In memory of Eila Kännö

For those of you who had the opportunity to move to Finland in the 1970s or early 1980s, will certainly remember Eila Kännö, the head of the then-Aliens’ Office (has anyone counted how many times the name of the immigration office has changed since the 1970s?).

She was the epitome of keeping Finland “clean” of foreigners.  Kari, the late Helsingin Sanomat cartoonist, who was well known for his stance against immigrants in Finland, did a cartoon of Kännö in a Helsingin Sanomat edition.  She was depicted as a “hero” standing guard like as hordes or inhuman foreigners looked on from behind ready to enter the country. Helsingin Sanomat or an evening paper compared  her style of rule with Benito Mussolini’s.

But her hard-line stance was her folly and turned against her. Kännö had threatened in an evening paper to throw the forreigners, who had staged the biggest generation ever in the early 1980s demanding greater rights, into jail because it was illegal for a non-Finn to take part in a demonstration. There was a loophole: The Helsinki University Union student body applied to the police to stage the demonstration.

That demonstration was what probably brought Kännö down. She had become a liability. The longer she stayed the more opposition to Finland’s antiquated foreigners’ policy would grow. It’s incredible that some Finns and well-known journalists like Pekka Karhuvaara hail her tough approach.

One of the favorite arguments used by police authorities back then why Finland had to keep outsiders from living in Finland was because they were “potential criminals.” Incredulous, no?

We should never forget this bleak period and more should be written about it. Not for revenge but that such policy mistakes never occur again.

The future human landscape of Finland

While we can debate how many foreigners will come to live in Finland in the next decade and if they’ll come to live in the country, what will Finland’s human landscape look like in the next and following decades as the country become more multicultural?

By multicultural I am referring to Canada’s novel immigrant policy whereby everyone is equal – regardless of color, national and religious background – in the job market and has the right to maintain and practice their culture.

One interesting matter that worries me about the whole debate of foreigners in Finland is that it is very one-sided. We rarely pose the following question: How receptive of a society are we to outsiders? Does Finnish society have the ability to accept people from different backgrounds as full members of society?

Or does Finland want to follow the questionable path of some countries like France and the US, where unskilled labor is exploited to the maximum?

So what will the future human landscape of Finland look like? If we are able to attract enough foreigners to live and work in our country, it will mean a lot of changed to how we define and  perceive  Finnish culture. There  will be the majority culture and the so-called minority cultures which,  like subcultures, will have their own distinctive identity in Finnish culture. These new members of our society will speak differently the Finnish and/or Swedish language not because they do not know the language well enough, but because they want to develop their own Finnish identity through language and culture.

“It paid to be Alfredo Stroessner’s son”

María Eugenia Heikel, 57, the former wife of the late Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner’s eldest
son Gustavo, is just one victim of the ruthless regime that ruled one of Latin America’s poorest
countries for 35 years. (Click to see Spanish version of the article in El País of Madrid).

Even though the Stroessners fled the country 19 years ago in 1989, neither Alfredo nor Gustavo
Stroessner have been brought before a Paraguayan court for human rights violations and amassing
huge fortune estimated at somewhere between two and three billion dollars through a well-organized network of coercion and corruption.

But all this may change after April’s presidential elections, when 56-year-old cleric Fernando Lugo caused a political earthquake by ending Colorado Party rule after 61 years. Edgar Ruiz Diaz, a journalist who works at ABC Color, Paraguay’s leading daily, has been investigating the Stroessners for a long time. “Even though the Stroessners fled the country in 1989, the system [of cronyism and corruption] they left behind is still intact,” he said, adding that the main reason why Paraguay’s former rulers have not been brought to justice is because the judges are Stroessneristas.

Heikel, who is the daughter of Finnish immigrants that settled the country in the 1920s, told this journalist 10 years ago that her former husband had amassed a fortune between “$300 and $500 million” that was deposited in US and Swiss banks. Today, she’s not that certain any longer. “The investigation into his finances was halted,” she says. “I cannot confirm how much money he has abroad.”

How is it possible that a Paraguayan air force colonel can amass such a fortune? Heikel said that apart from the insurance and construction companies that her husband ran, he received a percentage of the profits that casinos and bingo establishments made. “It paid to be the president’s son,” she said a decade ago.

Heikel’s problems with her former husband started when the family fled to Brasilia after a 1989 coup. “Gustavo was the most affected by living in exile,” she says. “He changed and started to pray all day and would not even give me money to buy a Coke. He was not well. People who know him tell me that he has not changed.”

Heikel explains that in 1993, when she left for Rio de Janeiro to take part in an equestrian competition,
she made the decision never to return to her husband’s side. “It was a very difficult moment in my life because I had lost everything,” she said. Heikel said that her ex-husband’s reaction to abandon and leave her penniless was “cowardly.”

While in Rio de Janeiro, Gustavo Stroessner spread false accusations about Heikel. She states that her former husband had channeled these lies through his sister-in-law Marta Rodríguez, who was married to “Alfredito” Stroessner before Gustavo’s brother died of a drug overdose at the age of 50. “Nothing was ever proven [when I returned to Paraguay in 1998] and neither did I steal anything from anyone,” Heikel says.

“When I lived in Rio, I feared for my life and was always very careful about my movements [in public].” In Paraguay, Heikel waged a tireless legal and media battle against her husband. She even exposed sensitive information about her husband in the Paraguayan media. She said, however, that an agreement was reached in 2002 with Gustavo Stroessner over compensation. Heikel did not reveal the sum but denied she was a millionaire. “I can now live without worries,” she said. Even if Gustavo Stroessner was seen as the heir -apparent to succeed his father, Heikel stated that Alfred Stroessner was against him becoming president. “He never wanted to be president,” she says. “I told him not to get involved in politics.”

Heikel claims that Stroessner’s harsh rule in Paraguay was due to communism. “We were fighting against communism,” she concludes. “We did not have the same problems as Uruguay and Chile [in the 1970s].”

The article appeared in the June 4th issue of IHT’s El País edition.

How immigrant-friendly is Finland?

If we look at the unemployment figures (20% jobless among foreigners) and the motives of non-Finns that moved to this country according to their residence permit applications, we are still faraway from being an immigrant-friendly country.

According to the Finnish Immigration Service, last year 6,196 (32%) residence permit applications were for employment followed for studies 3,980 (20%) and other reasons such as specialists, researchers, athletes (16%). Most of the residence applications were for studying and family ties based on marriage and children (5,464/23%).

Add both of the latter groups and it reaches 43%!

The total number of foreigners that applied for residence permits in 2007 stood at 19,216, up 33.3% compared with 14,420 in the previous year. Of the above-mentioned amount, the Finnish Immigration Service rejected 2,015 applications versus 1,633, respectively.

Even though the Finnish foreign population has been growing since the mid-1990s, when it became a EU member, Finland is not a paradise for foreigners who are seeking employment. Even so, matters can change. At the present rate, however, things are changing very slowly.