Festivals | Koko Hubara and Natalia Kallio canceled their performance at the Maailma kyläsä festival – criticizing the choice of performers

Sustainable the development-focused Maailma kyläsä festival is again expected to gather around 50,000 visitors during the weekend in Helsinki’s Suvilahti.

Last year, the festival was organized for the first time in Suvilahti and there were 49,000 visitors. The festival has a speech and music program as well as a program for children.

However, some of the speaker choices for the festival’s speaking program have attracted criticism, as the journalist-writer invited to discuss activism The whole Hubara and human rights activist Natalia Kallio said on Friday afternoon that they are not going to participate in the event anyway.

Natalia Kallio’s Instagram account in published in the statement, they justify their absence with some of the festival’s performer choices.

Cheers and Kallio are first of all against the fact that basic Finns are involved in the discussion related to the EU elections Sebastian Tynkkynenwho has convictions for incitement against a national group.

“Inviting such a person to an event with a huge representation of people from bipoc and immigrant backgrounds makes it unsafe,” Kallio and Hubara write.

The term Bipoc (black, indigenous and people of color) loosely translates to black, indigenous and non-white people.

They are also opposed to the fact that among the demonstrators are the governing parties, the Coalition and the Christian Democrats, whose policies they criticize in government.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs a Ukrainian journalist appearing as a guest at the festival Illia Ponomarenko also draws criticism from Hubara and Kallio. They are concerned about this possible connection to the Ukrainian Azov battalion, from which, according to them, this has not been sufficiently clearly dissociated.

They also criticized “the fact that there is not a single Palestinian performer or speaker in the program of the World Village festival. Ukraine, on the other hand, is brought up in several places and from many different perspectives”.

The festival communications manager Nelli Korpi says that Hubara and Kallio have not expressed these concerns to the festival before Friday.

The Finnish Palestinian network Sumud, however, questioned Ponomarenko’s appearance as early as April, when it was announced that he would be participating, and several organizations, along with Sumud, are signatories to the petition against Ponomarenko’s visit making a statement.

The festival has responded to the criticism directed at Ponomarenko in what it published on Wednesday in the bulletin. It says that he has renounced his ties to Azov or other extremist parties. The festival responded to other criticisms presented by Hubara and Kallio also in connection with their Instagram publication.

“The paucity of programs related to Palestine was not a conscious choice. Unfortunately, we did not receive speech program proposals about the situation in Palestine during the application phase of the program,” the festival wrote.

The festival responded to the criticism about Sebastian Tynkki and the governing parties on Instagram as follows: “All parliamentary parties were offered the opportunity to participate in the EU election panel, and they were asked to announce their candidate. When it comes to elections, it is important that the representation of as many parties as possible is present and we are committed to respecting the parties’ choices of participants.”