Hijacking my picture and defaming me and Migrant Tales on the Internet

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

I was pretty surprised Thursday that a blogger from a forum called Ylilauta had hijacked my Facebook picture and started defaming me and our blog, Migrant Tales. I got in touch with the administrator of the site, who took the offensive content off the site the following day. Fortunately I took a snapshot of what was written. 

One of the matters that surprised me when my picture was hijacked from Facebook and when offensive comments were made about my person and Migrant Tales, there was no apology from Ylilauta.

What happened is a case in point on how racism spreads, planted and buds on the Internet.

Writes Jonne: “Migrant Tales is a blog by an immigrant douche living in Finland. It concentrates on bashing the True Finns party and blaming most Finns to be racist and xenophobic. My eyes are bleeding.”

What our mission statement says: Migrant Tales is a blog that debates some of the salient issues facing the immigrant and minority community in Finland. 

The most offensive part of the thread was the following: “I just can’t read that shit. “Some immigrant mudface preaching on how Finland must be multicultural and immigrants are enrichment. Just fuck off.”

Wow! A mudface?! I haven’t heard that term for decades. It was commonly used in the 1980s, which suggests that the writer may be in his 40s or 50s.

Jonne uses terms like “enrichment” and “cultural Marxist,” which reveal that he hangs around far-right websites like the Gates of Vienna. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass killer, used “cultural Marxists” on his deranged manifesto.

If there is defamation and racism on the Internet, it is our responsibility to expose it especially if we are the target.

The damage has already occurred but possibly we can discourage it from happening again.

Finnish human rights activist and writer reports threats by two PS members to the police

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Every month the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party offers us a scandal. Well, here is the one for the month of March: two PS members, Klaus Eovaara and Jani Viinikainen, have threatened on Facebook writer and human rights activist Jussi K. Niemelä, who has reported the matter to the police.

Niemelä is the editor of the Vallan-vahtikoira blog, which has criticized the PS for its racism and ties with Suomen Sisu and other far-right groups.

Elovaara and Viinikianen received warnings at the party’s national convention meeting earlier in March. Viinikianen founded a anti-gay and anti-Roma Facebook page last year.

Eloraara, who was a PS candidate for parliament in 2007, is a member of the Nazi-spirited Suomen Sisu assocation like PS MPs Jussi Halla-aho, James Hirvisaari and others.

Suomen Sisu offers web links to sites that openly question the “Jewish conspiracy” and that praise Adolf Hitler as a military “genius.”

One of the matters noted by some concerning the scandal is the police’s reaction and how it has played down the affair.

According to Ana María Gutiérrez Sorainan citing Satakunta Radio, the police said “that there are two sides to the story and that the collision is due to ideological differences.”

 

Ilta-Sanomat tabloid ad (lööppi) from October 5, 1992

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Migrant Tales will begin to publish Finnish tabloid ads* (lööppi in Finnish) from the 1990s. Taking into account that Finland’s immigrant population started to grow during that decade, it is easy at least through some of the main stories of tabloids like Ilta-Sanomat and Iltalehti to see how some of them reflected our xenophobic and racist views.

Sounding as if we lived in some social war zone, the billboard below lures readers with the following headline: “Armed refugee hater chased blacks.”

Refugees that came to Finland in the early 1990s, when the country was suffering from one of its worst recessions in a century, were assaulted in public. One of our bloggers told me that he remembers being attacked by total strangers in the street when he went with his mother to the market.

Shameful behavior that has no place in our society.

*Migration Institute archive. 

Adolescent to receive Red Cross Award against racism

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Rebecka Holm, 14, will get the Red Cross Award on the UN Day Against Racism on March 21 for her noteworthy example in denouncing racial harassment against her friends and herself, according to Swedish-language daily HBL.

The adolescent from Helsinki wrote a letter to the editor of HBL in January speaking out against racial harassment of her friends and herself. Her story received wide national attention.

“If Finland is now the most secure and stable country [in the world], why do people of [different] ethnic backgrounds get attacked every day?” she asked.

Holm said that  she sees such attacks publicly take place several times a week. ” I am subjected to [those types of] attacks maybe once a week,” she wrote to HBL.

Holm is a  good example of how the ever-worsening negative climate for immigrants and visible minorities in Finland has brought out the best in some members of our community.

Migrant Tales personally congratulates this brave adolescent for her very important example, which we hope will catch on.

Ilta-Sanomat tabloid ad (lööppi) from September 21, 1992

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Migrant Tales will begin to publish Finnish tabloid ads* (lööppi in Finnish) from the 1990s. Taking into account that Finland’s immigrant population started to grow during that decade, it is easy at least through some of the main stories of tabloids like Ilta-Sanomat and Iltalehti to see how some of them reflected our xenophobic and racist views.

Some of their stories, like the one below, showed Finland’s reaction to refugees to be even life-threatening on occasions.

The billboard below states that a refugee family was saved from a petrol bomb attack.

The poor atmosphere for refugees and immigrants was exacerbated by Finland’s worst recession in a century, when unemployment levels came close to 20%.

*Migration Institute archive. 

Soviet refugees in Finland: No escape to freedom

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

I met Aleksandr Shatravka in 2009 thanks to Migrant Tales after searching for over twenty years for such a person. He was one of twelve former Soviet citizens documented by Amnesty International who was forcibly returned in 1974 to the USSR after being caught by Finnish Border Patrol authorities. 

Shatravka sent me by email a video clip documenting that ordeal with his brother Mikhail and two friends, Boris Sivkov and Anatoly Romanchuk.

After they were caught by Finnish Border Guard Antti Leivo they were soon sent back to the Soviet Union, where they ended up at a special psychiatric hospital.

While Shatravka holds no grudges against the Finnish authorities for sending him back, Finland was not during the cold war a place to seek political asylum especially if you were from the Soviet Union.

Aleksander and Irina in Mikkeli in October 2011.

I wrote in February 2010 a feature in Apu magazine about Shatravka. I met him and his second wife, Irina, for the first time in Finland last year.

Finland’s darkest period: 2011-15

Posted on by Migrant Tales

In the future, when Finnish historians of different ethnic backgrounds look at the present parliamentary term 2011-15,  they will most likely conclude that it was the darkest period for Finland and immigrants in the new century.  A prelude to this sombre period were  the municipal election of 2008 and how it reflected a shift in the national mood. 

It would be naive, even an exercise in self-deceit, to claim that the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party isn’t one  obvious culprit. The municipal elections of 2008 and 2003, when PS MP Tony Halme was elected to parliament,  speak volumes about how racism and xenophobia started to lift their heads in this country.

Despite being one of the worst periods in our recent history, where some groups and politicians aim to make racism and xenophobia as normal and acceptable as karjalanpiirakka, it has brought out the best in some of us. For some, like Migrant Tales, it has been a clarion call.

If this period has brought out the best in some of us, it has brought out the worst as well.

Some regretful examples come form of silence and lack of leadership by the Finnish media and some politicians. The success of the PS in the April elections is proof of the inarticulateness, complacency and even the flirting of these two groups with anti-immigration parties and groups.

The PS has provided us with monthly scandals beginning with MP Teuvo Hakkarainen’s first day in parliament to the recent suggestion by councilman Tommi Rautio’s  to give a medal to a cold-blooded killer.

A word of advice to anti-immigration extremists: Everything you write will come under scrutiny by future generations. Those future generations, which will be made up of Finnish researchers from different ethnic backgrounds, will highlight the racism and xenophobia that inflicted part of our society today.

When they give their lectures at our universities on ethnic studies or history, they will show to their students the shameful evidence left in the writings of numerous anti-immigration politicians like PS MP Jussi Halla-aho and his Suomen Sisu crowd, for example.

Time will increase the shamefulness of these racist writings. What is written today by some of these racists will look eerily similar to what some groups wrote about blacks during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Recognizing this will be the first important step in liberating our society from the illness that has inflicted it.

Stateless persons do not have the right to open a bank account in Finland

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Here is a pretty odd case that I encountered Monday when I went to Nordea bank in Mikkeli to open an account for a stateless person.  After a few questions, the bank employee said that the person needs a valid passport to open an account at that bank. But if on that passport it reads “his/her identity cannot be confirmed,” the person can never open an account at Nordea.

I asked the Nordea employee what could be done.

“Why don’t you go to OP bank,” she said. “I’ve read in Länsi-Savo [the local paper] that such persons can open accounts at that bank.”

Surprised by what I was hearing, I asked the bank employee if she was serious.

“Why do they [OP bank] have one set of rules and you have another?” I asked. “Don’t you think it is pretty incredible that you are sending a potential client to the competition?”

When I asked JusticeDemon about what happened, he said that there is a clear administrative problem over what counts as proof of identity and over the  implementation of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (Accession by Finland on 10 October 1968).

One point of that Convention is Article 27 (Identity papers), which states, “The Contracting States shall issue identity papers to any stateless person in their territory who does not possess a valid travel document.”

According to the Ombudsman for Minorities, an identity card issued by the police should count as valid identification just like a passport.

Some believe that the decision by the banks to not allow a stateless person to open a bank account as arbitrary.

There is not much a person from a war-torn country can do if he or she is stateless. Who’s to blame? The refugee? The failed state? The bank(s)? Or authorities regulating the bank sector?

Whatever the case, it sure isn’t the fault of the stateless person.

Ilta-Sanomat tabloid ad (lööppi) from March 9, 1995

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Migrant Tales will begin to publish Finnish tabloid ads* (lööppi in Finnish) from the 1990s. Taking into account that Finland’s immigrant population started to grow during that decade, it is easy at least through the main stories of tabloids like Ilta-Sanomat and Iltalehti to see how some of them reflected our xenophobic and racist views.  

The billboard below shows Finland’s surprise at the new brave world that emerged after the demise of the former Soviet Union.  In an exclusive scoop, Ilta-Sanomat reveals to its readers how a Russian millionaire lives in Finland.

Seventeen years later in Finland such a story would probably not receive such attention by the tabloids.

A warning to those that push urban tales and stereotypes of immigrants and minorities today: You may end up looking as ridiculous as some of these ads. 

*Migration Institute archive. 

Who needs integration: immigrants or natives?

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

We must ask hard questions if we want our new integration program, which came into force in September, to do what it sets out to: effectively integrate new immigrants as equal members of  society.  But one of the many challenges of the program aren’t resources and immigrants but the attitudes of the native population. 

Another important question is can an integration program actually integrate people? Integration, or adaption, is a long and complex process. How many years do natives need to study at schools in order to be integrated into society and the job market?

One of the most worrisome matters in the ongoing debate concerning our ever-growing cultural diversity is how some anti-immigration groups and politicians would be more than happy to have one set of laws and rules for the majority and another one for immigrants. Thus the natives would enjoy all the civil rights enshrined in our laws while the latter groups would have limited rights.

This is not to say, however, that this two- or many-tiered society already exists in Finland.

Good examples of this situation can be found on Migrant Tales’ comment board, where some bloggers have suggested limiting religious freedom and freedom of expression for certain immigrant groups.

The Perussuomalaiset (PS) party’s Nuiva Manifesto is a case in point. If ever adopted as the big picture of how Finland should integrate immigrants, the manifesto would not only spell disaster but seriously hinder immigrants from becoming equal members of society. Even if other parties don’t have such a manifesto, they quietly identify and support it.

Debate on different social media discussion sites show us another worrisome fact:  ignorance about our basic civil rights.

Should the government launch for some Finns their very own  integration program to bring them up to date about their rights and obligations as well of that of other groups?  Certainly. The sooner the better.

In my opinion, one of the flaws of the government’s integration program is that there is no big picture concerning the role immigrants and their children in our society.  Without such a grand picture it is difficult to debate matters like equal rights, social justice and equal opportunities.

Are we hesitant to speak and promote such a grand societal view that would include immigrants because it would require some of us to accept them as equal members of society?

If we have two sets of unwritten laws and rules for the native population and other groups, integration will only be a catchword used by politicians for their own selfish means.

One very important first step in the ongoing debate should be to include more immigrants and Finns with international backgrounds in the debate. That would certainly give more perspective to the debate and permit us to look at the realities and challenges instead of expectations by the majority population.