Far-right activists are reopening their gathering place, the Otsola cultural center, after the previous center closed in November last year after a fire that police suspect was deliberately set.
The opening of the new center will be held this Saturday in Hyvinkää, according to an announcement by Otsola published on the Telegram service. Far-right actors have been spreading information about the opening on social media channels, among other things.
Information about the opening ceremony was also confirmed to HS by Tuukka Kuru, the chairman of the openly fascist party Sinimusta Movement .
According to preliminary information, Kuru will give a presentation at the opening ceremony. Bands will also perform at the event and, apparently, wrestling matches will be organized.
Far-right researcher Tommi Kotonen from the University of Jyväskylä says that based on the information so far, the new center appears to be continuing similar activities to the previous center that was targeted by arson.
According to Kotonen, the center is significant for the activities of far-right groups. It lowers their threshold for organizing various events.
“They don’t have many established facilities where they can organize events. It’s a problem if you always have to rent a space separately for events. Established facilities make their operations and planning easier,” says Kotonen.Tuukka Kuru from the Sinimusta store commented on the importance of the new center for its users in a similar way to Kotonen.
Kuru says that “nationalist actors” have had difficulty renting premises for their activities for years due to their ideology.
For example, according to Yle, the city of Jyväskylä canceled
the reservation of its sports facility from the Law of Blood group in 2020 because it considered its activities to be contrary to the city’s values.
With the new center, organizing events will no longer depend on the goodwill of occasional tenants of the premises.
According to Kuru, the new center is run by a network of people who know each other, of which he himself is a member. According to Kuru, the actors running the center have rented the new space for their use.
“The landlord is not a public figure. As far as I understand, he is not particularly interested in what kind of political activity is organized on the premises,” he says.
HS has not been able to confirm Kuru’s information about renting from other sources.
Kuru is not willing to reveal the location of the new center yet, but according to him, it will not be located in the same property as the previous location on Konenkatu in Hyvinkää.
HS visited the yard of the former center on Thursday. The fire damage to the building is still clearly visible, and there were no signs of new activity at the site. HS’s observations support Kuru’s statement that the center will not reopen in the same space.According to Otsola’s own social media post and Tuukka Kuru, the center’s new address will be announced on the morning of the opening day, Saturday.
According to Tuukka Kuru, the location will be public information in the same way as in the previous Otsola. This is exceptional, as far-right actors have not usually made the addresses of their established premises public.
According to Kuru, the advantage of a public address from the center’s perspective is that new people can come to the events who would not otherwise be able to attend.
The risk, in turn, is that the center could again be the target of an arson attack or other similar actions, Kuru admits.
“The risk has been raised higher on the priority list than before. The security arrangements are better than in the previous location. Sabotage is more difficult than before,” Kuru says, without specifying the content of the security arrangements.
The previous Otsola center operated for less than a year before the fire. A variety of far-right events were held in its premises.
The police investigation has revealed that the fire was deliberately set. The person or persons who started the fire have not been identified.
