12

What Is Happening in Norway?

Shooting in Progress

While the campers were rescuing the young people from the Tyrifjord, and Anzor, Arshad, Ida and Stine were fighting for their lives on Utøya, the rest of Norway, which was still hypnotized by the bomb in Oslo, was slowly beginning to see that something was wrong.

‘There's shooting on Utøya,’ one of Hadia's friends whispered, as she came back with bags full of fizzy drinks, pizza and crisps to the temporary party office they had set up in a flat in the Grønland area of Oslo. ‘The kids are tweeting about it!’

Shooting? What does that mean?

As he sat in his Volvo heading towards Oslo, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre spotted a missed call on his phone. It was State Secretary Gry Larsen calling from her holiday in Denmark. Again? They had only just spoken. Støre called her back. Larsen told him to call the leader of the AUF, Eskil Pedersen. Pedersen had just reported that a desperado was shooting on Utøya. Larsen had spoken with him but said that she thought it was difficult to know what to make of it all. It was too unbelievable, and he had seemed worked up. Støre got through to Pedersen, who at that moment was on board the MS Thorbjørn. The ferry was escaping Utøya and heading north on the Tyrifjord in the direction of Storøya. The distance between Støre in his Volvo and Pedersen on the boat was not just geographical. Pedersen was in a different state altogether. From their short conversation, Støre made out that Monica Bøsei, ‘Mother Utøya’, had been shot and that somebody on the island was attacking them. The fleeing AUF members on the boat were terrified and very distressed.

The wing-beats from the panic on Utøya could be sensed in the car. The tweets and text messages from the island began to stir the attention of people right across the country. The foreign minister knew that it was serious. In spite of the unclear accounts of what was happening, the response was nonetheless to call out police and ambulances immediately. This was happening now. He called the minister of justice, Knut Storberget, who had already been informed and was able to report that the police were on their way.

At 17:51, the first two policemen from Northern Buskerud police district arrived at the Thorbjørn's pier, half an hour after the first shots were fired. One of them was in full uniform, and the other was wearing a Kevlar vest on top of his civilian clothing. Both of them had submachine guns and helmets. The emergency response unit, Delta, was on its way from Oslo in six vehicles and was approaching when they passed Sollihøgda at 17:57. Other units were on their way from Hønefoss, but what could the two policemen do now?

They had a clear line of sight to the island across the water. There were sounds of gunfire out there; a shooting was in progress, which according to police regulations meant that all necessary measures should immediately be taken to protect citizens at risk. Smoke rose up behind the main building, orange and diffuse. There were boats by the pier at Utvika, boats in the water and people swimming, but, even though 600 metres is not far, it suddenly becomes a huge gap when it is a matter of 600 metres of water. The two officers stood on the pier while the questions of command responsibility, boat transport and where to land slowly put a damper on any immediate action. The initiative was lost, while every shot out on the island demonstrated that the killer's macabre meter was running.

Terror in Buskerud?

Norwegian journalists were also struggling to tear themselves away from the bomb in Oslo, like fascinated onlookers at a car accident not noticing a hand tapping them on the shoulder. They were watching out for another terrorist strike, but could something really happen at the AUF summer camp on Utøya? Christian Brændshøi, executive editor of the online edition of the newspaper VG, sat by his computer inside the newspaper's shattered offices. Somebody had to keep the wheels in motion, publishing pictures and stories while editing the live feed. On Twitter, somebody claimed that VG had been the target. At least they could deny that rumour.

A red message from the NTB agency appeared on Brændshøi's screen, an important, high-priority news item. It referred to the New York Times having reported that an Islamist group had taken responsibility for the terrorist attack in Oslo. Brændshøi read the message. The source was good, but, even though everybody in Oslo thought it was Islamists, the facts were thin – too thin. Brændshøi chose not to publish it. VG also avoided interviewing experts in the early phases. News first. Many potential leads turned out not to be true, fortunately. The rumours of a train derailment in Dram­men, countless suspected bombs in Oslo and an explosion in Fes­tningstunnelen, the motorway tunnel below the city centre, all turned out to be false.

A policeman came up the stairs and looked in at where Brændshøi was. He explained that he was checking the building. The radio on the policeman's shoulder was set to receive. There was a crackling, then Brændshøi suddenly heard a voice say something about a shooting. A colleague picked up that the location mentioned for the shooting was in Buskerud county. Buskerud? The policeman left, but, at the same time, Brændshøi's colleagues found several tweets and Facebook messages about shooting on Utøya. Another lead to check out. One of the summer temps was a member of the AUF and so phoned friends who were at the summer camp. Another journalist phoned Eskil Pedersen. It was a short conversation. ‘We're under attack,’ said Pedersen, hanging up.

The journalist realized it was an ongoing situation. Clearly it was risky to call the AUF members on the island. There were tweets about shooting, people dying and escaping. Was there a connection with the explosion in Oslo? The police were evidently on their way. How would the newspaper cover what was happening right then on the island?

A few hundred metres above Oslo, Marius Arnesen, a cameraman with the public broadcaster NRK, was bobbing up and down like a cork floating on the waves. The camera he was holding was pointed towards the city centre, just like the eyes of the rest of Norway. Smoke was rising from the government district. The helicopter's door was open, which made the filming easier but also meant that the wind and turbulence could get an even better hold of the small craft. Since the airspace above the centre of Oslo was restricted, and had been since 2001, they were far away from the scene, and the pictures Marius was getting were not great. Marius spotted a missed call from the duty manager at NRK. The time was 17:58. A text message came in from him instead: ‘You must to fly to Utøya ASAP! Shots being fired there! AUF summer camp. Be careful! But fly there and call as soon as you can.’

‘Utøya’, Marius told the pilot, ‘on the Tyrifjord. Somebody's shooting there!’

They looked at each other.

‘Huh?’ said the pilot, voicing both their feelings.

The story had started off being about international terrorism, so it seemed, and it was now something to do with Utøya? It was as unexpected as a shark in a field of turnips. Utøya was just so Norwegian; a foreigner would probably not even be able to find the way there, even supposing that for some peculiar reason or another he or she had found out about the AUF summer camp. Both the pilot and Marius had assumed that this had to do with some form or another of Islamist terrorism, but now they had been told to go to Utøya. Was this some kind of attack on the Labour Party? If something really was happening on Utøya, the Labour Party was the only thing the two places had in common that Arnesen or the pilot could think of.

The helicopter leapt and bounced in the rough weather, small and cramped, like an electric car with rotary blades. Arnesen was unsure what to expect. He was better prepared for what might be waiting in the barren valleys of western Afghanistan than then, as he flew westwards from Oslo under low clouds towards the Tyrifjord.

Marius Arnesen was one of NRK's most experienced photographers when it came to war and crisis situations. He had worked for a long time with the Norwegian forces in Afghanistan. Arnesen was cheerful and inquisitive, renowned as a tough guy. The helicopter rushed off over Bærum towards Sollihøgda to the north. The fog was like a wall up there. The forest of Krokskogen had disappeared into a thick grey soup, which the unsophisticated helicopter had no chance of getting through. Instead the pilot turned left and flew south along the edge of the sea of fog.

It felt as if the helicopter were being boxed on the ear by the fog as they brushed past the wisps of cloud hanging above the treetops. The pilot was dependent on visual contact with the ground. After a tough ride over the tops of the spruce trees, the pilot finally found a gap in the solid fog right at the southern tip of the Tyrifjord.

The helicopter continued on across the surface of the water, beneath the low sky. The clouds were 200 to 300 metres above the water. The pilot pointed ahead. ‘There's the island,’ he said.

A small, flat speck on the grey mass of the fjord. Arnesen pulled his camera up onto his shoulder and started filming. He had never seen the island before and went for general shots first, which a helicopter is best suited for. While his lens captured the nightmarish situation down to the smallest detail, Arnesen tried to understand what was going on down there: shades of green, a large campsite, some buildings here and there, including a large T-shaped one in the centre of the island. There were traces of people everywhere, but the island was strangely empty, like an abandoned campsite. It was completely still. Had it been evacuated?

The roar of the helicopter drowned out all other sounds apart from the pilot's restrained comments coming through the headset, but there was something wrong down there that Arnesen was struggling to grasp. Normally he would have asked the pilot to go lower, but they stayed flying relatively high up just under the clouds, while Arnesen hung out of the door with his small safety belt on, trying to control his camera between the gusts of wind. ‘Do a circuit over the main shore,’ he said.

Perhaps something was happening there. There were blue lights everywhere and tailbacks on the main road, but the ambulances stood still, lined up. It looked as if they were waiting. He could not see any activity. ‘Circle the island,’ Arnesen said.

He wanted to get more panoramic shots and was also trying to find his bearings. He spotted people in the water on all sides of the island. Had they gone for a swim? Something was happening here, but what? What kind of a shooting was this?

He noticed spots of colour all around the island. Clothes? People? In some places he saw clusters of people. Why were they so still? Everyone in the water was swimming straight out from the island, not along the shore, not across or in circles. Straight out, straight away. They were escaping. That had to be it. Escape. They were fleeing the island. At the southern end there was something amiss. The splashes of colour there resembled both people and piles of clothing. Arnesen zoomed in. It was hard to keep the camera still. He saw the outlines of people, but it was difficult to make out details. Some of them were moving right out in the water, others lay completely still, while one figure stood out. Arnesen noticed it. The figure was dark and standing up.

‘Can you hover?’ Arnesen asked, as he wanted to study the southern end more closely.

‘Not a chance,’ the pilot answered.

The wind was behind them, pushing them towards the south-east, away from the island. The helicopter did another circuit and came in over the island from the east. A boat came alongside at the ferry landing, and Arnesen zoomed in on the dark figures running ashore at the dock. Police. It was like a choreographed dance or a sequence from a film. The policemen took up positions on the jetty and then moved tactically towards the centre of the island. Had the Delta Unit only just got there? Yet another piece fell into place in Arnesen's mind. This had to mean that what was happening was still going on.

‘Low fuel,’ said the pilot, pointing at the indicator.

Arnesen was filming the rescue operation on the fjord, with young people being dragged onto a white boat naked by a man in a blue jacket. ‘OK,’ he answered.

On their final trip over the island, he saw more policemen at the ferry landing. This time, they ran towards the white building and the large orange mattress on the lawn, where two figures lay completely still. The policemen did not seem to notice them. Arnesen filmed for eighteen minutes in total, without seeing the faces of the people down on the island. Frightened youngsters were wondering who was in the helicopter, while the murderer glanced at it sceptically.

When Arnesen lowered the camera between his legs and leant back in his seat, as the helicopter veered off south back towards the city, he was completely unaware that he had shot iconic images that would be seen around the world.

What the Camera Saw

If NRK had known what was happening on Utøya, they would not have sent the helicopter. If Arnesen had understood what was happening, he would have kept a good distance from the island, even if just for the sake of his and the pilot's own safety. Instead, in the prevailing confusion, he interpreted the emptiness of the campsite to mean that the island had been evacuated. Meanwhile Ida Spjelkavik, hidden in the so-called Love Grottos, concluded that the NRK helicopter had to be part of the operation against Utøya. Both conclusions were based on concrete observations and rea­soning that were understandable in context, but they were both mistaken.

While Arnesen gradually realized that he had ended up in the middle of a situation that had not yet been resolved, his lens picked up the dead bodies lying by the campsite, in front of the main building and by the rock at Stoltenberget. Dispassionately, the camera documented a huddle of six dead young people by the pump house, showing that the water in the cove was red with blood – 20 to 30 square metres of water as dark red as a rose. It looked as if the island was bleeding.

The camera had picked up the Delta Unit's arrival on the island, although Arnesen had not spotted it. The first group of policemen (in Allan's neighbour's boat) came ashore at the ferry landing at about 18:25. The first policemen ran northwards along the island. The next boat arrived barely a minute later. A team of five policemen from the Delta Unit and Northern Buskerud police district heard shots and ran towards the south of the island. They apprehended Breivik at some point between 18:32 and 18:34. It took well over half an hour from when the first policemen were in position at the Thorbjørn's pier on the mainland until the first policemen landed on Utøya, and another eight minutes until he was arrested. It was not a long time, but every minute was precious that day.

At the southern tip of the island, the camera picked up the final sequences of the massacre. At that point, Delta had already landed on the island. A boy is sitting in the water, raising his arms towards an armed figure dressed in black. Pleading, perhaps, or attempting to shield himself. Lying at the feet of the dark male figure with his gun is a tangled mass of clothes and people. Two bodies lie on their sides on the shore in the background. It can be seen that the boy in the water is exhausted, possibly injured. He is completely powerless against the executioner in front of him. The dark figure holds up his weapon with the muzzle aimed towards the sky. The white reflective bands around his trouser legs can be seen, as well as a badge at the top of his arm. He looks at the boy in the water. Then he turns round, walks away and back towards land. As he turns, the bald patch on the back of his head comes into view, as well as a white stripe at the top of his back. The boy in the water lowers his head and drops his arm.

He survived that day.

NRK did not realize what Arnesen had filmed but lent the video to TV2, who passed it on to the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. The next day, Aftonbladet published the image of the dark-clothed executioner on its front page, a frame grab from the sequence at the southern tip of the island when Arnesen zoomed in without realizing what he was filming. It was a shocking tableau, with the boy begging for his life. In Afghanistan, Marius Arnesen had worked on anticipating and thinking through a number of scenarios and had learnt to be prepared for the unexpected. This time he was on home ground and was suddenly reacting far more slowly. His instincts made him keep the helicopter high and zoom in on the south­ern tip, but at the same time he did not realize what he had witnessed or that he was filming the details of a massacre that was still ongoing.

A message posted on Twitter at 18:54 put it best: ‘9/11 and Columbine on the same day – in little Norway’. There were no points of reference in recent Norwegian history that could be used to understand what happened on 22 July 2011, so the message referred to events in the USA. The terrorist attack on the H Block, which really had more in common with the bombing in Oklahoma City than with the attacks of 11 September 2001, was followed by what seemed like a school shooting, and perhaps on some level it was. While the events touched Norway's soul and affected thousands of relatives, friends and colleagues, the macabre dramaturgy captivated the whole world. The images of the shattered government district seemed familiar after a decade of terror. The mutilated buildings evoked associations with similar bombings around the world and created the expectation that an Islamist terrorist action had taken place in peaceful Norway. The eyes of the world were on Oslo.

As a result, the international media and news audiences were immediately drawn into the unfolding drama that lasted just over three hours from when the bomb exploded until the culprit was caught. The massacre took place in front of the whole world's eyes, from the destroyed buildings and bleeding people in the centre of Oslo to the mass murderer hunting at the AUF summer camp. Even if the Norwegian surroundings were exotic, everyone realized what was happening: the unfortunate children were surrounded by cold water and had nowhere to run. It was as if a disaster film had been followed by a horror film. First the earth shook in Oslo, and then the devil ran loose among the spruce trees on the island. Preliminary information came during the night that eighty young people had been killed, a macabre world record for a massacre carried out with small firearms by a single person. How could that be possible?

When Fear Takes Over

When were you last afraid? Perhaps when you were driving and a car appeared to swerve towards you. Or perhaps you were in a threatening situation out on the town when an aggressive and intoxicated man approached you. Maybe your heart skipped a beat when your child had a bad fall while skiing. Or maybe you cannot even remember. Fear has been banished to the fringes of our modern society, and we generally experience it only in glimpses. Fear is something you observe in the fish you catch or the animals you startle while walking in the woods. We watch disaster films and horror films, while we immerse ourselves in newspaper articles about terrifying events. What would we do, we wonder, if we were in that situation? When the going gets tough, what would we be like? Perhaps we fantasize about heroic deeds. What would we have done?

Even though our lives are extremely safe in historical terms, fear is still a central part of our biology. From an evolutionary perspective, it is not long since it governed major parts of our lives. Without fear, we would not have survived. To some extent, fear lives on even without any direct reason: anxiety and panic attacks are relatively widespread psychological conditions. Fear has several functions. Memories associated with reactions to fear can be very strong, perhaps because we want to recognize and avoid similar situations in future. Some people say that fear is the best teacher. Or, as Anzor put it, violence is a language all people understand.

When we are afraid, several things immediately happen in our brains and our bodies. The very moment we witness or experience something threatening or frightening, a part of our brains known as the amygdala takes over. Normal thought and interpretation processes are short-circuited, leading to an intense focus on the source of fear, often accompanied by a temporary loss of hearing and what is known as tunnel vision, both of which are a consequence of all non-essential senses being filtered out. The AUF leader Eskil Pedersen, for example, described how he just saw the boat in front of him and did not notice the bodies he ran past when he fled from the white main building on Utøya to the MS Thorbjørn, and how everything fell silent ‘as if the island were covered by a blanket of death’.1 Pedersen's reaction to fear probably resulted in auditory exclusion and tunnel vision.

A number of hormonal reactions occur; adrenaline is released in large quantities. Fear is therefore a kind of intoxication, and extreme sports enthusiasts, among others, seek out fear to experience the adrenaline rush and the feeling of having your body on edge. The body is ready for extreme stress. The concentration of glucose in the blood – in other words, the blood sugar level – rises. Both sugar and fat are transferred to the muscles. Blood vessels expand in parts of the muscles, increasing their strength to an optimal level, while the blood vessels in the skin contract, reducing its sensitivity and further raising the threshold of pain, which is perceived as a cooling effect on the body. We say that fear is chilling, but it is actually the opposite. Our body temperature and blood pressure rise, our breathing and pulse speed up. The pupils dilate in order to take in as much light as possible, since dangers came in the dark in prehistoric times. The digestive system is stopped as essential bodily functions are prioritized. It can occur that the bladder automatically empties itself.

All these reactions are meant to help you either to flee or to fight for your life. There is also a third reaction: paralysis, being frozen with fear. When a cat catches a mouse, the mouse will try to escape, but at the point when escape is no longer possible, it will give up and become completely limp. If it is lucky, the cat will lose interest and leave. On the whole it is not so lucky, but thanatosis (feigning death) is nature's very last resort in a dangerous situation. The last reaction to fear is to be scared stiff. When the bomb went off in Oslo, some people lay there in foetal positions, while others ran away.

Some people have argued that there is an opposite reaction to dangerous situations, known as battle trance or aphobia (fearlessness), in which people such as soldiers in combat stop feeling fear and act without regard for themselves. For example, soldiers might throw themselves in front of comrades or officers to save their lives, or people might run into burning buildings to save strangers. There are many examples of this kind of apparently instinctive, unselfish behaviour, which suggests that we have a deeper identity on a reflex level, in which we see ourselves as members of a group, of a herd, and are willing to sacrifice ourselves for the collective good. The boat drivers risked their lives in the rescue operation. According to them, they were acting instinctively.

Fear was the fundamental condition on Utøya. The adrenaline was pumping. Ida ran and climbed with a broken ankle. Fearing death, Stine managed to escape along a steep, craggy shoreline that she normally would have thought was impossible to force her way across. Some of the survivors, and presumably a number of the AUF members who were killed, played dead when the terrorist came, in a conscious effort to avoid the bullets or because they were paralysed with fear. Some, however, reacted differently. Even though panic was breaking out, Anne-Berit Stavenes kept her composure as the terrorist was coming up the steps to the Café Building, and she tried to close the door, maybe because she was used to taking responsibility as the leader of the Norwegian People's Aid team from Hadeland, as a nursery school manager and as an adult on the island. That same experience was possibly the reason why Anne-Berit instinctively put herself in a situation from which she could not escape when she lay under the seriously wounded girl whose life she and the young AUF members probably saved.

As our instincts get the upper hand, fear can reduce our abilities to orientate ourselves or to think clearly, but fear is also an individual matter. We are influenced by our experience, knowledge and training. We wonder what we would have done when we hear about dramatic situations. Fear is primarily an automatic response. The amygdala is part of the reptilian brain, a structure developed 100 million years ago to help dinosaurs to run away from other dinosaurs, forest fires and volcanic eruptions. Even though it is modified by your own experiences, by things you have learnt to fear such as the neighbour's dog or gangs of juvenile thieves, the main point is that you stop being your normal self when you are unexpectedly exposed to extreme fear. That is why few people can really know how they would react in situations like these.

Perhaps that is precisely why people pose themselves that question: ‘What would I do?’ We go around with another self inside us, and we wonder what kind of person this unfamiliar self is. ‘How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?’ Tyler Durden asks in Fight Club. From a philosophical perspective, you could question whether you really are yourself at all in situations involving fear. Fear makes you somebody else. The soldier who is cold and rational in combat can be an incorrigible hothead in peacetime. But which person is the real him: the rational warrior or the disturber of the peace? Western societies have been blessed with peace for a couple of generations, and this normality has defined who we are. Norwegians are people with ‘many friends in common, and no enemies’,2 as the author Erlend Loe wrote, while Breivik thought that the ‘helpless Norwegian youth […] are brought up to be “suicidally” tolerant and therefore […] completely unprepared mentally for attacks such as these.’3

Training and preparation are the only things that can improve the way we react when disasters occur. ‘You do not rise to the occasion, you sink to your level of training,’ as US military officers say. The Norwegian People's Aid team from Hadeland had trained for many different scenarios, including terrorism, and they had a person in charge of crisis management. The group quickly found its bearings and reacted fast. They saved their own lives, as well as those of many young people, by barricading themselves in the Schoolhouse. They worked as a team. Many of the AUF members carried out acts of heroism to save others, some took control and led groups to hiding places, as Ida did, but these were individual reactions when people who were used to having responsibility took responsibility in a given situation. A number of AUF members, such as the late Håvard Vederhus from Oslo, Dana Barzingi from Akershus, Eivind Rindal – who guided the boat Reiulf towards land while the terrorist was shooting at it – Secretary General Tonje Brenna and others, performed similar deeds.

The members of the AUF were not trained, prepared or in any way equipped to act as a unit in the situation that arose. When the shooting began, they acted not as a unified group but as 600 indi­viduals. The rational thing for an individual to do was to flee and hope that the police would come. Norwegians are taught not to confront violent people but to inform the police, and that was what the AUF members did. Hundreds of young people called the emergency number 112. The rational thing for a group to do might possibly have been to attack the terrorist, but such a unified reaction would have required some kind of preparation, training or experience, and the AUF was not the Tåsen Gang. Although there is conscription in Norway, most young people have not even been in the armed forces. Perhaps there would have been spontaneous resistance if the terrorist had forced a group into a corner with no way out. He did not.

The Captain and His Ship

If you had Googled the name Eskil Pedersen in August 2011, you would hardly have been able to write ‘e–s–k’ before options popped up reading ‘Eskil Pedersen’, ‘Eskil Pedersen coward’, ‘Eskil Pedersen gay’, ‘Eskil Pedersen boat’ and ‘Eskil Pedersen ran away’. When people searched for Eskil Pedersen on Google (which logged their searches so that they appeared as suggestions), they were apparently expressing their anger and contempt for the AUF leader having almost immediately ‘run away’ (not escaped) the island on the MS Thorbjørn in the company of seven other AUF members and the ferry captain. The Google suggestions also imply that people searching saw a connection between the AUF leader's sexuality and his alleged cowardice.

The tragedy on Utøya generated intense feelings, and some of the anger was directed at the leader of the AUF. The criticism concerned the fact that the twenty-seven-year-old leader left while the youngsters for whom he was responsible were being murdered. The ferry disappeared with Pedersen on board instead of taking part in the rescue operation. Survivors said that they waved to the MS Thorbjørn, hoping to be saved, as the ferry passed the northern end of the island.4 Pedersen described the time from when he ran onto the boat until he arrived at Northern Buskerud police station. As he lay on the deck of the ferry he thought that, after the bomb in Oslo, Utøya was now ‘occupied’. That meant that ‘the whole country was under attack’ and that Politiets sikkerhetstjeneste [the Norwegian Police Security Service; PST] was involved in an attempt to ‘take power’ – in other words, an armed coup. The terrorist had introduced himself as an officer from the PST and claimed that another two colleagues were on their way to the ferry landing. As a result, Pedersen thought that nowhere was safe, that people would shoot at them from land, and that other boats might ‘board’ them.

Pedersen concentrated on calling his many contacts in the Labour Party and in the government to tell them and to ask for help. To the AUF members on Utøya who contacted him, he texted back: ‘Swim’. As soon as he was ashore, he hurried up to the main road. While thinking that the PST was carrying out a coup, he stopped a civilian car with a female driver (for some reason he did not feel he could trust men) and asked her to drive him to the police station in Hønefoss. In the meantime, he shouted down the telephone to the Labour Party secretary Raymond Johansen that ‘we are under siege’. Even while he was at the police station, he distrusted the police. For a long while he wondered whether he could really trust them, telling them: ‘We don't believe you.’

Pedersen himself pointed out holes and contradictions in his reasoning. How could he trust that a murderer who had tricked his way over to the island was the PST officer he claimed to be, or that what he said about two colleagues being on their way was true? If the PST – in other words, the police – was involved in a coup, then why did he call 112, the police emergency number, and why had he gone to Northern Buskerud police station? Pedersen had no explanation of his own to offer apart from the fact he was not thinking logically in that situation. The situation that had developed was inconceivable, and panic reigned on the boat.

When Pedersen had to interpret what he had observed in the few short minutes he was near the terrorist (in other words, the sound of shots, lifeless people outside the building and what the other AUF members on the boat told him about the alleged PST officer), he fell back on notions of war (boarding, being under siege and occupation) and of a right-wing coup featuring the PST in a central role. In a way, Pedersen's notions tell some of the same story as the NRK cameraman Arnesen's situational slowness. There were no references in Norwegian history to help those who were involved in the situation to interpret it. The closest reference to the tragedy of 22 July 2011 was 9 April 1940, the beginning of Norway's involvement in the Second World War, the German occupation and Vidkun Quisling's coup. What Pedersen describes is 9 April 1940. ‘You sink to your level of training’, and it may appear as if Pedersen had been transported back to his history lessons at the University of Oslo.

Even though Pedersen drew far-reaching conclusions concerning the whole country, a number of the other AUF members had similar ideas independently of each other. Ida suspected the NRK helicopter of being part of the attack, and a large number of the AUF members were sceptical of the people who picked them up in boats, as well as the campers on the jetty at Utvika. Many of them thought that there was more than one gunman on the island and thought that the terrorist had allies on land, on the water, and even in the sky.

Some of the Labour Party leaders with whom Pedersen spoke on the telephone probably tried to explain to him that there was no coup, but a voice on the telephone can do little to influence a person who is on the deck of a boat and thinks that he might be shot at any moment. While AUF members in other situations took charge and became natural leaders, Pedersen and the others were passengers on a boat being steered by an older captain. The captain was Monica Bøsei's partner and had witnessed her becoming the terrorist's second victim on Utøya. He also had a daughter on the island. Given that the captain was in shock and afraid, perhaps it was not so strange that fear and panic spread on the MS Thorbjørn.

Some of them were hyperventilating on deck, while others tried to calm them down. In the claustrophobic situation, they discussed frantically where they should take the boat. They did not dare to head to the ferry landing at Utvika for fear of the two PST officers who were allegedly on their way, and they did not count on being able to land anywhere else along the shore. Since Pedersen and the others thought that the whole country was under attack, their escape had only just begun and they felt that they were still being hunted. The ferry eventually put ashore in a cove near Storøya, approximately 3 kilometres north of Utøya, where the captain had a friend he trusted.

While Pedersen and most of the AUF members went up to the main road and hitch-hiked to Hønefoss, the captain was met by his friend, a local resident by the name of Even Frogh. Frogh was employed as a security inspector at Norges Bank, Norway's central bank, he was an officer in Heimevernet [the Norwegian Home Guard], and had served several tours in Kosovo and Afghanistan. He noticed that the captain was deeply affected. After having summarized the situation, the two men and the captain's AUF first mate went down to the camping ground at Utvika to meet the Delta Unit. Frogh thought that the captain might be a valuable first-hand witness for the police. At the same time, Frogh had seen how the fleeing AUF members had moved away from him in fear, seen how the first mate had sceptically asked him who he was, and noticed how shocked the captain was. These impressions defined the atmosphere in the car. Fear is contagious, and, when he heard somebody scream at the camping ground and smelt the stench of gunpowder, Even concluded that there had to be shooting going on there too. He quickly reversed out of there and drove off back towards his house and his boat.

The fact that such an experienced officer could make such an error of perception demonstrated how panic and collective thinking are self-reinforcing and can spread to people who did not even experience the original danger. Once a false perception has grown in a group, it is tremendously difficult for a single individual to challenge, correct or reject that perception, especially if that individual does not personally have access to all the facts and has to trust second-hand information. The captain, together with Frogh and his brother Stian, took part in the rescue operation on Utøya for the rest of the evening, transporting survivors and the wounded ashore on Frogh's bow rider and the captain's ferry.

The way you act also depends on the situation in which you end up. When panic spreads, everybody gets caught up and makes a break for it. In other situations, individuals had an opportunity to think and to act, even in the midst of fear. The intense aggression towards Eskil Pedersen after the massacre seems strangely misplaced, as what could he have done? He could have stayed on the island, but he would have been just as powerless in the face of the terrorist as the others. Perhaps the ferry could have stayed near the island and contributed to the rescue operation. Having originally been a Swedish military landing craft, the MS Thorbjørn was armour-plated after all, but, for that very reason, the large, heavy and slow vessel was actually poorly suited to rapid rescue work. The decision to head ashore to fetch help was not necessarily a worse option than trying to save people from the island.

It seems as if the criticism of Pedersen has less to do with what he actually did or might have done than it does with a kind of expectation about leaders, perhaps especially male leaders, left over from other times. As Rudyard Kipling wrote: ‘If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; / […] you'll be a Man, my son!’5 Men's role has evolved considerably since Victorian times. Norwegian political organizations do not choose cold-blooded warriors as their leaders, but people who can communicate and work together, whether they are men or women. Norwegian political organizations choose peace leaders, not war leaders. All the same, there are some residual expectations of a leader in a crisis. The captain should go down with his ship, they say, as if Utøya were a ship.

The disaster on Utøya raises the question of how it was possible for a single terrorist, equipped with a semi-automatic rifle and a pistol, to take the lives of sixty-nine people. But focusing on the unarmed AUF members' inability to resist the terrorist or their leader's inability to keep a cool head are rhetorical dead ends. The AUF leader could hardly have made a difference, while the AUF members on the island would have put up resistance if the situation had allowed them to do so, but the terrorist carefully avoided situations in which he might provoke people to stand up against him. The answer to why the disaster took on such proportions is to be found not with the victims but with the culprit.

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 Eskil Pedersen's story is drawn from the TV2 documentary Fire fortellinger fra Utøya [Four stories from Utøya].

2 Erlend Loe, L (Oslo: Cappelen, 1999), p. 23.

3 2083, pp. 1389–90.

4 Kjetil Stormark, Da terroren rammet Norge: 189 minutter som rystet verden [When terror struck Norway: 189 minutes that shook the world] (Oslo: Kagge, 2011), p. 183.

5 Rudyard Kipling, ‘If–’, in Rewards and Fairies (London: Macmillan, 1910), pp. 175–6.

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