Tag: Finland

PS MP Halla-aho to attend first Council of Europe meeting Monday

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Perussuomalaiset (PS) MP Jussi Halla-aho, who was sentenced for ethnic agitation, will represent Finland at a Council of Europe meeting Monday in Strasbourg, according to Tampere-based Aamulehti, which cites STT. 

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Read full story (in FInnish) here.

The appointment of Halla-aho to the Finnish delegation to the Council of Europe last year prompted a joint statement by the leaders of seven parliamentary parties expressing regret over this move.

One of the aims of the Council of Europe is to promote human rights.

National Coalition Party MP Kimmo Sasi, who is Vice-Chairman of the Finnish delegation to the Council of Europe, said that Halla-aho’s appointment as deputy member didn’t advance Finland’s image as a country that defends human rights.

True, but Sasi forgets that before 1995, when Finland became an EU member, the human rights of migrants were not respected. One clear indication of breaches of human rights were denying Soviet citizens the right to political asylum in Finland.

The fact that Finland’s third largest party in parliament, the PS, doesn’t have any problems with naming an MP like Halla-aho to represent this country speaks volumes about the state of intolerance in this country.

Finland was one of the last countries in Western Europe to join the Council of Europe in 1989. Finland’s special relationship with the former Soviet Union was one reason why Finland took so long to join.

Higher unemployment and economic woes spell big trouble for migrants and visible minorities

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Finland got shocking news Thursday when postal company Itella announced that it may shed up to 1,200 jobs, according to Yle in English. Taking into account that unemployment shot up in 2013 to 7.9% from 6.9% in the previous year, what do these two news stories mean for the migrant and visible minority community?

Those who lived through the early 1990s in Finland, when this country suffered its worst economic downturn in a century and when unemployment soared to around 18%, it’s nothing unusual that migrants were hit especially hard back then.

Since migrant unemployment is normally two to three times higher than the national average in Finland, that means the jobless rate for migrants at that time was 53% in 1994!

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Read full story here.

While unemployment in Finland is still lower today than that 10.5% average for the European Union, migrants and visible minorities have a lot to worry about since the recession will be especially harsh with them during two consecutive election years.

Just like about twenty years ago, the dire economic situation will offer self-declared and closet racists the opportunity to layoff migrants or to make their life miserable at work. How? By letting them know that the shadow of unemployment hangs constantly over them.

Contrary to the early 1990s, when Finland didn’t have a large anti-immigration party like the Perussuomalaiset today, migrants and visible minorities will be scapegoated and victimized relentlessly by greedy and opportunistic politicians.

With the Euro MP elections in May and the parliamentary elections in April 2015, the going for migrants and visible minorities in Finland and Europe is going to get tougher.

The situation resembles a sinking ship where most of the passengers will be sacrificed to the chilling waters because there are too few lifeboats for everyone.

What will make matters worse is the dog-eat-dog climate that will discourage solidarity.

 

Trade Union Pro leader affair: PS leadership claims it is a victim of hate speech

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Perussuomalaiset (PS) party secretary Riikka Slunga-Poutsalo put her two cents on tabloid Ilta-Sanomat Tuesday by stating that Antti Rinne is guilty of hate speech against her party. One matter is an MP filing police charges against a person for having an opinion and the other is for the party leadership to back such action.   

Migrant Tales reported Monday that PS MP Kaj Turunen had filed charges against Rinne for ”ethnic agitation” because he had stated on a Helsingin Sanomat interviews that the right-wing populist party had no scruples and therefore was open to racism and fascism. Kuvankaappaus 2014-1-21 kello 11.27.04

Read full story (in Finnish) here.

The reaction of the PS to Rinne’s statement is one of the party’s deceptions exposed in the raw.

Since much of the party’s support comes from Finnish males who feel excluded and victims of society, Rinne’s comment sits well with the image the party wants to give voters. “The image that the party wants to reinforce is that of a socially excluded [male] victim who is misunderstood and has no voice,” a university professor told Migrant Tales.

Sensible people understand that what Turunen did and what Slunga-Poutsalo condoned is ludicrous from a legal standpoint.  We know that the PS is a political party not an ethnic group or religious minority that needs protection from hate speech.

The present incident, which will be forgotten by many but not by Migrant Tales, is another example of the tragic-comic performance by the PS. It not only shows how lost ideologically and susceptible they are to racism and fascism, but to shameless opportunism as well.

It reinforces our view that the PS are a political menace to Finland.

MP files police charges against union leader for naming the PS a party of racists and fascists

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Can you believe that an MP of the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party, Kaj Turunen, has filed charges against Trade Union Pro chairman Antti Rinne for stating on a Helsingin Sanomt interview that the right-wing populist party had no scruples and therefore open to racism and fascism, according to Uusi Suomi. 

Believe it or not, Turunen believes his party to be some kind of an ethnic group and therefore – in his opinion – Rinne is guilty (sic!) of hate speech and ethnic agitation.

This type of nonsensical behavior by the PS is nothing unusual. Remember, they love to picture themselves as the excluded victim. Turunen is exploiting this image of the anti-EU, anti-immigration and especially anti-Islam party by charging Rinne even if it sounds ludicrous.

That’s how low Finland has stooped with the PS since 2011.

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Read full story here.

Trade Union Pro is the largest private sector union for clerical employees. Rinne is challenging Social Democrat head Jutta Urpilainen for the chairmanship of the Social Democratic Party this spring.

Turunen was quoted as saying on Uusi Suomi that he was “very offended” by Rinne’s statements, which he considered “scary.”

The PS MP from Savonlinna may claim what Rinne said to be scary, but what’s even scarier is how little an elected lawmaker like Turunen understands our right to express ourselves freely in this society.

While the PS tries countlessly to hide its racist statements under the guise of “free speech,” there’s a big difference between criticizing a party and outright racism.

Moreover, there are countless of disgraceful examples of racism in the PS and even that one of its MPs, Juho Eerola, admitted being attracted by fascism. One former and present PS MP, James Hirvisaari and Jussi Halla-aho, respectively, have been sentenced for ethnic agitation.

What does Turunen attempt to win from this?

Expose his ignorance of our civil rights and that he can’t take criticism because it offends him.

 

 

PS MP Jussi Halla-aho doesn’t like cultural diversity, never mind Africans and Muslims

Posted on by Migrant Tales

I’m not going to expend a lot of energy on analyzing what Perussuomaliset (PS) MP Jussi Halla-aho wrote in a recent blog entry. All of what he writes about migrants, especially refugees, is demeaning and negative. One sentence in particular, however, caught my attention and which exposes the anti-immigration politician to a tee. 

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Read full story (in Finnish) here.

Halla-aho, who was sentenced for ethnic agitation, makes a special effort to stress in his blog entry that the measures he’d like to propose to control migration flows to Europe aren’t intended to keep Europe “white” but in the best interests of the countries concerned.

The PS MP’s first deception is exposed when he uses the term migration as opposed to refugee flows. He uses the former as opposed to the latter term because he believes that most Africans, Middle Easterners and Muslims aren’t real refugees but “welfare shoppers.”

If you’ve read Halla-aho and his ilk, their whole argument is based on criticizing immigration policy, which, according to them, allows too many refugees to move to Europe. Now who are those refugees? They are the Africans, Middle Easterners and Muslims that politicians like him loathe.

Rule number one of journalism: Denial is usually what a politician really thinks or feels insecure about.

A good example of the latter would be a politician like Halla-aho who goes out of his way to claim that he has nothing against cultural diversity or a homophobe who denies he’s against gays.

We’ve heard these types of statements so many times before, especially from anti-immigration politicians.

Attorney general inquiry confirms earlier internal investigation by the Helsinki Courts of Appeal

Posted on by Migrant Tales

An inquiry commissioned by the attorney general confirmed an internal investigation scooped by MTV3 in summer revealed some judges of the Helsinki Courts of Appeal harassed women sexually at parties and used racist language, according to MTV3, which cites Helsingin Sanomat.

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Read full story (in Finnish) here.

The internal investigation, which revealed that some judges acted in a sexist manner parties, revealed as well that they used racist and derogatory labels to name blacks, Russians, Jews and gays.

One of the claims made by a story on Helsingin Sanomat is the Helsinki Courts of Appeal doesn’t believe that the racist behavior of the judges didn’t have any bearing on the sentences they pronounced.

While we don’t have enough information about this case except for an MTV3 story and another one written by Finland’s largest daily, one could rightly ask how could such racist and sexist behavior by judges not impact their impartiality especially in cases involving migrants and gays?

Even if the original investigation doesn’t mention the Romany minority, I wonder what the judges think of them.

A judge is a public figure and his credibility hinges on his or her impartiality. Making racist comments and treating women in a demeaning manner at parties destroys such credibility in one blow.

To all the Other Finns like me: Nobody can deny who you are

Posted on by Migrant Tales

After spending a brief moment of my childhood in Finland, and growing roots in other lands, I longed to move back to the country I was once from.  I was fortunate and able to visit Finland every summer.

Those days I spent as a child and adolescent in the company of my grandparents in the Finnish countryside changed my life. If a person changes after a long journey, every journey to Finland changed me.   

Visiting Finland in the summer didn’t only give me an opportunity to relearn the Finnish language and strengthen my bonds with this land, it recharged my soul and gave me strength to face life of a huge city like Los Angeles.

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My Finnish roots are as deep as my roots in Argentina and Southern California. As Finland continues to deny its cultural diversity, it continues to deny others their right to their identity. The Perussuomalaiset is one party that has openly declared war on people like us.

I’m grateful for my Finnish roots and for those summers I spent with my grandparents. I am who I am today because of them and those summers.

But with the rise of intolerance in this country, and political parties that have declared war on Finland’s ever-growing cultural diversity, I have one important message for them: Nothing, absolutely nothing, can erase who we are.

Today there are tens of thousands of us. We come from diverse backgrounds but one matter unites us: Finland is our home. Some of us have appeared on Migrant Tales: Joseph, Ida, Abdulah, Ariela and other multicultural Finns like Aune and Anna.

Don’t allow those that take their prejudice and intolerance seriously erase who you are. No ethnic group in Finland can claim this land as their own. This land belongs to all those who live here irrespective of their background.

I fear that I will not live long enough to see that day when most of us in this land, irrespective of his or her background, will be accepted and respected as equals.  Maybe it’ll be you or your children or grandchildren that will witness that day.

Those who want to exclude us aim to erase and deny our history.

Rodolfo Walsh, an Argentinean journalist and writer, said something that we should never forget when we write our history. Even if it was written in the 1970s, it still applies to immigrants and multicultural Finns:

Our dominant classes have made sure that the worker has no history, doesn’t have a doctrine, any heroes or any martyrs. Every struggle has to be started from scratch, separated from previous struggles; the collective history is lost, their lessons are forgotten. History appears as it if were private property, whose owners are the owners of everything.

When someone tells you that you’re a “half-Finn,” answer them back kindly that you’re not “half” of anything but a full human being. Remind them of the 1.2 million Finns that emigrated abroad between 1860 and 1999.

Ask them why they have conveniently forgotten these Finns and how they integrated and become a part of a greater world family.

Image1-35_edited-1(1)This picture is of one of the saddest moments in my life. It’s a day before we moved from Finland to Argentina. I made a vow to return back to Finland one day and I did about sixteen years later, in 1978.

Joseph, Ida, Abdulah, Ariel, Aune, Anna and many Other Finns like me, don’t forget who you are and remember above everything else, nobody can deny who you are.

As Nelson Mandela said, you are the captain of your destiny, or in our case, the captain of your identity, the master of your narrative.

Nobody can erase who you are because you have memory.

Draft law that aims to prohibit Russians from purchasing land is a sad sign of the times

Posted on by Migrant Tales

In a country like Finland, which has a small migrant population compared with other European countries, intolerance and xenophobia usually reveal themselves as déjà vu. One of these real illusions came in the form of a draft bill in parliament that aims to prohibit real estate purchases by Russians, according to Joensuu-based daily Karjalainen.

The same fear-mongering to incite nationalism is by some Finnish MP during an election year is no different from what we saw recently in the United Kingdom, when Prime Minister David Cameron warned that 250,000 Romanians and Bulgarians were going to swarm to the country.

Home Secretary Theresa May added fire to Cameron’s warnings by claiming that Britain was powerless to stop tens of thousands of Bulgarians and Romanians from moving to the UK in 2014.

When January 1 came, only a few dozen arrived, according to Al Jazeera.

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Read full story (in Finnish) here.

The draft bill already has the backing of 101 of 200 MPs.

According to Karjalainen, 400-500 real estate purchases are made annually by Russians in Finland, 20-30 in Eastern Finland alone.

One of the arguments used by those in favor of the draft bill is that it would curtail money laundering and is justifiable since Finns cannot buy land in Russia.

While they have a good point, the bill would hurt us since it would keep alive old suspicions about our eastern neighbor.

If the draft bill gets approval and becomes law, non-European Economic Area (EEA) citizens would have to be residents of Finland for five years in order to purchase real estate.

If we look at some of the MPs that are in favor of such a bill, we’ll quickly notice that they are the same politicians that are against refugees, cultural diversity and like to use the word “fatherland” in every other sentence.

Some of these MPs are the ones that want to demote the Swedish language to elective status at schools arguing that it would pave the way for more Finns to study the Russian langauge.

If these politicians are fueling our age-old suspicion of Russians with such a bill, why would more people be inclined to study such a language? Certainly favorable attitudes of a country play an important role.

For some, who have lived in this country for a long time, understand that present plans to curtail real estate purchases by Russians is a flashback to the days of the Restricting Act of 1939 (law 219/1939), which prohibited foreigners from owning real estate and acquiring a majority stake in Finnish companies.

The Act, which was in force until 1992, prohibited foreigners from owning shares in key sectors of the economy such as forestry, securities trading, transportation, mining, real estate and shipping.

Suspicion and xenophobia of the outside world was and still is very real. In the early 1980s I was handing a petition with a group of non-Finnish citizens to some MPs in parliament. The petition demanded greater rights for migrants in Finland. A common guest at such an event with foreigners was Police Chief Olli Urponen (1983-97). I once asked him why Finland had such a restrictive policy towards foreigners.

He responded: “To keep criminals out of Finland.”

This was the response of the police chief of a country that saw over 1.2 million of its countrymen emigrate between 1860 and 1999.

The very attitude, that the outside world is a dangerous place full of suspicious people, is how Finland saw the world during most of the last century.

Apart from having a law that curtailed foreign investment to the country up to the mid-1990s, official Finland did everything possible to hinder as much as possible foreigners from moving to the country.

The fact that it took Finland 65 years after independence to have in force in 1983 its first aliens act reveals how the country saw migrants and cultural diversity.

That same attitude persists today in too many circles and we have no-one else to blame than ourselves. We should teach more tolerance and less hatred of people who are different from us at schools and our homes.

If parliament passes a law that prohibits Russians from buying land in Finland, it won’t be a coincidence.

Migrant Tales Literary: When Finland kicked the shit out of tolerance

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Dedicated to Eila Kännö (1921-2009)*

By Leo Honka

I lived in this land of Finland

from a long, long time ago

before it heard your steps

when it could kick the shit out of tolerance

and walk away with impunity with intolerance

in the streets

as soverign master

Over anything that moved.

You’d be shocked by the things I’ve consumed

with my eyes and ears

and devoured in one gulp

by a thrusted spear through the heart:

The fight to maintain Finland white back then

was pretty easy

all you needed were two sentences:

To keep criminals

and the human trash away.

* Head of the Aliens Office of Finland during 1970-84.  Finland got its first aliens act in 1984, or 66 years after independence. Before this the authorities could detain and deport a migrant with no right of appeal. Some claim that Kännö ran the Aliens Office like a state within a state. 

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This book, Naisena miesten maailmassa, was published by Kännö in 1990.

October 19, 1982: A day we should never forget in Finland

Posted on by Migrant Tales

The first large demonstration ever held in Finland by migrants was on October 19, 1982. Before that historic march, some 100 Pakistanis marched from Helsinki to Turku in the early 1970s to protest that they didn’t get work in Finland. The second march in 1982, began in front of Porthania and ended at the doorsteps of Parliament. 

A day before the 1982 march, the then Aliens’ Office head, Eila Kännö, was reported to have threatened on Ilta-Sanomat that those migrants that took part in the march would be arrested. Back then, foreigners had few rights in Finland.

Among the things we were marching for back then was passage of Finland’s first Aliens Act, which came into force in 1984, or 65 years after independence.

 

I’m proud that we did organize the march. I found a rare poster in my files of that day we should never forget. 

IMG_2981The official poster that was used for the march on October 19, 1982.

If you asked over thirty years ago the police why Finland had such a restrictive policy against foreigners, their response was a common one: To keep criminals from moving to Finland.