Thanks to hard questions asked by high school students on Thursday’s Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) televised debate to Perussuomalaiset (PS) Timo Soini, the issue of racism in Finland finally got the scrutiny it deserved in the presidential campaign.
Taking into account that an anti-immigration party like the PS won its historic election victory in April, a social ill like racism has got dear little attention in the presidential election.
This fact reveals that Finland is either in deep denial or in shock-and-awe concerning the rise of the PS and the xenophobic atmosphere it has helped to fuel in this country.
But the critical and persistent questions by the high school students on YLE’s presidential debate on Thursday to PS leader Soini on racism in his party encouraged other candidates to grill the populist leader on the topic.
Thanks to the example of the students, there is hope that the beachhead the PS has got in Finland is seriously questioned by those that will lead this country in the future.
Those candidates that denied on the YLE debate that racism had lifted its head in Finland were the usual ones: Soini as well as Christian Democrat hopeful Sari Essayah and Paavo Väyrynen of the Center Party.
Soini backed his claim by hiding behind a Police College report in October that showed that hate crimes had fallen by 15% in 2010 versus the previous year.
Social Democrat Party hopeful Paavo Lipponen, who said he had become a candidate because he was concerned about the rise of racism and the PS in Finland, hit Soini the hardest.
“Even if [your party] had 50% support I would still be against this type of [racist] politics,” Lipponen said on Helsingin Sanomat quoting the YLE debate. “This must come to a stop…”
Lipponen said that the PS’ connections to far-right European parties is shameful.
After the Green Party declared war on the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party before the April 17 election, its presidential hopeful Pekka Haavisto has made an about-turn: He has become a “friend” of PS MP Teuvo Hakkarainen, who became a household name thanks to his racist gaffes, and now displays a show of support for his candidacy by PS MP Jussi Halla-aho.
Certainly forgiveness is an important but how can you forgive somebody for their hostile racist behavior if they don’t even consider it wrong?
Another sad matter that Haavisto is doing by extending his hand to racists and far-right Islamophobists like Halla-aho is that he gives them legitimacy.
Moreover, his approval of these types of politicians shows that at the end of the day Haavisto is a white Finn.
If we could draw a tree that bares these fruits of hatred how would it look like? Would our surprise be to discover that it’s the same-looking tree that continues to cast its shadow on all of our societies for centuries? It still stands mighty and tall because we continue to feed and protect it.
If we strive and aim for social freedom and social equality we must understand the terminology. It’s a bit like being imprisoned but having never heard the word freedom.
The same could apply to an immigrant or minority, who is discriminated by society but cannot place his finger on the words that he needs to know to help him break out of his predicament. How can you demand greater rights from others if you never heard and grasp key social concepts like mutual acceptance, respect and equal rights?
In order then to understand how fear, ignorance and hate promote racism, we’d have to understand the big picture like the one below.
Degrees of Us vs Them / Gloria Yamato’s Degrees of Racism. Source: Community Village Activist*
Let’s take Finland and use Gloria Yamato’s tree to study how it could work in our context: fear leads to action (Russification, the 1918 Civil War, for example), fear leads to hate (Winter and Continuation War), and fear thoughts (we are such a small country that will be devoured by foreign hordes).
If we understand that fear+ignorance = hate (racism), what would you call a political party like the Perussuomalaiset in Finland that uses fear to attract public attention and votes?
I would call that the worst case of political opportunism and chicanery!
*Thank you Glenn Robinson for the heads-up! Glenn is a European-American married to a Mexican-American. They have two children. Glenn is interested in progressive immigration reform, and desegregation within schools and communities. He is a life long learner with interests in sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and politics.
Christian Democrat presidential hopeful, Sari Essayah, was quoted as saying on Jyväskylä-based daily Keskisuomalainen that racism hasn’t increased recently in Finland. She blamed the media for increasing such perceptions for following more closely what is written on different anti-immigration online forums.
The socially conservative candidate said, however, that society should have zero tolerance for racism.
What is unclear by Essayah’s statement is how serious of a social problem she believes racism is in Finland and how it should be tackled. Playing down the problem by blaming the media for doing its job will not help racism and prejudice to go away in this country.
Different anti-immigration forums like Hommaforum, Scripta and others gave a big boost to the Perussuomalaiset (PS) election victory in April.
PS leader Timo Soini plays down the role that the anti-immigration vote in the recent election.
Like Soini and Sauli Niinistö of Kokoomus, Essayah did not see the far-right posing a threat to Finland, according to an MTV3 poll in December.
The role of accepting refugees in remote municipalities as a way of slowing the number of people who move out of the community is a half-way solution to the challenging demographic problem facing many parts of Finland. While there is a lot of good will to accommodate refugees in their municipality, many of these people end up moving to bigger cities like Helsinki after short stay.
One of the problems why refugees and immigrants avoid small municipalities or stay a short while is because there are few opportunities, jobs and near-nonexistent immigrant community.
Another important matter that encourages such refugees to move out of such municipalities when possible is the lack of a clear idea by city officials of what these people’s role is in the community. Directing them to their umpteenth Finnish-language course, employment office or to The Social Insurance Institution of Finland (Kela) are not effective ways of dealing with the issue but a method of brushing the problem under the rug.
While some municipalities do a better job than others at integrating refugees and immigrants, those that do a poor job are the ones who do no envisage any “real” place for them. By “real place” I mean hiring refugees and immigrants to work for the municipality and doing everything possible that they’ll work, invest and raise their families in our community.
Mikkeli (pop. 48,676) is a municipality located about 230km northeast of Helsinki. It’s a typical city that faces serious demographic challenges (aging population) and needs outside investment to create more jobs. What makes matters worse is that the city does not have any concrete plan or roadmap on how it plans to meet these future demographic and economic challenges.
Believe it or not, Mikkeli has no international director coordinating such efforts except for the assistant mayor.
Some estimates see Finland needing by 2040 two million immigrants to maintain the same age structure it had in 2007, when 17% of the population was over 65 years. Since such a large number of immigrants are needed to maintain the present age structure, the role of immigration can only slow the process of aging at municipalities like Mikkeli.
In the region of Etelä-Savo where I live, 2040 is already here in some municipalities. In Puumala, 29.3% of the population is over 65 years while the average for Etelä-Savo is 22.7%. In Mikkeli, 19.1% of the inhabitants are pensioners.
In many respects the rise of an anti-immigration party like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) comes at a very bad moment for Finland and regions like Etelä-Savo.
If local authorities are struggling to figure out the big picture for refugees and immigrants in their respective municipalities, they have to deal as well with ever-growing nationalism and anti-immigration sentiment.
Hiding one’s head in the sand is not a solution. Smaller municipalities throughout Finland need not only a viable plan that will promote mutual acceptance, respect, equal opportunities and most importantly jobs for refugees, immigrants and their local inhabitants, they need to implement such a plan now.
Comment: Finland has deported between 2008 and 2010 ten homosexuals to countries where they could receive harsh punishment for belonging to such a sexual minority, according to YLE in English.
The Finnish Immigration Service denies such allegations.
Homosexuality is seen as a crime in over 70 countries carrying even the death penalty.
“It was surprising that the decision’s are there with detailed information about the countries, but it was decided that people were not in serious danger and could be deported,” says researcher Outi Lepola.
It is not the first time that Finland has been accused of sending asylum seekers to countries where they could face harsh punishment. During the cold war, Soviet asylum seekers were deported back to the USSR, where they were interned in mental asylums or sentenced to hard labor.
The Centre for Torture Survivors in Finland, has accused the Finnish Immigration Service (FIS) of deporting refugees who have suffered torture to their home countries.
_____________
Finland has deported asylum seekers to countries where they could be put to death for their sexual orientation, in violation of international agreements. Some have been told to conceal their sexuality to ensure they remain safe.
This is not a far-fetched question taking into account what is happening in Hungary and the rise of populism in Finland. How many in Hungary ten years ago could have envisioned what is happening today in that country?
The architect of Hungary’s ever-autocratic grip over its democratic institutions has been Fidesz party prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Daniel Cohn Bendit, the leader of the European Green group in the European Parliament, is not too happy in the video clip below about the reforms that have taken place under Orbán.
Says Bendit: “Europe was born in a struggle against totalitarianism and the basis of democracy, the basis of liberty, is quite precisely freedom of expression. And that disturbs. A democracy never died of too much freedom, democracies died through throttling freedoms.”
Here is a link to a massive protest in Hungary by tens of thousands of people against the government’s reforms.
What we are seeing in Hungary last decade and especially today is of concern: The rise of Antisemitism, xenophobia, hostility towards the Romany minority, increased government monitoring of the media and other institutions like the central bank by the government to name a few.
The guardian.co.uk sums it up pretty well: “…the new constitution is the source of most anguish. It came into effect on 1 January, and, combined with at least 350 laws that have been rushed through during Fidesz’s 20 months in power, has, say critics, all but removed checks and balances to the power of the government and ruling party…There have been crackdowns on Roma rights, and funds for education and social care have been shredded, campaigners say.”
The question that I’d like to ask our bloggers is if Finland could ever follow Hungary’s xenophobic and increasingly anti-democratic path if a party like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) got an absolute majority in the election as did Fidesz in 2010.
Fidesz election victory, which gave them two thirds of the seats in parliament, is as impressive as what the PS gained in April.
Another big winner of the 2010 election in Hungary was the Antisemitic and neo-fascist Jobbik.
If any party were to swing Finland on Hungary’s path, the place to start is the Constitution.
I am certain that there are a lot of sympathizers in the PS and in Finland of the anti-democratic reforms in Hungary.
The more I read about Timo Soini the more I am convinced that the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party is a threat to this country, especially to those who do not fit the PS’ narrow view of the world. I am not contesting the election result, which I respect, but what the cat has brought in from the back door.
Marianne Lydén will publish in a few weeks a book, Jag är inte rasist. Jag vill bara ha främlingsfientliga röster [I’m not a racist. I am just out to get the votes of those who hate immigrants], that highlights the role of the media and political parties in fueling the rise of the PS, according to HBL.
Fear = Hate forums in Finland (Hommaforum, Scripta and others), Ignorance = bloggers who visit these sites, and hate = hostility towards immigrants and visible minorities. Thank you Hannele Kosonen for sharing this very revealing cartoon with us.
While we at Migrant Tales have repeatedly criticized the media’s lack of teeth and the complacency of the largest political parties to the xenophobia and racism of the PS, Lydén raises the important question again in her book.
If anything, the media and politicians can learn from their past mistakes and now see what can happen when we are too complacent to parties that hold in contempt the rights of other groups in society.
“We journalists did Soini’s work by spreading his hatred of foreigners sometimes unknowingly,” the staff reporter at the Swedish-language daily HBL is quoted as saying, “but if we wouldn’t have written about him we wouldn’t have been doing our job.”
Lydén points the finger in her book at the following politicians for boosting the PS: Kokoomus MP Ben Zyskowicz, Jutta Urpilainen and Eero Heinäluoma of the SDP as well as Center Party veteran politician Paavo Väyrynen.
While you’ll find the same anti-immigration hardliners in all Finnish parties as in the PS, it explains why a politician like Urpilainen can flirt with Soini’s one-way integration model for immigrants and why Wille Rydnman has been christened by his party as Kokoomus’ Jussi Halla-aho.
The HBL reporter shows how an Islamophobist like Halla-aho and Soini complimented each other in the historic April election. “Without Halla-aho Soini would have never got the anti-immigration vote. Without Soini Halla-aho would not be chairing the administration committee,” she said.
Another important observation that Lydén makes is that nothing happens immediately or by chance in Finland. Racism has been festering in the undercurrent for a long time in Finland. “What is it and nothing of the sort happens [xenophobia] in Finland was the normal answer,” she said of the 1990s.
I have worked as a foreign correspondent and journalist in Finland for a long time and totally agree with Lydén about turning a blind eye to racism, bigotry and prejudice. If you didn’t you were blacklisted by the foreign ministry which did everything possible to smear your good name.
I am certain that Lasse Lehtinen, Rolf Friberg, Pekka Karhuvaara and Finnfacts can give us more details about how the foreign ministry “worked” with foreign journalists during the cold war and tried to convince us that Finlandization did not exist.
We are in big trouble if we deal with this threat of the PS in the same manner as we did before the election.
However, I believe that Finland is slowly but surely learning a stinging lesson from its pre-April 17 mistakes.
There is one line of a film review of Pariah on Colorlines that really caught me: “The film hinges on the belief that there’s no one way to be young, or black, or queer. And while it’s a struggle to come into any identity, those fights are always punctuated by moments of resilience and triumph.”
That resilience and triumph that the author speaks of is when when we take that giant step and succeed at accepting who we are.
Even if accepting who we are may be easier said than done, society must help by being acceptant and even encouraging diversity. Advancing the rights of one group has a positive ripple effect on the whole of society, especially on different minorities.
The greatest threat to societies like ours in Finland and elsewhere doesn’t come from abroad but from within. Attacking and undermining the rights of others and retarding their acceptance have an adverse knock-on effect.
Since selective hatred is a myth promoted by far-right, populist right wing and anti-immigration groups for political and personal profit, we should be especially alarmed by such groups and people that hold in such contempt the rights of others.
Contrary to what these groups want you to believe, you cannot control racism, hatred nor can you contain it to impact one group. Selective hatred affects everyone.
It’s funny how still some in this country like to tell the rest what is acceptable when it comes to labeling different ethnic groups. The term ryssä, a derogatory term to place Russians in a negative context in the Finnish language is one of many examples. The Council of Ethics in Advertisingruled that using the term ryssimmeas a verb from the noun ryssä on one of its cider beverages was unethical.*
The label ryssä is used by Finns as a derogatory term for Russians.
Even if some Finns like to constantly warn and remind us about the “Russian threat” to Finland and that of other groups as well, the truth is that the only ones that are a threat to this country are such people. They don’t build with their racist comments anything constructive but feed an old ogre of to Finns called hatred and suspicion of outsiders.
Another degrading label that we have brought attention to on Migrant Tales is the term mamu, the shortened word for maahanmuuttaja, or immigrant.
Stand-up comedian Ali Jahangiri mentions in the following video clip why his blood boils every time he hears the term mamu used by Finns. Warning: The video clip uses quite offensive language and is recommended for viewers who are over 18 years old.
On a number of occasions we have debated on Migrant Tales about the use of the term neekeri by Finns, which is highly offensive to blacks.
As a person with a Latin American background, I personally find it incredible how Mexicans are portrayed, sometimes as toothless unshaven desperados outside of Mexican restaurants. The Amarillo restaurant chain portrays a Mexican in a pretty suspicious manner. Isn’t it funny that cowboys from the U.S. are never portrayed as Mexicans, who don’t even look human.
A dating website shows subjectively and even in a racist fashion how sexy women are portrayed in Finland. If the picture is anything to go by, the ideally beautiful woman in Finland has platinum-blonde hair, blue eyes and enjoys holding a red strawberry between her teeth.
Despite the racism and sexism we see in advertising in this country every day, the Council of Ethics in Advertising ruling on the usage of the term ryssä is a positive step in the right direction.
*Mainostoimisto Kingin suunnittelemassa mainoksessa oli kuva Otto Greippi Lime -tölkistä, jossa sana greippi oli tavutettu virheellisesti grei-ppi. Mainoksessa luki ”Uudistimme maun, mutta ryssimme tavutuksen!”.
