Of course, if you don't like to go to army, there are options. If you're a Jehova's Witness, you're free. No need to serve at all (which is not terribly fair towards other people with similar faiths but fair if you consider how they were treated earlier). If you live in Aland, you get the easy way out. If you don't happen to belong to either of these priviledged groups, you have less choice. You can either become a siviilipalvelusmies (="civilian service man" literally) or skip the whole army thing completely. First option nets you 13 months of service, other six months in prison.
The thirteen months is a long time, but it has been worse. It was 16 months in the 80's and there's been lot of conversation and parlamentary arguing about if the period should be shortened to 11 months or so. You see, Amnesty International does not like it and has started to adopt Finnish war resisters who are in prison. It doesn't look very good on records, Finland being the only country in EU to have prisoners adopted by Amnesty. And what kind of crime is that anyhow, to refuse to learn to kill people? It might be against the Finnish law, but it's definitely not against the common sense or general humanity.
I, however, am not that extreme in my views, so becoming a siviilipalvelusmies, or sivari as we are called by everyone, was my choice. I spent a nice month in training, it was June so the Lapinjärvi training center was a very pleasant place. The training was very easy, we learned some first aid, had lectures about crisis situations, agriculture, psychology and things like that. Very easy and pretty useless (except the first aid).
Next twelve months I spent working. I was an office worker for local university student's union, doing computer stuff and helping wherever help was needed. Not a bad thing to do. Very nice work environment and friendly co-workers. Can't help thinking what it did to me, as most Finnish young men spend their army time with other young men, I spent the year with middle-aged women... Oh, whatever, I'd still like to think I spent my time being more useful to the society. I don't consider learning to kill people very useful skill and I hope that the service time gets shorter so more and more people choose not to go to army.