One of the reasons why the Finnish government hasn’t shown any interest in rejoining Karelia with Finland is because of its large Russian-speaking population. The other factor is fear that Karelia could in the future cause a new war with Russia.

The last matter that some government officials want for Finland is to turn the country into an Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania, where there are large Russian populations that pose a cultural challenge to such countries.

Karelia, which had a Finnish population of about 420,000 and had been inhabited by Finns for centuries, is a case in point for Europe. Too many of the conflicts that have occurred in this continent, like World War II and recently the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, are ethnic in nature.

The most extreme modern manifestation of ethnic suspicion and hatred in Europe was by Nazi Germany. It could send millions of Jews and other religious, political and ethnic groups to gas chambers on the pretext that such outlandish deeds were necessary to conserve the purity of the German “race” and help it to realize its full potential.

The first matter that Stalin’s Russia did when it snatched Karelia from Finland in 1944 was to populated it with Russians, Ukrainians and other Soviet nationalities after 420,000 Karelians left their homes and moved as refugees to Finland.

It was the same method that the former British Empire used to ensure that territory seized or colonized by it remained British.

Fortunately there are different winds blowing in Europe today. European Union countries are embracing, albeit at different speeds, a policy of multiculturalism where ethnic, national and cultural minorities must be protected and encouraged.

If you think of it, the advance of multiculturalism in Europe may be the continent’s best insurance against future wars. It may even help resolve in the future sticky geopolitical issues like Karelia.

A map of southern Finland printed in 1908 by the Suomen Matkailijayhdistys..

What do cities and towns like Viirpuri, Käkisalmi, Hiitola, Kivennapa, Sortavala and Terijoki have in common? They were all once a part of Finland, before the Karelian Isthmus was ceded to the former Soviet Union after the end of what Finnish historians call the Continuation War (1941-44).

Even though my knowledge of Finnish geography was pretty rudimentary in the 1960s, when I was growing up in Los Angeles, the name Karelia had a special ring to it. It sounded like a mysterious land that wasn’t on any modern maps but was out there refusing to accept what it has become.

People like my grandfather, who fought in the Winter and Continuation War, never forgot the names of those former Finnish cities that once dotted the Karelian Isthmus. The hope of visiting those places one day expressed themselves in lachrymose songs and tales such as Karjalan Kunnaillan.

Even in the Jaeger March (Jääkärinmarssi) there is special mention of that part of Finland: …Häme, Karelia, land and beaches of Viena… Viena is the northern half of ceded Karelia.

My grandfather was originally from the eastern Finnish town of Savonlinna, which is about 65 miles from the shores of Lake Ladoga. He lived for a short while as a young man in Viipuri, one of Finland’s most important cities at the time.

Those that were forced to witness war and were quickly humbled by its brutality rarely gave details about those gruesome times. The war, the loss of Karelia and near-interminable suffering always followed them as ghosts, even if hostilities had ended decades ago.

There was something unique about the tales and songs they sang about from those times. Now I understand that they were purposely inconclusive so that new generations could give the stories and songs a better ending. They did this in order not to smother hope.

What did they hope for? They secretly wished with all their hearts and mights that one day Karelia would be rejoined.

I asked a Finnish writer called Eeva Kilpi in the late-1980s what should the government’s stance be on Karelia. Of all the proposals I’ve heard throughout the years, Kilpi’s was the most sensible. She proposed turning the Karelian Isthmus into a (bi)national park administrated by Finland and Russia.

Taking into account Finland’s careful official foreign policy line that continues to this date despite the demise of the Soviet Union, it’s doubtful that the present or any near-future government will throw a lifesaver to the region.

Karelia will unfortunately continue to decay from lack of Finnish attention. But that is now — tomorrow may be a totally different story.

See Part II posted June 28.

Prior to Finland’s entry into European Union in 1995, there was little written in the English-language media about the Nordic country. Apart from news agencies like Reuters and the Associated Press, a handful like the Financial Times wrote regularly about Finland as well. When I wrote for the FT in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I’d file on average two stories per week on the country.

Undoubtedly the Soviet angle was was one of the most intriguing aspects of being a foreign correspondent in Helsinki. The first front-page story I ever wrote was published in 1985. It was a story about Soviet authorities asking Finnish customs officials to keep secret the price of natural gas that Finland imported from the USSR.

If you wrote critical stories on a regular basis about Finnish-Soviet relations, you were placed under close scrutiny by Soviet Embassy and even Finnish Foreign Ministry officials. I was told by one Finnish diplomat based in Madrid in the mid-1980’s that I would be blacklisted if I didn’t stop writing stories that ran against to “the official” foreign policy line.

The diplomat was annoyed by a story I had written in Cambio 16, one of Spain’s largest newsmagazines, on the contraband of Bibles from Finland to the Soviet Union.

Writing lame stories about Finland during the Cold War-era meant not writing about human rights issues, refugee from the USSR nor questioning sensitive geopolitical agreements like the treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Understanding (FCMA).

How much censorship or self-censorship existed in Finland before the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s? Part of the answer can be found in the editorials of the country’s major newspapers.

Were such editorials ever outspoken about Finnish-Soviet relations? Did they openly question the government’s foreign policy stance with the former USSR? What did Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s leading daily, write the next day after Soviet troops marched into Czechoslovakia in 1968? Why didn’t the Finnish press ever question why the country granted only once political asylum to a Soviet citizen?

We cannot change the past but we can understand it well enough so we’ll never fall pray to the trap of censorship and self-censorship.

As the US administration debates the closing down of the Guantánamo Bay prison, the stigma of opening such a detention center for enemy combatants, a concept conjured to detain anyone without due process indefinitely, will live on.

Erasing the damage to US prestige abroad as a beacon of hope for the word’s oppressed will take time. Time will reveal as well ever-detailed horror stories from the detention center. Gitmo will reach the same notoriety like the gulags in the former Soviet Union and of the internment camps where Japanese Americans were sent during World War II.

The lid on the excesses at Gitmo has come to the public light for sometime now. An army officer, who served at the US enclave in Cuba, says in an AP story that tribunal members relied on flawed evidence.

Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a California lawyer who has served 26 years in the army, said that evidence against detainees didn’t hold up to the most basic legal challenges.

One of the basis of US democracy are checks and balances. There is no such oversight at illegal detention centers like Gitmo.

AP reports:

“What were purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” Abraham said in the affidavit submitted on behalf of a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, who is challenging his classification as an “enemy combatant.”

Abraham’s affidavit “proves what we all suspected, which is that the CSRTs (Combat Status Review Tribunals) were a complete sham,” said a lawyer for al-Odah, David Cynamon.

The sooner Gitmo, and other illegal detention centers operated by the US are closed, the better. It’s one of the first important steps in ridding the world from a treacherous legacy that will haunt us well after George W. Bush’s mandate ends in 2008.

Possibly one of the interesting matters about the multicultural society debate in Europe is that some don’t grasp what it means or implies.

If we look at the etymology of the word, everyone knows that multi derives from the word multus, meaning many or much. Defining culture is a bit more complex. For the sake of simplicity, let’s define it as anything learned.

What is multiculturalism, then? A good definition is provided by countries that aim to promote multiculturalism, like Canada:

Canadian multiculturalism is fundamental to our belief that all citizens are equal. Multiculturalism ensures that all citizens can keep their identities, can take pride in their ancestry and have a sense of belonging. Acceptance gives Canadians a feeling of security and self-confidence, making them more open to, and accepting of, diverse cultures. The Canadian experience has shown that multiculturalism encourages racial and ethnic harmony and cross-cultural understanding, and discourages ghettoization, hatred, discrimination and violence.

Through multiculturalism, Canada recognizes the potential of all Canadians, encouraging them to integrate into their society and take an active part in its social, cultural, economic and political affairs.

While such a definition gives the impression that we live in “cultural compartments” and meet in some neutral place like equals, the interesting question to ask is if it’s possible to create a just multicultural society where all are respected as equals?

Possibly we should, however, pose the following question to seek an answer: What kind of a society would we build if we didn’t uphold such values and instead promoted racism, segregation and ghtettoization?

Answer: We’d build a pretty lousy nation.

Here’s a snapshot of the sublime landscapes that accompany us north of the 60th parallel. Witnessing such a sunset is magical. It’s like being nowhere but between two great frontiers that meet briefly at a special moment. Those two frontiers are Space and Earth.

Here’s wishing everyone a wonderful midsummer if relevant to your region.

It was on a Saturday afternoon in April 1978 when I was locked up in a police cell in Buenos Aires for forgetting my ID at home. The other mistake I made was to accidentally point my camera at the US consul’s home. When I reached the corner, two undercover policemen ran from behind and stopped me pointing guns and yelling at the top of their voices.

One of the matters I thought of inside the cold and humid cell was President Jimmy Carter’s human rights foreign policy that had raised a lot of controversy in the region. At least it made a lot of sense to me locked up in a cell without the right to counsel and due process of law.

I was released in the evening. The police took mug shots and and a record of my fingerprints.

One of them warned: “If anything happens to the US consul, it’s your fault.”

That’s how a citizen of a country gets treated when an autocratic regime is in power and has no respect for human rights. I was lucky, though. Over 30,000 people vanished under similar circumstances during Argentina’s dirty war (1976-83).

Even if former and present US presidents cared less about human rights in Latin America and elsewhere, the 39th president did. Carter’s human rights policy sent an important message to despotic military regime’s that Washington wasn’t going to give carte blanche to de facto governments to murder and torture.

At a human rights conference in Dublin, Carter blasted President George W. Bush’s, Israel’s and the European Union’s decision as a mistake to reopen aid to Mahmoud Abbas’ West Bank while denying the same to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

He considered Bush’s decision not to accept Hammas’ 2006 election victory as “criminal.”

While Hammas’ refusal to renounce violence and recognize Israel is a mistake, it was a grave error by Washington not to recognize Hammas after it had won fair and democratic elections.

Washington’s refusal to recognize the radical Palestinian group sends the wrong message to other groups that believe violence is a more effective method for political change than the ballot box.

But possibly what’s behind the US’ mistaken Middle East policy in Palestine is intentional. Israel and Bush, who are obsessed with terrorism, care less for the Palestinians and the best way to rule that troubled region is by dividing and creating mayhem.

Did you know that one out of 35 people in the world is an immigrant, according to a 2004 United Nations study? In numbers, that translates to 175 million people (2.9% of the world’s population) versus 75 million (2.5%) in 1960.

In the United States, the number of immigrants total over 34 million, accounting for 12.4% of the population. The biggest national group are Hispanics at 17 million. In some states like California, the foreign population accounts for 27.2%.

Using simple math, it’s clear that the Hispanics are one of the most disfranchised national group in the U.S. The fact that Spanish hasn’t become an official language in states like California shows the minuscule rights Hispanics have.

If a country like the U.S. accepts and depends on immigrants for its economic growth and well-being, its legislation should reflect respect for those cultures and national groups that work in the country. Good examples for the US to follow are countries where more than one language is officially spoken. Some of these are Switzerland (French, Italian, German, Rumantsch), Canada (English and French) and Finland (Finnish and Swedish).

It’s incredible that as we’ve become more interdependent through globalization and can communicate with ease through the Internet, our perceptions of other cultures continue to be in the Pre-Cambrian Era. Even legislation reflects this antiquated stance. The difficulty of immigration reform in the US is a sad example of how some interest groups want the status quo to continue.

There are a myriad of reasons why immigrants continue to be disfranchised. But as long as we continue to teach our children in school that our country, our language and our culture is the best, we’ll never build a world that respects in earnest people from other countries and nationalities.

The tendency will be to disenfranchise as opposed to learn how to treat such people as true equals.

Some linguists warn that of the world’s 6,000-odd languages that are spoken today, about half will disappear by the end of the century. That means 300 languages become extinct in a year, or about six in a week.

A BBC documentary posed an interesting question: When does a language become extinct? Is it when the last person who speaks the language dies or is it the last survivor, who cannot converse with anyone in that language?

The culprits of the death of our global linguistic diversity are none other than “universal” languages like English, Spanish, Portugese, French, Russian, Mandarin and others.

While there’s a lot of concern about our environment and global warming, there appears to be less on how languages like English are steamrolling over smaller fragile ones.

The death of such languages is a bit like what’s happening to our planet’s biodiversity. There’s a lot of concern but not enough to take serious and effective action to stop such destruction.

How will languages evolve hundreds of years from now if humanity only speaks a handful of languages? Will it spark wars after all the smaller languages have been wiped off the face of the Earth?

Seen from The Americas, Europe looks like myriad of languages and religions with most of them having a score to settle for some injustice that took place recently or long time ago. In countries like Finland and the Baltic States, the main motive for independence was ethnic. The strife in the breakup of Yugoslavia is a recent tragic case of ethnic civil war.

Has Europe changed from the times when racism reached horrific proportions during Nazi Germany? Certainly it has but the seed of such hatred hasn’t been yet nipped from the bud.

Alfred Rosenberg, the Karl Marx of Nazi Germany’s mistaken race ideology, argued that Germany had become weak because religious groups like the Jews lived in the same country as the Germans. For Germany to regain its past greatness — he said — it had to banish the Jews and ensure that Aryans married their kind.

What a load of bologna! If that type of twisted reasoning is correct, then the US, Canada, Brazil, Australia have been undermined by hordes of migrants who adapted and became a part of such societies.

Europe, as opposed to The Americas, is still slow in realizing that a multicultural society is the way ahead. In some European Union countries, such a reality is still more of a theoretical treatise than a practical matter that government should enforce and encourage.

Possibly the UK is the most “tolerant” multicultural country in the EU with the least tolerant being the Baltic Republics.

High unemployment among foreigners in the EU and the treatment of some minorities are sad examples that Europe is still distant from creating a just and dynamic multicultural society.