Condoleezza Rice is wrong

I was pretty amazed when I read an AP story where Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Paris after meeting with France’s new President Nicolas Sarkozy that democracy will come to the the Middle East no matter what.

“Yeah, it’s really hard,” she said. “It’s hard for democracy to take hold in a place where it has not taken hold before, but I am confident about the triumph of these values because I’ve seen it before.”

Rice continues: “Democracy is hard and I see it as especially hard when there are determined enemies who try and strangle it.”

While it’s debatable if the Bush administration wants democracy in the Middle East in the first place, Rice’s and Washington’s foreign policy continues to show a remarkable amount of ignorance of how the world has changed since the invasion of Iraq.

If anything, it reveals how fixated the US is on imposing its unilateral will on other countries.

One way to show how out of touch Bush’s foreign policy is to pay close attention to what gurus like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brezinski and Brent Scocroft said recently about the US and its role in the world.

While they all served under different administrations, they agreed that the US needs to be less arrogant about using its might and more willing to talk with other countries.

One of the many big lessons learned from the Iraq debacle is that a hyperpower like the US can impose its will on smaller countries and rogue states through sheer might but this method is no longer feasible.

Might in no longer right. It can, however, get you in a hell of a costly mess.

Missä aika melkein pysähtyy

Kesä on vihdoin saapunut näille pohjoisille asteille. Vaikka tämä kaikkein suosituin vuodenaika on saapunut miljoonien vuosien ajan, aina se epäröi ennen kuin muuttaa maisemat niin perusteellisesti.

Pikku epäröinti, jota luonto harrastaa on ymmärrettävä. Vuoden ajat tällä hiljaisella Euroopan nurkalla eivät ole koskaan kevytmielinen asia, vaan ne ovat kuin vallankumouksia.

Pian ihmettä alkaa tapahtua: lehdet puhkeavat, lumpeet nousevat järven pinnalle, lentävät sudenkorennot ja perhoset maalavat matalaa taivasta kiusallisten hyttysten kanssa; linnut lentävät edes takaisin nokassaan ruokaa poikasilleen. Kuuset, männyt ja metsien saaret, joissa asuu koivuja muutaman pihlajan ja leppäpuun kanssa, ovat erityisen puheliaita kesällä.

Kesä on niin hurmaava ja pyhä aika meille, että vain hyvien asioiden sallitaan tapahtuvan.

Vaikka on vaaralista yleistää, millainen kansan luonne on, suomalaiset ovat oppineet kantapäänkautta kuinka kesää palvotaan. Yksi tärkeimmistä on, ettei pitäisi koskaan aloittaa sotimaan erityisesti kesällä.

Jotkut ovat sitä mieltä, että jatkosodan alkaminen kesällä 1941 oli huono enne maallemme. Vaikka armeijamme taisteli alussa menestyksellä entistä Neuvostoliittoa vastaan, sodan seuraukset vaikuttivat monien sukupolvien suomalaisin. Menetykset, kuten Karjala, painavat yhä monien mieltä.

Suomen kesä.

Olisiko asiat sodan jälkeen Suomessa olleet eritavalla jos jatkosota olisi alkanut syksyllä tai talvella?

Kauan sitten, kun olin 13-vuotias, minulla oli tapana kulkea polkupyörän ja kartan avulla Savon syvissä metsissä, kun vietin kesä-aika isovanhempien kesämokilla lähellä Mikkeliä. Yhtenä erityisenä iltapäivänä päädyin hylätyn ja ujon polun eteen. Päätin kokeilla minne se veisi.

Päädyn vähän ajan kuluttua harmaan maalaistalon pihaan ja aikuinen nainen tuli. Pyysin neuvoa. Halusin tietää pääsisikö polkua kulkemalla päätielle. Hän suositteli kääntymään takaisin, sillä polku oli huonossa kunnossa.

En ymmärtänyt aluksi miksi tunsin niin paljon läheisyyttä tätä ihmistä kohtaan. Vasta monien vuosien jälkeen tämä asia tuli selville. Sinä päivänä kun tapasimme puhuimme joutavia asioita, mutta sydämemme ja sielumme olivat tietämättään täydessä keskustelussa.

Vaikkemme vielä tienneet, olimme kaksi ihmistä, jotka olivat menettäneet kotinsa. Eeva oli evakko ja minä siirtolaisen lapsi.

Olen tavannut monia ystävällisiä ihmisiä Savon metsissä, mutta matka tämän lempeän naisen mökille opetti minulle, ettei saa koskaan menettää rohkeuttaan kävellä vähän kuljettuja polkuja pitkin.

Sellaisia polun päästä voit joskus löytää todellisen aarteen, kuten ikuisen ystävän tai vaikkapa hetkellistä onnea.

Siksi aina kun voin, yritän kulkea ujoja polkuja, missä kesän taika saattaa piileskellä hetkeksi.

What should Finland do about Karelia? (Part II)

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 should Finland do about Karelia? (Part I)

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 rejoined to Finland.

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.

Censorship and self-censorship in Finland

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.

The stigma of Gitmo

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.

Spreading the good word of multiculturalism

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.

Midsummer 60 degrees north

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.

Landing in jail without due process

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.

Disenfranchised immigrants

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.