It was a Friday afternoon like any other. Being the end of July, there were perhaps more tourists than usual on the streets of Oslo, and a few more temps in its offices, but on the whole, it was a distinctly unremarkable day.
I was in my third week of reporting for the national newspaper Vårt Land in downtown Oslo. Working in a big city for the first time in my life, I was immensely pleased with our office location. It couldn’t be more central, situated just up the road from the central station, round the corner from the Cathedral, and some 100 meters from the government quarters.
From my cubicle by the window I was trying to decide on an angle for a particularly tricky article. Knowing it was my turn to do the Sunday shift, I was extra anxious to get home for my one-day break. An email from an important source ticked into my inbox little over half an hour before I was set to clock off. Just as I opened it to read, it happened.
A bang. Windows shattered. Glass showered over me. It took a few seconds for it to sink in. I vividly remember thinking to myself “Crap, now I have to clean up all the glass before I can go home.” It wasn’t until I registered my co-workers hurrying towards the door that it hit me – I should probably get out of this building.
In various stages of panic, we made our way down nine flights of stairs. There was a silent understanding that the lift was not a safe option. Outside, we were met by a sea of crystals covering the streets. I looked over at my friend, a summer temp like myself; the colour had drained from her face.
We headed down the main street, already full of people emerging from offices, shops and cafes. Suddenly, a huge crowd came running up behind us. Within seconds, we were all running. One of my co-workers and two older women were knocked over, falling to a pavement littered with broken glass. In the end, it turned out there was nothing to run from. But the hysterical mass stampede of terrified people only looking to get far, far away was no longer just a scene from a disaster movie.
A group of us made our way to a colleague’s flat. Our editors sent us home. They had a newspaper to completely rewrite and finish in two hours. I still don’t understand how they managed it.
We were silently watching the news when I noticed the text at the bottom of the screen. “Five people shot at Utøya.”
Throughout that night, a million thoughts fluttered through my head. I knew this was a turning point. We all did. We just had no idea what to expect. We had no idea what we would be waking up to the next day.
By now, the whole world has seen the pictures and heard the stories. A deranged man on a deranged mission to “save” Europe from Islam, taking the lives of 77 innocent people in the process. There are no words in any language that can adequately express the loss and the sheer senselessness of it all.
Though he doesn’t deserve to be remembered, his actions left a permanent scar on our society. For me, waking up to the unfathomable death toll from Utøya on July 23rd is something I will remember for the rest of my life. It was like being punched in the gut.
“Something about Norway broke that day,” says Morten Malmø, author of The Tragedy That United Norway, the first book to be published about the attacks.
He is right. The fact that this was the biggest disaster to hit our country since the Second World War says something about how wholly unprepared we were for it. Not necessarily in a lack of security measures or facilities to deal with the aftermath, but in terms of any sort of frame of reference to use to be able to understand it.
That this wasn’t supposed to happen here is a sentiment I’ve heard countless times over the past couple of months. “There are so few of us in this country, every fallen man is a brother and a friend,” a quote by Norwegian poet Nordahl Grieg, suddenly seems more relevant than ever.
This is perhaps partly why the response shown by Norwegian society has been so applauded by the world. In his first address after the attacks, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called for “more democracy and more openness” to counter mindless violence. That this response came mere hours after his place of work had been destroyed, his colleagues killed and the island where he’d spent his youth transformed in to a living nightmare, speaks volumes in itself.
Much has been made of the contrast between this and George W. Bush’s first response to 9/11, in which he spoke of a war on terror and of bringing the perpetrators to justice.
“Norway is a small country with a very strong and peaceful sense of national identity,” says Bernard Enjolras, senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research.
He believes Norway’s identity as a bit of an outsider is part of the reason for our response. A young nation at the edge of Europe, we keep mostly to ourselves. Not even part of the EU, we’re not used to being at the centre of the world’s attention.
He also touches upon the identity of the terrorist; a man who, on the outside, didn’t seem too different from the average Norwegian. A fact, Enjolras argues, that could be difficult for some to accept; “The response helped people cope with the shock.”
Regardless of the reasons behind it, the immediate reaction also worked as a collective therapy session. Scandinavian countries have a reputation for being cold, and not only temperature-wise, but the overwhelming outpouring of love and support on display after the attacks seemed to warm every corner of the country.
The rose parade filled the streets of Oslo with over 200,000 people; so many that a tram couldn’t move due to the sea of roses surrounding it. The flowers, notes, pictures and teddy bears covered every inch of the pavement in front of Oslo Cathedral, and hundreds of candles lit it up from the inside. The day after the explosion, the broken glass had already been swept up from the streets, and downtown Oslo was buzzing with life. All are signs of a people determined not to let this break them, a people willing each other to go on.
A tragedy that united Norway. This was what inspired the title of Malmø’s book: “We could’ve easily responded with hatred and despair, but we responded with flower parades,” he says.
The book chronicles events over the three weeks following the attacks, using various media reports from that time period as its main source. Malmø explains that he was especially moved by the support offered from people not directly and personally affected by the tragedy. He tells of people with no connection to Utøya laying down flowers as they pass the island, and of rose parades all over the country.
“It is pretty special, and something we’ve never experienced in this country before. Not on this scale.”
In 11 days, three months will have passed since the attacks. Our reality has shifted back to something that closely resembles normality. Not every conversation revolves around that one topic, and long gone are the days it was the only story to occupy the news cycle. There are times I feel like we’re pretty much the same country as before July 22nd but, the thing is, we’re not. However similar it feels, the fact of the matter is that we are living in a different reality. And we still don’t know exactly what to expect.
A bit of that outsider identity Enjolras was talking about is fading. We’re suddenly part of something bigger. Things that can happen to the US and the rest of Europe can also happen to us. “That realization can affect emotions deep within people for a long time to come,” he says.
A whole country has been shaken to the core. An entire generation of young people will take this experience into adulthood, and it will consciously or subconsciously shape the decisions they make. Maybe most significantly, in the Utøya survivors, we have a group of potential political leaders who have personally experienced the true horror of terrorism.
Per Anders Torvik Langerød was one of them. It was his tenth summer at Utøya, a place that has given him countless great memories and one horrendous one. He tells me he has been afraid a lot since that day; afraid of sounds, of gunfire, of having to escape again.
He made the decision to go back to Utøya, to regain what it once meant to him. He says he’s no longer afraid of the island, but rather of the terrorist himself. It was important to take the island back, he explains, to show that they will not be silenced by violence.
“This is something that will affect all young politicians, and of course especially those who were there,” he says. Torvik Langerød is an active politician and was recently elected into Oslo City Council as a Deputy. He says those of the Utøya youth who decide to remain in politics will serve as a reminder of how important it is to work against prejudice and racism. “And,” he adds “how important it is to rise above a coward’s violence and respond with peaceful means.”
It still remains to be seen whether we’ll be able to answer Stoltenberg’s call for more openness and democracy in the long run. The early statistics for September’s local elections suggest a 3.5 per cent increase in electoral participation, with the final figures expected to be even higher. Not an insignificant increase, when most trends today suggest our likeliness to vote is declining.
As for the issue of openness, the situation is slightly trickier. Norway has a tradition of relatively high levels of interaction between the electorate and the elected. High-profile politicians regularly meet voters without any sort of security, and until 22/7 the area around the government quarters was open to the public. The attacks have sparked a debate about the sustainability of the model, with several of the employees at government offices allegedly telling newspaper Dagbladet that they were worried about their safety even before the attacks.
Enjolras is certain that we will see security measures boosted in the future, noting that there is already an increased police presence in Oslo. “Politicians will still meet voters, but it will perhaps require a higher degree of planning.”
Meanwhile, Torvik Langerød is confident that openness won’t be lost if a few more MPs get security or the government quarters are cordoned off. “But we have to remain critical of these changes to ensure that they won’t increase the differences between these two groups,” he adds.
Potentially the most interesting development to keep an eye out for is Norway’s attitudes to immigration and the wider integration debate.
As in many other European countries, a right-wing wave has swept across Norway over the past few years. Fringe groups like the Norwegian branch of the EDL have appeared in the political landscape, but more interestingly, the far right has also been embraced by the mainstream. The best example is the Progress Party (FrP), Norway’s second largest party at the last general elections.
Leader Siv Jensen coined the phrase “snikislamisering”, roughly translated to creeping or back door islamification, arguing that parts of Norway were in danger of slowly but surely being taken over and controlled by Islamists. MP Christian Tybring-Gjedde heavily criticized multiculturalism in an opinion piece last year, accusing it of “tearing the country to shreds.” This rhetoric is uncomfortably close to that of the terrorist in his so-called ‘manifesto’.
Much has been said about the terrorist’s connection to various far-right online discussion boards, but the fact of the matter is that the views he expresses are not so very different from those you can find in comment threads under articles on mainstream Norwegian news sites.
Since the attacks, FrP have come under fire, resulting, among other things, in Tybring-Gjedde apologizing for the wording of his article and Jensen admitting that some of the party’s rhetoric has crossed a line. Enjolras does, however, warn against ostracizing parties like FrP at this stage, worried that it might stifle debate and subsequently lead to more extremism.
It is along this tightrope that Norwegian society will be walking over the coming months, and perhaps years. How do you allow for an open debate where a plurality of opinions can flourish, whilst simultaneously weeding out potentially poisonous rhetoric? It goes without saying that those who hold the same or similar political views as the terrorist won’t do what he did. But are opinions like his something to be desired in the public sphere? That’s the question Norway needs to ask and answer in order to go forward.
Enjolras is cautious in assessing any wider societal changes at such an early stage. For now, he says that people seem to have become more trusting, and their attitudes toward immigration more positive.
“It remains to be seen whether these attitudes will last and if they will ever be transformed into action.”
Torvik Langerød is one person taking the step to turn his attitudes into action. On the 22nd of each month for a year, he will be putting his prejudices to the test, meeting and debating with people he disagrees with on important issues.
He is doing this because he feels the attack was one specifically aimed at multicultural Norway, and a result of extreme generalizations on both sides of the Islamification debate. “By meeting people I hold prejudices against, I hope to stop my own prejudice. It’s a good way for each of us to fight to ensure that 22/7 will never happen again.”
Fantastic article.