Workers washed off red paint from one of the 14 columns in the facade of the Parliament House in Helsinki on Wednesday, 25 September 2024. The paint was sprayed on the columns and steps of the building as part of an unannounced protest against peat extraction organised by Extinction Rebellion Finland and Sweden’s Återställ Våtmarker. (Vesa Moilanen – Lehtikuva)
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THE COLUMNS AND STEPS of the Parliament House in Helsinki were daubed with red paint yesterday morning in a protest against peat extraction staged by Extinction Rebellion Finland and Återställ Våtmarker, a group of environmental activists from Sweden.
Extinction Rebellion said the water-soluble paint was sprayed on the columns with fire extinguishers.
Helsinki Police Department on Wednesday reported that it received no advance notice of the demonstration – a fact that was corroborated by the organisers – and that roughly a dozen protesters were taken into custody at the scene of the protest. The incident is provisionally investigated as aggravated criminal damage.
Lior Stefansson, the spokesperson for Återställ Våtmarker, said the Parliament House was targeted because also Finnish lawmakers are responsible for some people losing their lives and homes due to the climate emergency.
“Finland has received over 400 million in support to discontinue its own peat production, but then Finland sends its own company, Neova, to Sweden to destroy Sweden’s nature. This has to stop,” he stated according to YLE.
Formerly known as Vapo, Neova operates around 200 peat production areas in Finland, Estonia and Sweden. The Finnish government is its majority owner, with a stake of 50.1 per cent.
Neova on Wednesday rubbished the claims made by the activists.
“I’d say that they’re completely false claims,” Ahti Martikainen, the director of communications and media relations at Neova, said to Helsingin Sanomat. “We haven’t moved peat production from Finland to Sweden. In both countries, the volume of peat production has decreased in recent years. In Sweden, it’s very low.”
In Finland, he added, the company expects to extract about five million cubic metres of peat this year, marking a 75-per-cent drop since 2018. In Sweden, the production will be slightly over one million cubic metres for the second consecutive year, possibly the lowest total ever for a two-year period.
Martikainen also said Neova has received no support from the fund identified by the activists, the EU’s Just Transition Fund. The fund was created to promote the 27-country bloc’s effort to become carbon neutral by 2050.
Finland has received 466 million euros from the fund, allocating the sum for offsetting the adverse environmental and socio-economic effects of reducing the energy use of peat.
Helsingin Sanomat wrote that most of the paint had been washed off from the columns and steps of the building by early yesterday evening, with the exception of some residue in the grains of the granite facade.
“We’ll start looking into it tomorrow, and we’ll be accompanied by a representative from the Finnish Heritage Agency. It’s a protected building, so the Heritage Agency is overseeing also the facade clean-up,” Juha-Pekka Ryynänen, the property manager of the Parliament House, said to the newspaper on Wednesday.
The protest was condemned widely by lawmakers.
Prime Minister Petteri Orpo (NCP) described it as a “condemnable” and “incomprehensible” act of disturbance.
“Finland is a free democracy. We have the right to protest and influence things, but we have civilised ways for doing so,” he commented to members of the media in the Parliament House on Wednesday.
He also argued that resorting to increasingly aggressive measures to secure an audience for protests does not promote the cause of the protest but will instead result to the ramping up of supervision in public spaces.
“You can demonstrate, protest, stand in elections, engage in all sorts of civic engagement, but acts like this don’t belong in Finnish society.”
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
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Source: www.helsinkitimes.fi
