All around them would be PS members, including Soini, getting ready for the loud explosion.

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Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja sheds light on a blog entry where the PS is today.

He writes: “The spirit that [Timo] Soini opportunistically freed from the bottle by accepting extremist [candidates] of the Suomen Sisu [association] to run for office will soon permanently tarnish the ability of the party to cooperate with other ones and may even soon threaten Soini’s position as party leader.”

EuroMP Sampo Terho, together with PS strongman Matti Putkonen, are another example of how lost the party is.  Both proposed a plan how Finland could save 3.15 billion euros. While the usual culprit of development aide was mentioned, it was surprising that Terho and Putkonen suggested raising VAT, a PS policy no-no.

Soini has distanced himself from the proposal.

Terho is chairman of the Suomalaisuuden liitto, an association taken over by right-wing extremists which, like Suomen Sisu,  see cultural diversity and immigration as a threat to Finland.

One matter I have never figured out is why politicians like Tuomioja and the media still see Soini as a “good guy” victim if he signed a pact with the devil? Soini is nothing more than the good cop but we mustn’t forget that he’s still a cop.

Finland’s stance on Soini reflects how out of touch it is with its immigrants, visible minorities and its ever-growing cultural diversity. It’s perfectly fine to socially exclude, bash and insult immigrants and visible minorities in this country as long as you don’t treat white Finns the same way.

The PS, with the blessing and silence of other political parties in Finland, blames immigrants and visible minorities for most if not all of the country’s problems. Sensible people understand that the issue is much bigger. Large multinational companies relocate to countries where they can exploit workers by paying lower wages.

Greedy corporations are the ones stealing jobs, not immigrants.

 

 

 

 

Red Herring tales (Part I): City of Vaasa plans to prohibit the use of burquinis

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Ever heard of the burquini, a swimming outfit consisting of head scarf, tunic and trousers designed for Muslim women? The western Finnish city of Vaasa plans to prohibit the use of these swimming suits at a city committee* meeting next Wednesday. The reason? Because it is a security risk and not hygienic, according to a City of Vaasa official contacted by Migrant Tales.

The use of  burquinis in Finland is generally prohibited at public swimming pools, according to Suomen Uimaopetus- ja Hengenpelastusliitto (SUH), the Finnish swimming instruction and lifesaver’s association.

The SUH is drawing up guidelines that aims at prohibiting the use of burquinis at all public swimming pools in Finland.

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France and England can be cited as two examples of how public swimming pools have treated the issue.

Two Muslim women wearing burquinis in France, which outlaws the use of the Muslim veil together with Belgium, were asked to either change into conventional bikinis or one-piece suits or leave the swimming pool.

Contrarily in England, a London Croydon council dropped the guidelines from its website that prohibited the use of burquinis for all swimmers after it sparked a backlash of protests from non-Muslims.

One of the matters one senses when speaking to the representative of the City of Vaasa and SUH, is that there has been little to no contact with the Muslim community concerning the issue.

The City of Vaasa official asked why Muslim women should be given special liberties if  men cannot wear shorts at swimming pools.

The SUH representative said that it had got in touch with the Somali association of Finland and a Somali city councillor but none of them had commented on the matter.

While safety and hygiene are important when using a public swimming pool, it’s odd that both representatives have not even bothered to explore how the issue was solved by the Croydon council, which must have addressed the same issues (safety and hygiene) that the City of Vaasa and SUH are arguing to prohibit the use of the burquini.

The question that the whole issue surrounding the use of the burquini in Finland is whether those that want to prohibit it are honestly interested in finding a compromise and a solution. That is why the arguments used to prohibit the use of the burquini are red herrings disguising a wider issue: our rejection of other cultures.

If I had to give both the City of Vaasa and SUH a grade on two-way integration, that grade would be a D- (needs improvement)!

*The City of Vaasa leisure committee comprises of nine members of the following parties: National Coalition Party (2), Social Democratic Party (2), Swedish People’s Party (2), Perussuomalaiset (1), Center Party (1) and Christian Democrats (1).  

 

How do you challenge racism?

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Challenging a social ill like racism is no easy task. In countries like the United States, slavery was legal in some states for a very long time, between the sixteenth and nineteenth century.  Despite the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), it took a Rosa Parks in December 1955 to ignite the Civil Rights Movement. 

Racial inequality is still a widespread problem in the United States.

Must we wait hundreds of years for immigrants and minorities in Europe to be treated as equals?

In Finland, for example, the Romany minority has waited for half a century for social equality.

There was a distressing story on Jyväskylä-based Keskisuomalainen about a young dark-skinned twenty-year-old woman who was in a toilet. One of the white Finnish women standing in line exclaimed upon seeing the black woman: “I’m not going to [sit on the same toilet bowl] as that n-word,” she said speaking to a woman behind her. “You go ahead if you dare.”

The insults by the woman in a Jyväskylä toilet didn’t stop here:  “You can fucking go where you came from. I can’t stand people who live off my taxes and leech in this country and live like insects.”

The sad matter of the story is not only the loudmouth racist, but the woman who wrote about what happened on Keskisuomalainen. She didn’t speak up on the spot and tell the racist woman that what she was saying was out of line.

Challenging a social ill like racism isn’t easy. I therefore raise my hat to the woman for at least writing about what happened. I’m certain she’ll never forget what she heard in that Jyväskylä toilet because what she heard is disturbing. Racism not only hurts its victims but some of its bystanders like the rest of society.

Racism can rally some pretty “colorful” people as the video clip below shows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL1jDcAHkc8&feature=player_embedded#!

The English Defense League is a dangerous organization. One of its followers claims that he’s marching against “Muslamic law” and “Muslamic ray guns.”*

How do you challenge racism?

By raising your voice and expressing your disapproval if somebody speaks or treats anyone n a racist way.

Since racists are cowards, a strong show of disapproval of their behavior can make them think twice before they think again before opening their mouths.

* Thank you Mikko Kapanen for the heads-up.