Finns are in front line

Press, 27 September 1983, Page 17

Finns are in front line

From

WILLIAM MANN,

Associated Press,

in Pukari, Finland

The sign at the end of a gravel road tells you this is where west meets east. “Frontier zone,” it says, in English and Finnish. “Any person moving or staying within the frontier zone has to act and behave in such a way that maintenance of peaceful conditions and irreproachable order on the frontier will not be jeopardised.” Obviously, Finland does not want trouble on its 1480 km eastern border, western Europe’s longest land frontier with the Soviet Union. One kind of trouble the Finns want to avoid in particular is a Soviet citizen who crosses into Finland illegally in search of new horizons in the west. The official Finnish policy toward such people is not welcoming, to protect economic links with the Russians. There is no accurate count of how many get to the border from the Soviet side. Movement is restricted inside the Soviet Union for at least 75km on the main road from Leningrad to Helsinki, and much of the border runs through roadless woodlands or along deep Icikes. Even those who reach Finland risk capture by the 3700-man Finnish border patrol, to be returned under an agreement with Moscow. Only those claiming persecution and seeking asylum have a chance of staying. Simply wanting a new life is not enough. “It would be a different situation if these Russian people would give cause to stay in Finland, but they don’t,’’says Eila Kaennoe, chief of

the Aliens Office in Finland’s Interior Department. “If a person doesn’t want to have asylum in Finland, then he has to have papers and a passport to proceed to another country.” '

Anyway, she adds, border authorities have few contacts with Soviets claiming persecution at home — fewer than one a year over the last several years. Such claims, she says are investigated and handled as asylum cases as they would be from anywhere else. Of 14 asylum cases in Finland in 1981, none involved a Soviet citizen. Last year, nine people requested political asylum in Finland, and the only Soviet among them, a woman from Leningrad, was rejected. Four people have asked for asylum this year, but Miss Kaennoe refuses to discuss them because their cases are not resolved. “Those who are successful (in avoiding detection) and cross our country, that’s another story,” Miss Kaennoe says. Swedish officials refuse to say how many of 94 Soviets allowed to stay in Sweden since 1978 came from Finland. The most celebrated recent case involved Victoria Mullova, a 23-year-old Soviet violinist who defected with her accompanist, Vakhtang Zhordania, to Sweden, then

to the United States, in early July. She said she defected because as a non-member of the Soviet Communist Party she was denied choice concert forums.

Miss Mullova, who left a priceless Stradivarius violin on her hotel bed at Kuusamo, 40km west of this border crossing, at Pukari, said she and Zhordania hailed a cab and fled to Sweden 280 km away.

They were in Finland legally, on a concert tour under the auspices of the Soviet Culture Ministry, but they apparently did not want to risk contact with Finnish authorities in their flight to the west. Miss Kaennoe, who admitted that the question of sending Soviets back across the border is “very political,” insists nevertheless that handing back a fleeing Soviet citizen does not violate the Geneva convention governing the treatment of refugees. She interprets the convention as requiring protection only if a refugee was persecuted before leaving his country, not if the act of leaving might cause persecution. Finland’s post-war policy of maintaining good relations with the Kremlin without losing its western economic, social, and political systems makes defectors a sensitive issue. Its touchiness makes the Finns reluctant to talk about it.

“The Government would not feel happy about Finland being recognised as a refugee route,” says one Government official, who commented on condition that he not be named.

Finland regularly sends construction workers to work in the Soviet Union, and many Soviet tourists visit Finland, normally by train, boat, or on guided tours by bus. The Finns and the Soviets also have “a first class cultural exchange.” “All this would be screwed up if Finland became known as a refugee route,” the official says. A question of continuing debate in the Finnish press is how much help potential defectors get from Finns. Officials even within the Aliens Office, recognise that there are people who help. They deny, however, that any “underground railway” exists similar to post-war networks that ferried East Germans to the west.

Miss Mullova raised eyebrows in Helsinki when she said in Sweden that she defected in Kuusamo because she had been told it was the best place for defectors to use as a springboard to the west. Staff at the Kuusama hotel, where Miss Mullova and Zhordania say they got the taxi that took them to Sweden, say they know of no organised movement to help defectors.

“But what are you going to do if somebody comes to you and asks for help?” one asked. “You’re going to do what you can.”