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No Unfriendly Facts. The Image of “Blacks” and Soviets in Finnish Caricature 1956-1990 the Society of Foreigners in Finland, Ahti Tolvanen, submitted a complaint to the Finnish Media Council in late 1990. He stated that the caricaturists had “insulted foreigners living in Finland and also one section of the readership of the paper” (i.e. Helsingin Sanomat), evidently referring to green MPs Pekka Haavisto and Heidi Hautala, who had raised the issue in Parliament. Several caricatures from the end of the 1980s did not, in Tolvanen’s opinion, represent the views of the majority population and they “instigated prejudices” against asylum seekers by not telling why they had to find refuge in Finland. Tolvanen bluntly classified Kari as a “racist”, because he presumably had disseminated the idea that the Blacks were the ones who had contaminated Whites with HIV and were connected to drug dealing and trade of falsified passports.‘ All this offended the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights as it undermined the human dignity of the Blacks. Tolvanen picked up one caricature in particular (December 2, 1990), in which Kari showed how the Blacks were welcomed by the Finnish authorities while poor, homeless, and sick Finnish citizens did not get anything, as most of the provisions had gone into the pockets of the asylum seekers. There was also in the caricature the insinuation that the Blacks had reached Finland via human trade routes. For Tolvanen, the caricature made the asylum seekers the scapegoats for Finnish economic and social problems (Ahti Tolvanen’s complaint May 6, 1991. Archives of the Finnish Media Council). This cartoon is depicted in the Figure 3. Figure 3 On the left, one sees poor Finns and a woman from the Red Cross stopping them from approaching two policemen. In the middle there is a naive Swedish-speaking Finn expressing the idea that the Somalis should be accommodated in hotels. There are two policemen to whom the Somalis say: “They are friendly here, we have arrived in a land of fools” (in Finnish, 4é/mé/d in the caption). On the right we see a foreigner selling falsified passports and trips to Finland. The caricature was based on the suspicions that asylum seekers had come via Moscow, where they had been given money to travel to Finland. Tolvanen’s complaint tested the limits of the Finnish sense of humour versus self-censorship, as it was put before the Media Council, the independent institution controlling the ethics of journalists.’ The council’s decision created a precedent to be followed in future cases of this kind. As its principle was audiatur et altera pars (listen to the opinion of the opposite party), it asked from the chief editor of the Helsingin Sanomat, Janne Virkkunen, his reply. Virkkunen was able to refer to the journalists’ rules specified by the Media Council, according to which a caricaturist like Kari could criticize “sharply and sensationally” any sphere of life and could * Kari called himself a racist in the sense that there were in his opinion intelligent and stupid races, honest and dishonest races, as well as developed and wild races—among dogs (Helsingin Sanomat, October 1, 1989). > The author of this chapter was a lay member of the council from 2009 to 2014. 469
