Exhibition – Finland

188-Kukkavirta Memorial

On 18 August 2017, the northern country of Finland made headlines in the international news media, when a Moroccan asylum seeker proceeded to stab 10 people in Turku, Finland. The attack took place in the late afternoon, which killed two and injured eight more before the police arrived at the scene and detained the 18-year-old attacker, who was later charged with two murders and eight counts of attempted murder, which a regional court described to have been motivated by terrorist intent. The events sparked a national debate on immigration and security in Finland, fuelled by the unprecedented violence of the attack. At the same time, communities were conflicted about how to commemorate the victims of the attack because, for instance, the Mayor of Turku declined to organise a public memorial in fear of causing further tension in Finnish society, particularly when it came to multicultural relations. Despite similar concerns expressed by other local politicians, a coalition of far-right groups and organisations called the National Alliance organised a memorial event on the first anniversary of the attack, which became annually known as 188-Kukkavirta in Finnish. Yet given the far-right association of its organisers, the event drew a great deal of criticism from Finnish civil society, which saw the emergence of a great number of counter-protesters gathered around the scene of the controversial memorial event in the heart of the oldest city in Finland, to dispute the sincerity of the occasion on the basis of protecting the memory of the victims from being tainted by far-right memory politics.

Even today, the memory of the 2017 attack remains a contested issue in national politics between different activist groups and their commemorative practices, most notably the far-right event 188-Kukkavirta, organised annually by the National Alliance, and its counter-protest Turku without Nazis, which describes itself as a “politically unaffiliated coalition” engaging in an “anti-fascist and anti-racist demonstration”. As feared by some local politicians, including the man who rose to national prominence as a result of his actions during the 2017 attack, the controversial memorial event did indeed become a platform for extremist views for years to come: between 2018 and 2023, the scene of the public memorial has seen not only the display of “White Lives Matters” banners and other white supremacist slogans, but also swastikas and the Nazi salute. Although the number of participants has remained relatively small throughout the years, being greatly outnumbered by its counter-protest, the impact of the controversial memorial event on national politics has been nevertheless significant. For instance, when a prominent politician of the right-wing populist Finns Party took part in the event in 2019, his extremist remarks resulted in a vote of no confidence during his later tenure as Finland’s economy minister, and although he survived it, he was later forced to resign over his far-right ties after only 10 days in office.

Source: Varisverkosto.com

For the far-right groups and organisations involved, the annual 188-Kukkavirta quickly became a highly symbolic occasion, the meaning of which expanded considerably beyond simply commemorating its 10 victims: it grew into an arena of far-right memory politics in Finland, where the events of the 2017 attack were placed along a certain historical arc that presents multiculturalism as an existential threat to Finnish identity and values. As a result of this rhetoric, the sincerity of its organisers has been greatly disputed by its counter-protest Turku without Nazis, which views the far-right event merely as a platform for extremist views involving unfounded claims about contentious political issues such as immigration – namely through hate speech against ethnic minorities – in Finnish society. Moreover, they argue that such groups are using the memory of the victims to promote their own political agenda whilst essentially disregarding whether the victims themselves, or their families, would have liked to be associated with symbols and slogans commonly used in far-right politics.

Elsewhere in Finland, similar clashes between far-right and anti-fascist groups have also taken place, perhaps the most notable example being the far-right independence march and its related marches, which can be regarded as another prominent attempt by today’s far-right activists to claim a certain commemorative practice as their own in Finland. In Helsinki, as in Turku since 2017, public displays of far-right activism are often met with a response from their counter-protest Helsinki without Nazis, a coalition of several anti-fascist groups based in Helsinki.

Source: Varisverkosto.com

Given the above examples, a common characteristic shared by such events is that groups and organisations using them to promote extremist views tend to do so by employing certain “narrative tactics” through which they mobilise efforts to influence public opinion. For instance, far-right groups were amongst the first to associate the 2017 attack with international terrorism way before the court’s decision because it served as a textbook example of how they perceive multiculturalism to have failed in Finnish society. Thus, by framing immigration as a security threat in such a manner, they have since sought to arouse public fears about immigrants and asylum seekers in Finland – a rhetoric commonly used by right-wing politicians – and use the tragedy of the 2017 attack as a case in point. Like their ideological counterparts elsewhere in the European continent, such groups also tend to refer to an ongoing “cultural struggle”, which is commonly dressed in the rhetoric of the “erosion” of European values, or the nativist idea that states should be solely inhabited by members of the native group. Based on these premises, far-right groups attempt to position themselves as representatives of “true national character” in the wake of what they believe to be threatening the social and political order of Finnish society, which most notably includes the perceived threat of the “islamisation” of Europe at large.

Source: Varisverkosto.com

Unlike the far-right groups and organisations involved in the annual 188-Kukkavirta, the voices on the opposing side highlight the need for a greater sense of solidarity that transcends differences and fosters understanding and respect for democracy. Judging by the number of counter-protesters gathered each year at the scene of the far-right event, such ideas appear to be shared by a great many residents of the coastal city of Turku, whose individual and collective responses to the growing public presence of far-right activists since 2018 demonstrate a considerable degree of resilience on the part of Finnish civil society when it comes to recognising and disputing the far-right narrative of the events of the 2017 attack. Furthermore, their efforts to challenge the far-right association of the event also does justice to the victims of the attack – at least four of whom were non-Finnish – who did not choose to be associated with the extremist rhetoric of its organisers and whose families had not been appropriately consulted in the organisation of the first memorial event.

Although the far-right narrative of the events has been greatly disputed in the public sphere since the first anniversary of the 2017 attack, the collective memory of the events has nevertheless focused on the commemoration of its 10 victims who were either killed or injured on 18 August 2018. By building upon a different narrative, the 2022 documentary Broken Dreamland, directed by Hannu-Pekka Vitikainen and Khalid Laboudi, recounts the events of the 2017 attack by telling the story of two of the attacker’s close friends in Turku and how they struggle to belong in a world that rejects them wherever they go. The synopsis of the film describes it as follows:

They were children when they left, dreaming of a life without worry: freedom and wealth. But what awaited them was a nightmare. One of them began to change, leading him to commit a lethal knife attack in Turku, Finland. By following the lives of two of the attacker’s friends, the film delves into the experiences of an entire generation of young Moroccan men who feel like they do not belong anywhere. While their families push them to travel to Europe to find a better life, Europe casts them out.