Strange drama played out in Oulu

The protagonists are clear: an editor, an illustrator, and a masked prophet. But who are the villains of the piece?

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By Ritva Liisa Snellman in Oulu
     
      The immediate feeling one gets is that this has all the makings of a good drama: an Oulu cultural magazine called Kaltio publishes a topical strip-cartoon, the magazine's editor get fired for it, and the illustrator loses a commission from the city.
      It's clearly a tragedy. Two heroes of freedom of speech and a whole cast of villains.
      And because the cartoon strip also features an appearance by the prophet of the world's largest religious grouping - admittedly with a funny May Day mask covering his face - the chain of events is followed by a considerable furore, which spreads in an instant from Oulu to the pages of the world's press and as far as India.
     
Let us first consider the setting of the drama. Oulu is a university city of around 126,000 inhabitants, situated some 200 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. The city has always known how to get the best out of the local raw materials: tar, timber, and smart boys from high school who have been refined by the university into engineers to serve the needs of Finland's high-tech cluster.
      The city is growing and developing, but it has a permanent blot on its image-escutcheon. Oulu is regarded as a narrow-minded sort of place in cultural terms. When the opposing camps - traditionalists and the reform-minded (or the chosen ones and the children of the world) - find themselves on a collision course, then the clashing of swords and gnashing of teeth can be heard far away.
      Attempts to clean up the reputation have not taken wing. And whenever there is a cultural spat in the town, outsiders shrug and raise their eyebrows: they're at it again in Oulu.
      They are now.
     
The protagonists in the drama, cartoonist and illustrator Ville Ranta and the Kaltio editor-in-chief - oh, correction, the former editor-in-chief - Jussi Vilkuna, are drinking coffee and eating buns in Vilkuna's kitchen.
      It is 8:30 in the morning. Vilkuna looks a bit tired. He has had a succession of exhausting days: interviews, e-mail to respond to, SMS messages, and endless phone-calls. There are people signing up to subscribe the paper in support of its actions, too, and these are very welcome, since Kaltio only has 1,100 subscribers.
     
It all started on Friday February 17th. Earlier that week, both Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen and President Tarja Halonen had come out publicly deploring the fact that a small Finnish extremist group called Suomen Sisu had gone and republished on its website the Muhammad cartoons originally published in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten.
     
Annoyed and exasperated at the apologies, Ville Ranta wanted to draw a cartoon strip in which he discussed the subject of freedom of expression with the Prophet himself, and simultaneously took a swipe at the actions of Finnish politicians.
      Vilkuna approved the idea on the condition that nobody's feelings would be offended. The following day he went through the rapidly-drawn series of cartoons, and requested the removal of one expletive. By Saturday night, the strip was up on Kaltio's  website.
      "I wanted to get a discussion started up about freedom of speech and about the meeting of the two cultures", says Vilkuna now. "The idea came up when Ville offered the drawings. I think it is a good thing that we get moderate Islam involved in the dialogue."
     
After that, things happened with such speed that the main players in the drama are themselves not quite sure what went down and in what particular order.
      A young Finnish man living in Tampere sends the online magazine's advertisers an e-mail on the night of Wednesday/Thursday (February 22nd/23rd), in which he enquires as to what steps the advertisers plan to take in response to the publication of the cartoon featuring the Prophet Muhammad.
      The e-mail is so clumsily written that one might almost imagine the writer to be a foreigner rather than a Finn. Another e-mail sent only to the editor-in-chief contains a veiled threat.
      Three of the advertisers, insurers Pohjola and Tapiola and bancassurers Sampo, take collective fright and want their logos out of the online paper.
      The Kaltio Board also rears up on its hind legs and wants the cartoon strip out of the online paper and off the Internet. The Board's chairman is concerned about the paper's financial position and the feelings of Muslims.
     
Vilkuna refuses to remove the strip cartoon and appeals to his position: as editor-in-chief he has the final word on the paper's editorial content.
      A string of panicky phone-calls ensues. One board-member resigns. On Friday a rump of the Kaltio Board holds a teleconference.
      There is just one item on the agenda: firing the editor-in-chief. One of the board-members votes against the decision.
      At 14:00, Vilkuna is notified of his dismissal by e-mail. Half an hour later, the Board Chairman shuts down the web paper's pages and the strip cartoon is removed.
     
The panic spreads further afield and reaches the City of Oulu's Education Department.
      A working group putting together the programme for the 200th anniversary of the birth of J.V. Snellman decides to cancel the illustration they have commissioned from Ville Ranta for a booklet on the statesman and philosopher.
     
After all this, Jussi Vilkuna should look like a broken man. Even though his job at the paper was only a part-time number, and he was not picking up much in salary, getting fired without due cause must sting.
      Not a bit of it. Vilkuna gathers up Kaltio files from the cellar of his terraced house as if nothing much has happened, and wonders aloud where he ought to shift the stuff. He does not intend to kick up dust over his dismissal. "We were looking for limits with the strip cartoon, so that we would know what we can talk and write about."
      Now we know. Four-letter words beginning with F* may get sniffed at in a culture mag, but they do get tolerated. Words beginning with M should not be used.
     
But Vilkuna is familiar with dramatic and sudden turns  in working life. As an engineer with a background in wood processing, he worked in the branch, and ran a factory employing 120 people. When the plant went into receivership, Vilkuna turned to teaching the flute. Now his main job is running the Oulunsalo Art School, where he is Principal.
      And he does not intend to abandon Kaltio altogether. "The responsibilities have got lighter, and now I have more time to devote to culture matters. I wouldn't find it totally repugnant to join the editorial staff of the paper. But not under the current Board."
      A-ha. Looks like a surprising little sub-plot there.
     
And who is the villain of this piece?
      There have been attempts to put the mantle on the shoulders of Tytti Isohookana-Asunmaa, a long-serving member of the Kaltio  Board, Centre Party MP, and former Minister of Culture.
      Isohookana-Asunmaa rejects the claim with some vigour. She was not the one pulling the strings to get Vilkuna out. Quite the contrary. She has defended the editor-in-chief and thinks he has done a good job. It is important to kick down fences, even though this has not always gone down well with all the members of the association that publishes Kaltio.
     
There was some grumbling , particularly over the programme for the magazine's 60th birthday celebrations a year ago. The performance piece that Vilkuna had ordered - two naked men with their bodies painted up in evening dress and the editor himself flashing some skin - was not a particularly progressive cultural policy act in Isohookana-Asunmaa's opinion.
      "But over the strip cartoon we had a stalemate situation, and it had to be resolved somehow. This is not such a big deal for the paper. The information about the advertisers backing off and the security risk caused by the cartoon were much more serious matters."
     
According to Isohookana-Asunmaa, the decision was also influenced by the fact that Jussi Vilkuna had already earlier told the Board Chairman of his wish before long to withdraw from the editor-in-chief's position.
      Tytti Isohookana-Asunmaa does not give the whole imbroglio very good marks for style or artistic interpretation, but it was the only way to handle it. She read Ranta's strip cartoon herself and found it offensive. "The blaze that had been set off in Denmark was already dying down. We have no wish to kick the embers back into life, since people really are a bit scared for their safety."
      What? In Oulu?
      "Yes", says Isohookana-Asunmaa. "There are some vague aggressions going the rounds in Finland at the moment. I haven't experienced anything quite like this before."
     
A play must always have a message as well as a plot-line. The hysteria stirred up by Ranta's drawings has already been compared with the period in Finland from the end of the Second World War right up to the 1980s, when the Finns got used to self-censorship.
      When nobody wanted to irritate the Eastern neighbours, people kept quiet or just hummed under their breath. The nation's elite led by example, and the public silenced itself in their wake or sullenly muttered their objections in private.
      The Germans came up with a term for the quiet appeasement: Finnlandisierung.
      Could it be that the lost species of Finlandisation has been rediscovered in a new variant known as Oulufication: even the most distant threat should be shrunk from even before there are any tangible signs of danger.
      "It can't be denied, Finland has had a habit of pre-empting threats in advance", says Heini Hakosalo, a lecturer in the history of science and ideas from the University of Oulu.
     
That was the way things were even before the years of Finlandisation. Hakosalo mentions by way of example the curious advance censorship of movies that was introduced in Finland even before World War II.
      All things considered, Hakosalo feels the whole Kaltio incident had about it a whiff of "excessive justifiable self-defence", which has of course always been part of the peasant-farmer legacy - shoot first and ask questions afterwards, if the trespasser is in any position to answer.
      And anyway, there is a lot of talk about security in Finland these days. It was even one of the central threads of the presidential election campaign.
     
Curiously enough, up here in peaceful Finland, people are scared. When the BBC recently commissioned a questionnaire in 35 countries of views on the consequences of the war in Iraq, as many as 82% of Finnish respondents said they were worried about the rise in terrorism. The number was the highest in Western Europe.
      "We might be able to find some parallels with great panics of history", suggests Hakosalo.
      In the France of the 18th century, for instance, there was a bizarre outbreak of hysteria over cats. Cats were suddenly feared dreadfully without any apparent logical cause. The emotional turmoil lasted a while, and then eventually withered away.
      The phenomenon is known even now. A rumour, a piece of gossip, Chinese whispers, faulty information, "bad intelligence", or some strange thing can prompt an emotional reaction that spreads like wildfire and grows out of all proportion to the subject.
     
It is now a week since the climax of the drama, and time to write the epilogue.
      Surprisingly enough, nearly everything is as it was before the play. The people of Oulu realised that the whole thing went a bit overboard. The City's Education Department has rescinded its decision. Ville Ranta will after all be invited to produce some Snellman illustrations.
      Sampo, Pohjola, and Tapiola have called off their advertising boycott. Everybody wanted their company logos off that last online publication, but in other respects the advertisements will continue as before.
      And the former editor-in-chief has gone off skiing to Lapland.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 5.3.2006
     
*Translator's Note: A little poetic licence was taken here. In the Finnish context, the "Four-letter words beginning with F" would actually be "Five-letter words beginning with V".


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Finnish culture magazine sacks editor over Muhammad cartoon (27.2.2006)

Links:
  English-language version of Kaltio cartoon Panel 1
  Panel 2
  Panel 3
  Panel 4
  Panel 5
  Oulu cultural magazine Kaltio

RITVA LIISA SNELLMAN / Helsingin Sanomat
ritva.liisa.snellman@hs.fi