This week I've been filled with rage.

My parents asked me to represent them at a funeral of a cousin who in her forties had taken her life, leaving her 18-years old deaf daughter more or less alone in the world.

Let me confess at once that I didn't like the deceased. We had bad personal chemistry and we did not socialize. Only thanks to my parents' information I learned about her death, despite having lived at some 30 kilometres distance for the last almost ten years. But that doesn't make me less upset.

I am in rage, but I do not know exactly in what direction I best direct my rage.

The deceased had a demanding childhood and has ever since been known to be a wreck psychologically. That's not unique. Some people manage, also bad circumstances, some do not. She belonged to the latter category. Can I blame her?

And do not take me wrong. It's not her loss of life that disturbes me. For herself that may very well have been a welcome salvation. It's the fact that she and her daughter during their lifes so very obviously have been victims of evilness; ...of man-made intentional evilness.

It's likely, although nothing that I have proof of, that heavy drinking during an unplanned pregnancy contributed to her daughter's deafness as well as maybe also to the daughter's behavioural disturbances. I would like to be able to blame her, but I don't feel like that would be fair.

Her mother was a nurse and a drug addict. And of course a single mother. She too killed herself - some 20 years ago. I think she died before she had a chance to learn she would become grandmother.

So, what do we have? Three generations of unlucky women. One morphinist, one alcoholic and one deaf sociopath. That's rather unusual in our family, where most have gone to university and end up in the midst of big corporations or governmental bureaucracies, and all have very strict Lutheran morals about doing what's right - not what's right for the individual but what's right for the family or for the society ...and most of all What’s Right For the Nation.

I can not come to any other conclusion than that these three women are the victims of a Soviet war of aggression on Finland commenced November 30th 1939, taken up anew in June 1941.

If it hadn’t been for these wars, the women may well have suffered, but they would have suffered due to much different and smaller causes. In October 1941, the then three years old Reeta was evacuated out of the country. The reasons for this were very obvious then, although the mass evacuation of over 70.000 children has been heavily criticized later. War-time Finland had mobilized every man (and quite a few women) of working age for the defence of the fatherland. It was “known” that neither the nation, nor most of its individuals, would survive a defeat against the Soviet Union. As a neighbour, Finland understood better than most other countries what had occurred in the 1920s and in the 1930s. If millions of kulaks and “enemies of the people” had died, there was no reason to hope for the Finns having a better fate after a Russian occupation.

But already during the war, food was scarce (to express it mildly). There were many reasons for this. One was that the most fertile fields had been lost to the Soviet Union in 1940; another was that the army had to be prioritized: Farmers and farmhands were drafted. A third was the wartime blockade of fertilizers and petrol, and also of exports from Finland. A fourth reason was that the Third Reich was the only power that was both willing and able to contribute to Finland’s defence. Britain and her Commonwealth (and, to somewhat lesser degree, the United States) hence had no mercy for the fate of the Finns. That is rather ironic, since if there was any country that a broad majority of Finns looked up to before the wars, then that was the United Kingdom.

Sweden and Denmark on the other hand suffered from some of these limitations, but had a much, much better access to domestically produced food. So, as it was thought back then, two percent of Finland’s population, solely small children that could not yet contribute with any real work to speak of, were evacuated to foster homes in Sweden and Denmark; to get away from the ghost of starvation, but also, and not the least, to be saved from the terrible fate that was feared after a Soviet occupation. If the Nation faced the threat of destruction, at least a cutting of the Race should be saved for the future.

Aunt Reeta was one of these 70.000 cuttings. All of them suffered emotionally from the evacuation, which for some lasted four, five or six years, and for others never ended. Aunt Reeta was one of these latter, for which the evacuation came to last their whole life. She was adopted by a Swedish couple, that was her third foster family in three years, but it doesn’t seem as she ever could come over the loss of contact with her parents in 1942 or the trauma from changing foster parents twice after her arrival. Of course I do not know anything about this. She'd killed herself before I started school, so I wasn't exactly someone she spoke with.

But thousands of the evacuated war children have spoken up. There is no lack of information. Many of them are bitter against their foster parents or against the involved governments. ...or against their biological parents who abandoned them and send them away.

I am convinced that absolutely everyone involved in this big project, the evacuation of over 70.000 children from Finland during the war, had the very best intentions. Some may have been unskilled or insensitive or racist or chauvinist or egoist or whatever, but they didn’t intend to cause any suffering – quite the contrary. All involved thought they did a good deed.

The only one who can not have thought they did a good deed was the government in Moscow. There they didn’t think of the sufferings they were about to cause for neither children nor adults, but why should they, given how many lives and how much suffering they had on their conscience already? But their indifference for the sufferings that would follow the war they started, that is whereto I can direct my rage. That is the only direction in which I feel I can rightfully throw my blame.

65 years later, people still suffer from their war.

65 years later, their war still kills.

[Any connections to more recent history are purely coincidential.]

Yes, I know.

My words do not count.

I'm a citizen of a country that resisted joining the Coalition of the Willing. On the other hand, I work in a country that joined. But even if I were a voter in the United States, I realize that my advices would be totally out of the loop.

Anyway, let me state my own humble opinions:

• As long as the invasion forces remain present, they will be considered at least partially responsible for the security, or the lack of security, in the land.
• Seen from an American perspective, it's crucially important that everything is done to avoid creating a Dolchstoßlegende like after the Vietnam War. Foreign policies is the responsibility of the White House. The Congress better give the Commander-in-Chief what he points at, and concentrates on oversight - not obstructing.
• Remaining in the area will be very tempting for this U.S. administration - and likely so for the next one too. To discuss total withdrawal is thus a dead end.
• The Congress' need to investigate the road to this disaster must be kept separated from America's (and, indeed, the World's) need to see the Iraqi adventure get the smothest possible ending.
• The idea of training Iraqi police and army forces was probably not very intelligent to start with, but by now, we clearly see that this is a tactics that doesn't work.
• Iraq is fractioned, and the fractioning may well continue further. The fractioning began, if not before, with the U.S.-instigated Shiite uprising and the No-fly zones that created a semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan.
• With regard to what to do in Iraq, it can be argued that plenty of mistakes were done by the occupation authorities, but it's rather irrelevant to discuss that today. Today, the relevant issue must be, do we, or do we not, care for the civilians who suffer in the ongoing Civil War, for which the Coallition bears more blame than anyone else?
• Also if we do not care at all about the civilans' plight, we might wish the situation to get calmed down in order to avoid adverse effects outside of Iraq. Hence I disagree with the argument that "we" must step back and let the Civil War be concluded by the warring parties.
• Prolonged, and/or intensified, sectarian terror and ethnic cleansing will increase the temptation for neighboring nations to engage volountaries or regulary troops in the Civil War.
• Involving the neighboring governments in diplomatic agreements aiming at stabilizing the situation would be an ideal, although it is not very likely that the U.S. government would be able to contribute to this before 2009.
• Involvment of the neighboring countries without diplomatic agreements may be impossible to avoid, but in my opinion this ought to have the highest priority, since such involvment would open the gates to widening and escalation of the war, arousing the feelings of the Arab street and further pitting the Muslim World against the Christian West.
• Relocating most of the Coallition troops to Iraqi Kurdistan may fit both the needs of the Kurds and of the Americans. The Kurds need allies and protectors against predatory neighbors, and such de-facto protection would give the U.S. some leverage to mitigate Turkish fears for attacks over the border.
• In Iraq, even the Bush-administration ought to be able to recognize the locally powerful militias, at many places different from town to town, and in larger cities even from district to district. These militias are in fact the legitimate power on which (local) government resides. The notion of a "Iraqi Army" ought to be forgotten, since it distorts the perception of the reality on the ground.
• By recognizing, acknowledging and respecting the local powers, the occupation power knows whom to start talking to.
• Regardless of if the civilians' plight or the fear for spread is the driving force, the sectarian terror against civilians with the wrong ancestry must be, if not ended, at least minimized.
• The ethnic cleansing is on-going, irreversible and unavoidable. Better to contribute to an orderly relocation of people of the wrong faith or ethnicity than to let them be victims of terrorizing torture and assassinations.
• Finding new places to live will not be easy for the refugees of this ethnic cleansing, but U.S. economic wealth could here maybe come to good use?