A Norwegian Tragedy

8

The Safest Place in Norway

Shock

‘Oh no,’ thought Arshad.

Prableen Kaur and Arshad Ali looked at each other. The boy who had told them the news had already gone out the door. They heard him knocking on the next door and shouting the news: ‘A bomb's gone off in the government district.’ There followed the sound of many feet trampling around and anxious voices repeating the same questions again and again: ‘What's happened? Why? Who?’

Arshad grabbed his mobile and phoned his mother first, then his father. It was almost four o'clock. It was Friday prayer at home in Stavanger, and neither of his parents answered the telephone. Arshad made some other calls and eventually got hold of a friend from Ås, a short distance to the east of Oslo.

‘Oh no,’ Arshad thought again, as his friend described broken glass, fire and people bleeding in the centre of Oslo. Many people must have died. He frowned as the consequences sank in. Now it had happened here. He had travelled a long way to get to Utøya, and now it was as if a large wave flooded the island, carrying him back in time to that day many years ago when he stood alone in front of the class with his back to the board, with all the blue eyes of his classmates staring at him.

The cloudburst from that morning had turned into colourless drizzle. The rain struck the roof and walls of the large Café Building with an almost inaudible whisper. It would be impossible to be any further removed from the dust and sand of Mecca than this summer day on the Tyrifjord. The rain ran down the roofing felt, gathered in the gutters and poured out of the downpipes at the corners of the building. The water level of the inland fjord was rising. The waves lapped over the stones at the tip of Nakenodden [Naked Point], a part of the island that was usually above water. Prableen was busy on her phone. Somebody shouted that there was going to be an emergency meeting in the Main Hall. Arshad went towards the window. It was probably Muslims who were behind the bomb. On the slope down from the Café Building towards the rocky shores and the pump house on the western side of the island, the leafy trees were almost fluorescent green against the leaden sky.

Arshad phoned a friend who worked for the newspaper VG, with its offices right next to the explosion. His friend was unhurt but told him there was chaos and death in the centre of Oslo. Together with Prableen, Arshad went out of the downstairs back wing, up the concrete steps to Lillesalen [the Little Hall], and on through the corridor to the Main Hall and the information meeting that had been announced. He wondered whether it had all been useless. If there had been an Islamic terrorist attack on Oslo, would it ever again be possible to be both Muslim and Norwegian?

Planet Youngstorget

People came surging up the street towards Hadia Tajik in Møllergata as she walked towards the square in Youngstorget. Chaos. Confusion. Nobody really knew what had happened, but their instincts told them that if there had been one explosion, there could be others. Tajik walked against the current of people as she headed towards the centre. She had left Utøya together with three friends from the Party's central office about an hour before and had heard while in the car a sound that she thought was thunder. They had parked the car in a side street and phoned their colleagues as soon as they realized what had happened in the government district. They were told that nobody was hurt but that it was difficult to get a full overview of the situation. The people who were coming away from the centre were calm, but their wide-eyed faces showed surprise and fear.

Tajik was still wearing her fun red rose earrings and the red boots she had put on in honour of Gro Harlem Brundtland's arrival on Utøya. It was as if she were wandering into a different country, another world, as she approached her office in Folkets Hus. She felt that it was good to be wearing boots, as the asphalt was covered with glass from broken windows.

In Youngstorget, the extent of the situation dawned on her. The 200 metres across the square seemed like an infinite distance. It felt as if she were walking through custard, as if things were happening in slow motion. Together with her friends, she stepped warily over the paving stones. People wandered about while speaking intensely on their mobiles. The sound of alarms from buildings and cars was drowned out by the sirens of ambulances and police cars starting to appear in the city-centre streets.

It was only when she went past Internasjonalen, the café in Folkets Hus, that Tajik turned her head and looked up at the H Block. She had worked there as a political adviser first in the Office of the Prime Minister and later in the Ministry of Justice. For a short while, she felt lost for words. A journalist recognized her, but she waved him away. Outside Café Mono she met her colleagues from the Labour Party offices who had gathered on the pavement after having evacuated the premises in Folkets Hus.

Tajik took out her phone to find out if her friends in the government district were injured, while at the same time her brain slowly began the task of interpreting all the destruction. Was it a bomb? It looked like it. Who did it? If it was an immigrant, it was strange that the government district was targeted; an immigrant would have chosen the Storting, which was a more familiar symbol of power in Norway. On the other hand, if it was not an immigrant, then who else could it be? It had to be immigrants behind this. And who in Oslo would be thinking anything else that afternoon? In filthy-rich Norway, up in the top corner of a Europe experiencing what were historically positive and peaceful times, immigration and Islam were the only issues that could make temperatures rise and bring out doomsday scenarios.

As a well-known Labour politician from a Pakistani background, Tajik knew better than most what kind of attitudes could be found in Norway beyond Utøya. The messages that came from the dark mainland to her website, Twitter account and parliamentary e-mail inbox took many forms, but Tajik tried to answer most of them. The messages were influenced by current events, and there had been an increase in anti-Islamic messages in the period after Mohyeldeen Mohammad's infamous speech in Universitetsplassen in the winter of 2010. ‘You have a completely exaggerated belief that the culture you appear to represent (read: Muslim) is sustainable or popular here. We are even being regarded as impure and inferior! Who are the real racists?!’ wrote one angry person in the summer of 2010, suggesting that Tajik should take along ‘like minds’ with her, go back to Pakistan and enlighten people a little. He also thought that immigrants such as Tajik needed to learn about freedom of speech, democracy and equality. ‘I'm not in Norway to learn about freedom of speech, democracy or equality. I'm here because I'm Norwegian,’ Tajik replied.

North Along the E18

The rain hammered against the windscreen. Several of the leading members of the Labour Party were on their way into Oslo. Through the fan of the windscreen wipers, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre could just glimpse the winding road from the jetty, past small patches of fields and wooded knolls on his way towards the main E18 road. The time was shortly after four o'clock. It normally took four hours to drive back to the city, but the foreign minister ignored his officials' advice that it was ‘inadvisable’ to break the Road Traffic Act and accelerated as he headed towards the capital.

He was kept updated by his colleagues from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had the radio on and spoke briefly with the prime minister a couple of times to arrange where they would meet. They agreed that the government should avoid making any hasty statements based on unsound facts. A foreign number appeared on the display. The first one. It was from Ramallah.

‘I can feel your pain,’ said President Mahmoud Abbas.

In between telephone calls, Støre tried to sum up the situation. What do we know about the explosion? What are the probable explanations and what are our options? Since the chances were that it was a bomb, there was also a possibility of further attacks. At the Serena Hotel in Kabul, the terrorist in the lobby was dressed as a policeman. What might be the next target on the potential terrorists' possible list? And what would the consequences be for Norway?

Støre had launched the concept of the ‘new Norwegian we’ in a book in 2009 and in an opinion piece in Aftenposten. It was the foreign minister who had directed integration policy in Norway in the noughties. In this notion of a new Norwegian identity, including not only ethnically Norwegian nationals but also the immigrant population, there was an echo of Støre's French education and his one-time rebellion against conformity and uniformity that had taken him from Ris School to Berg Upper Secondary School. The idea behind the French Revolution was equal rights for all citizens irrespective of their background, race, sex or religion. At the same time, Støre had seen at Sciences Po how easily the idea could be watered down in reality. One of his fellow students, a girl, approached the professor. She had slightly poorer marks than the average and asked what she could do to keep up.

‘You can get married,’ the professor replied drily.

Støre's former boss Gro Harlem Brundtland had done her bit to shake up attitudes towards women, but the fact that it was still not evident that women and men had equal opportunities could perhaps be sensed in Hadia, Prableen and Bano's enthusiasm for Gro. Then there was the problem of conformism: even though all people should have equal opportunities, people do not have to be equal. The idea that variety is a strength was important to Støre, the idea that we are not just one thing but many. The ‘new Norwegian we’ was not only expansive enough to include people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds; it also fitted in well with Støre's personal desire for freedom of choice and freedom to be different. It was this engagement, more than anything else, that had made Støre the AUF's ideological godfather.

Norwegian people generally agreed with Støre, if the figures from Statistisk sentralbyrå [Statistics Norway] are to be believed. In a survey that is repeated every year, 45 per cent of respondents in 2002 thought that immigrants contributed to insecurity in society, while 41 per cent thought that they did not. In 2011, the figures were 35 per cent and 52 per cent respectively. Attitudes towards immigrants were becoming more positive in line with increased contact with immigrants. In 2002, 66 per cent thought that immigrants made a useful contribution to Norwegian working life, while 19 per cent were sceptical. In 2011, the figures were 74 per cent and 13 per cent respectively.¹ The changes were not massive, but they were heading in the same direction.

In 2011, there were 500,500 immigrants in Norway, and 100,422 Norwegian-born children whose parents were both immigrants. These 600,922 people accounted for 12 per cent of the population.² In some parts of this new population segment there were low employment rates, especially among women, but otherwise immigrants' participation in working life and in society was generally high compared to the situation in other OECD countries. But there was another side to the statistics.

In spite of the figures above, half of Norwegians thought that integration was not working well in Norway.³ In particular, the idea that Muslims were dangerous had spread considerably since 9/11. This was not merely a matter of attitudes among people with low education and income who were afraid of what immigrants might mean for their opportunities in the welfare state or in the labour market, or among people living in urban areas under strain who associated crime with immigration, and immigration with Islam. Neither was this a case of bitter male losers in their rooms or bed­sits, venting their spleen on the Internet. That stereotype was too straightforward.

Støre remembered a party with some friends earlier that summer. It was a large outdoor party in a beautiful spot in southern Norway. People were coming and going. At one point, a peripheral acquaintance had sat down on the bench next to him. ‘So, Jonas,’ the man said, ‘what are we going to do when the Muslims are in the majority then?’

Not ‘if’, but ‘when’, and implying that it would mean the end of Norwegian society. The man next to Støre was neither poor nor lonely but a highly educated man in the financial sector with a wife, children and a large home. He belonged to the elite of Norwegian wealth, with all the opportunities that entailed. The world was his and his family's oyster. Nevertheless, it was his fear talking.

A woman on the other side of the table had read the official Norwegian statistics and told the wealthy man that, while Muslims currently made up between 2 and 4 per cent of the Norwegian population, the number was projected to rise to between 4 and 6 per cent in 2030 and might possibly pass 10 per cent in 2060. However you chose to twist and turn the figures, a Muslim majority in Norway was only possible in the distant future.

‘Which Muslims?’ Støre added. ‘They are a heterogeneous group, both in cultural and in religious terms.’

Bosnia, Somalia, Ghana and Indonesia all had Muslim populations. There were many people in Norway with backgrounds from those places, as well as from a wealth of other Muslim countries, including Arab and non-Arab lands. Some followers were Shi'ites, others were Sunni, and there were both Sufi and Ahmadi Muslims. There was great diversity, but the wealthy man from the West End of Oslo shook his head, apparently just as unimpressed by Støre's nuanced views as by the official statistics.

Even though the man represented widespread attitudes, Støre was still surprised that such attitudes were so openly expressed among privileged people from the West End of Oslo, among people similar to him. You would think that this man, practically an aristocrat with his wealth, would have very little to fear from Muslims or other immigrants. It seemed a dramatic question, but when a bomb had apparently killed many people and destroyed parts of the city centre it was bound to come up: if al-Qaeda or some similar Islamic group had bombed Oslo that Friday, would there ever be a chance for a ‘new Norwegian we’? And what if Norwegian Muslims were involved?

As he rushed past Kragerø on his way towards Porsgrunn, Støre spoke with State Secretary Gry Larsen from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who was on holiday in Denmark. Larsen was a former leader of the AUF, and Støre told her what he knew about the explosion. He asked her to carry on with her holiday for the moment but to be prepared to come home and help if extra hands were needed to manage the emergency. Another foreign number appeared on the display. This time it was Defence Minister Ehud Barak calling from Tel Aviv to express his support as well as that of the Israeli government. Støre crossed the county border and drove on through Telemark. A dark Volvo making haste along the winding road.

The Information Meeting

The dark Café Building towers up on the plateau in the centre of the island and is not only by far the island's biggest building but also its social hub. Meals are held in the café at the northern end of the building, most of the events take place in the Main Hall or the Little Hall, which together can accommodate hundreds of people, while the rumour mill can be found where the camp newspaper Planet Utøya is produced in the room behind the Little Hall, at the western end of the building.

‘PU is watching you!’ the editor had warned the camp members the day before. ‘If you've done something immoral and haven't read about it in the paper yet, that's not because we haven't noticed but because somebody else had done something even more newsworthy.’ The kiosk can be found at the main entrance facing the yard on the eastern side of the building, forming a strategic business triangle in the centre of Utøya together with the waffle tent and the barbecue huts run by the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions.

When the information meeting began at about half past four, Anne-Berit Stavenes was standing by the entrance at the back of the Main Hall together with her colleague from Norwegian People's Aid, Hanne Fjalestad. The idea of Norwegian People's Aid was precisely to help people, and Hanne was comforting a young person out in the corridor. Many of the young people on the island were worried about family and friends in Oslo. Some had already heard that close relatives of theirs had been injured.

Anne-Berit Stavenes (personal photograph)

There was a strange atmosphere in the packed hall. Well over 500 young people had squeezed into the hall to hear a briefing about the situation in Oslo from the four leaders of the AUF and Monica Bøsei, the camp manager, known as ‘Mother Utøya’. They stressed that it had not yet been confirmed that the explosion had been caused by a bomb and that it was therefore far too early to speculate about who was behind it and why it had happened.

A skinny boy with close-cropped hair and a hawk nose came strolling down the corridor a while after the meeting had begun. His shoes squelched with water. He stared in surprise at Hanne and Anne-Berit's fluorescent vests and sneaked in through the door with the others. Monica was talking about an explosion and Anzor frowned when he realized that the disco had been cancelled. That was the big event on the Friday evening. What a disappointment. Anne-Berit was wearing uniform trousers, a green fleece and a shell jacket beneath her orange safety vest. The stocky figure with her short, reddish-brown hair looked like the very definition of preparedness. It had been cold watching the football in the rain that morning and cold outside under the canvas too when Hanne was making waffles in the Norwegian People's Aid camp by the Schoolhouse. Now Anne-Berit was beginning to feel warm in the humid air. The young people there were wearing wet clothes and many of them had not left their shoes by the door as they usually did. It was too cramped for them to sit down, so everyone had to stay standing for the twenty-minute duration of the meeting.

Anne-Berit was wide awake now and studied the young ones closely from the door. She was in her early thirties, and worked as a nursery school manager. She led the Hadeland regional branch of Norwegian People's Aid, which usually took part in search and rescue missions as well as carrying out educational work aimed at young people. On Utøya she sometimes felt as if she were back at the nursery. She had been on the night shift at the camp's first aid post all week and had been woken up at about six o'clock that mor­ning. The casualty turned out to be a girl who had been bitten by a mosquito and said that it was itchy. Anne-Berit had shaken the sleepiness out of her head and had done her best to comfort the girl. It was not the most dramatic emergency situation to have to get up for, but that was what it was like to be a volunteer in Norway. Little sleep. Most of the times she was called out had to do with insects or jellyfish.

The Hadeland branch's role as first-aiders and emergency responders on Utøya dated back to the eighties. Over the course of the many years that Anne-Berit had been a volunteer at the AUF camp, she had not only given first aid to those who hurt themselves in the football and volleyball tournaments, or who were grazed on the cliffs when they went swimming, but had also comforted young AUF members who were away from home for the first time, afraid of the dark or missing their parents and teddy bears. Utøya was nevertheless one of the highlights of the year for the Hadeland branch. Volunteering there united them. The island was full of energy and a paradise when the sun was shining, and the newspaper Planet Utøya had joked the day before that the island's coolest after-party was to be found in the Norwegian People's Aid ‘party tents’. ‘With glow sticks and the island's only real source of music (a radio tuned in to NRK) they party long into the small hours,’ claimed PU, stressing that the first-aiders on the island, which was kept free of alcohol or other intoxicants, were unfortunately quite sparing with painkillers, ‘so bring your own drugs.’

Camping Life

The dark mainland across the water from the island at Utvika was at its busiest in late July. In addition to the long-term residents at the campsite, who generally turned up throughout the year except in the winter months, summer tourists from the rest of Norway and from abroad filled up the site's caravans, cabins and tent pitches. There were mainly older people at the campsite, together with a few children – a calm contrast to the shrieking, ball-game-playing, debating and tweeting young people on the island 600 metres away out on the fjord.

In spite of the catastrophic weather, there was a good atmosphere on the grassy field that stretched out along the small bay up towards the main road. After the worst of the rain had subsided around lunchtime, it was meet-and-greet day at the campsite, a day of activities, with air-rifle shooting, mystery walks along the nature trails and ball-throwing games for children. There was a smell of barbecued sausages and the clattering sound of empty fizzy drink bottles in boxes. At four o'clock, there was a prize-giving, and Allan Søndergaard Jensen was standing together with an excited grandson when a nearby mobile phone rang.

Allan was in his mid-forties, originally Danish but settled in Norway with a partner and a job. He was a self-employed carpenter. There was a great demand for carpenters in the Oslo area, an area that was growing in both wealth and population. New buildings were being put up, old ones were being renovated. Allan was a typical incomer to the capital: a craftsman from a neighbouring country. His own children were still in Denmark, but that Friday they had his partner Reidun's grandson visiting them, a nine-year-old boy.

The couple were normally resident in a flat in one of the tower blocks at Enerhaugen in Oslo's East End. From their flat there, Allan and Reidun had a panoramic view of the city centre, but they also had their caravan at Utvika. They had both grown up by the sea, and sitting with their morning coffee while looking out across the Tyrifjord was like paradise for Allan. He was shorter than the average, stocky and with close-cropped hair that was turning grey, making him look older than he was.

The news they heard seemed unreal. A bomb had gone off in Oslo. Allan drew his breath and glanced around. There was no reason to worry Reidun's grandson. As soon as the prize-giving was over and the boy had gone down to the caravan with his friends, Allan, Reidun and a couple of their friends went up to the ledge, to one of the cabins on the slope above the shore, where they could have a beer. They listened to the radio, checked on their mobile phones to see what the newspapers were reporting and discussed the news. What had happened in Oslo, and what would it mean? Nothing anybody could have prepared for, obviously. Still, perhaps it had been naïve to believe that something like that could not happen there. Both Norway and Denmark had been involved in wars around the world.

‘Yeah, alright, maybe we have been naïve,’ Allan said. ‘But it's not wrong to see the best in people.’

It was well past five o'clock. There was a pause in the conversation. Allan and Reidun both looked pensively out across the grey fjord and the ferry landing on Utøya. Utvika itself was sheltered, with the wind blowing from the north. Low clouds drifted above the water and the mist was hanging down over the dark spruce-covered hillsides on the other side of the fjord. There would normally be many boats on the fjord now, but that day most boats had been left moored at the berths and pontoon jetties in the bay below the ledge.

Allan Søndergaard Jensen (personal photograph)

The water was high, and small waves lapped at the grass by the shoreline. A road led up from the shore, past where the goats were kept and past the main farmhouse at Utvika. Above the red barn there was row upon row of tents, caravans and small red cabins. There were not many people outside now. Most people were probably crowding together in front of the television or standing over the pots and pans at their gas stoves. Reidun furrowed her brow. Her eyes followed the MS Thorbjørn, the ferry that plied the water back and forth to Utøya. The black and red boat with its characteristic white wheelhouse wavered strangely as it headed north, away from both the island and the ferry landing on the mainland. It looked as if it were heading in the direction of the larger island of Storøya, a few kilometres further up.

‘Is he drunk or something?’ Reidun wondered.

Faces

As soon as Anne-Berit realized the extent of the disaster in Oslo, she anticipated that it would be the task of the Norwegian People's Aid volunteers to comfort and assist those who might be worried or upset for whatever reason. The team from Hadeland was made up of seven people. The eighth person was on his way back to the ferry with extra supplies for the final weekend.

When the information meeting was finished, Anne-Berit walked across the dimly lit corridor and into the café, where a special meeting was taking place for the delegations from Oslo and Akershus county. She squinted against the rows of large windows along three of the four walls. The café was the brightest room in the building, and everyone who came in from the corridor would automatically squint. The message from the camp leaders was practically the same as it had been in the main meeting: Utøya was the safest place they could be, and travelling to Oslo now would be difficult. Some of them sat on the black, aluminium-framed chairs with their eyes fixed to the floor like obedient children.

Anne-Berit consoled a girl who had been told that her brother had been injured in the explosion. There were several other young people crying, and Anne-Berit feared that the rest of the camp could be affected and become nervous.

In consultation with Guttorm Skovly, who was the Norwegian People's Aid member in charge of emergency response, Anne-Berit decided to keep the ones who were directly affected apart from the others as much as possible, in order to comfort those who needed it and to avoid panicking the others. Skovly gave her the team's mobile phone and went off to make ready a room in the Schoolhouse, while Anne-Berit did a round of the campsite on the gently sloping field below the Café Building. The colourful campsite was in disarray. She met a boy who did not want to turn on his mobile because there would be so much stress with texts and calls if his family could get hold of him.

‘Imagine if you were in their place,’ said Anne-Berit. ‘I think you should switch it on and let them know that you're OK.’ The boy turned on his mobile.

She walked through the agitated crowd in front of the main entrance and back into the café. At the table where the coffee was, she recognized the dark purple dress and blonde hair of Ida Spjelkavik. Ida was in responsible mode, with a steady gaze and speaking in short, concise sentences. Her global group had taken the events calmly, but Ida had understood from the reactions of her colleagues abroad that the explosion in Oslo was major international news.

At the moment, Ida was concentrating on calming down the Norwegian participants at the camp. Where the Nord-Trøndelag county branch had their tents, at the top of the campsite, she had found a boy who was wondering where his brother was in Oslo. Ida had taken him back to the café to talk. The two women briefly discussed who needed help and support before Ida began pouring coffee for herself and the boy. Further out into the room among the rows of long tables was Stine Håheim. She had arrived late at her delegation's meeting.

After having made some calls from the media room behind the Little Hall, she had confirmed that everyone she knew in the Ministry of Justice had miraculously escaped unharmed from what appeared like Armageddon in the government district. In the café, Stine's usual pyrotechnic laughter had been exchanged for calm admonishment. Stine was another one of the more senior comforters on what had suddenly become an island of frightened children. On the wall by the corridor, a paper plate hung with the bottom part facing out above a steel canteen table where the boxes of plastic cutlery were. The catering team's motto and salute to Utøya was written on the plate, followed by six exclamation marks. ‘YOU ARE FANTASTIC!!!!!!’

Ida, Anne-Berit and Stine suddenly heard some loud noises from outside. Somebody was screaming. Anne-Berit looked up. Outside the window, a group of teenagers came rushing across the yard, past the plaque commemorating the AUF members who were killed in Spain and past the large white tent at the end of the yard. Stine stood by the west-facing windows and watched the young people throwing themselves down among the trees and the scrub on the hillside that led steeply down from the northern side of the Café Building towards the beach by the pump house, which was hidden from where she stood.

Their expressions were unmistakeable. This was not for fun. This was not a joke. There was danger on the island. From their wide-eyed, stony faces, Ida realized that they were terrified, and that they were running for their lives.

Notes

All translated quotations from non-English-language texts are the translator's own, unless indicated otherwise. Quotations from Breivik's compendium are reproduced as in the original English text, although some minor changes have been made to punctuation and capitalization.

1 Statistisk sentralbyrå [Statistics Norway], ‘Attitudes towards seven statements on immigrants and immigration, 2002–2011’, 5 December 2011, www.ssb.no/a/english/kortnavn/innvhold_en/tab-2011-12-05-01-en.html.

2 Statistisk sentralbyrå [Statistics Norway], ‘Population 1 January 2010 and 2011 and changes in 2010, by immigration category and country background’, 28 April 2011, www.ssb.no/a/english/kortnavn/innvbef_en/tab-2011-04-28-01-en.html.

3 Integrerings- og mangfoldsdirektoratet [Directorate of Integration and Diversity], ‘Integreringsbarometeret 2010’ [Integration barometer 2010], June 2011, www.imdi.no/Documents/Rapporter/Integreringsbarometeret_2010.pdf.