Throughout a painful week, Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg has been a tower of strength, urging his fellow citizens that democracy and openness are the best reactions to hatred and violence, writes DEREK SCALLYin Oslo
A CROWD watches the workman, in the cabin of a crane, as he pulls a shard of glass from a shattered window and tosses it to the street, eight floors down. Behind a metal barrier to the blast site, its frame almost hidden by wilting roses, a young boy, no more than five, watches with rapt, innocent attention.
“Was it loud?” he asks his father.
“Very loud,” his father replies, leading him away, as Norway ended the longest week in its history.
“It’s always good to have lots to do but this is not the way we like to earn our money,” says Robert Larssen, a glazier. He and his employees have worked around the clock to repair the damage left by the July 22nd bombing in Oslo.
“It’s a strange feeling here, in the heart of the city. To install new glass is the easy part; to repair the damaged buildings is more complicated. But to repair the rest, what lies beneath, will be much harder.”
A week later, as the international media circus ups sticks and moves on, Norway faces the task of burying its dead: eight civil servants killed by the bomb blast; 68 teenagers gathered on an island to discuss their country’s future before they were robbed of theirs.
“Each life lost is a tragedy; together it’s a national tragedy,” said the country’s prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, in an address to the nation.
The bomb blast and gun attacks were planned in perfidious detail as a destabilising attack on his ruling Labour party and on core Norwegian values of openness, democracy and multiculturalism. But the real and remarkable story of this past week is not what went wrong in Norway; it’s what went right.
For journalists it was dangerously easy to be carried away by the narrative of events set in motion by a paranoid perpetrator. For nearly a decade, Anders Behring Breivik planned his attacks as a call to arms for Europeans to rise up against what he saw as the “creeping Islamisation” of their continent.
The 32-year-old, who comes from a comfortable, middle-class home, wrote a 1,500-page manifesto that reads like an unintentional parody of the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho, outlining which kitchen blenders are best for grinding fertiliser for bombs and debating the motivational merits of the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. It reeks of an insecure narcissist desperate to gain the recognition of his peers. The aftertaste the text leaves recalls the tragic epitaph of Arthur Miller’s salesman, Willy Lohman: “Attention must be paid.”
Attention was paid, for a few short hours on Monday morning, but no more.
There was a charged atmosphere outside Oslo’s modern courthouse complex when Breivik, smiling in satisfaction at the fuss he had caused, arrived in an armed jeep. Crowds had gathered to see the monster. But as soon as his closed-door remand hearing was over, the crowds drifted away, satisfied. The government buildings were in ruins, but the state was working.
“I hid under a bed until I was sure he was gone,” said Vagad, outside the courthouse. The 19-year-old survived Breivik’s 90-minute shooting spree on Utoeya. “But I’m anxious to be here because it’s important to see justice take its course.”
As Monday wore on, emotional pressure was seeping out of central Oslo. By early evening more than 200,000 people came together, clutching flowers, in a spontaneous show of solidarity in front of the city hall. On stage, Crown Prince Haakon and Princess Mette-Marit were joined by almost the entire cabinet.
“One sniper and Norway would be leaderless,” said an Irishman in the crowd. This was Norway: wounded and confused, yet vulnerable.
Two days later, a smaller crowd has gathered on the sunny market square, in front of the Labour Party headquarters. A third of its windows, shattered in the blast, are still boarded up. In the tower opposite, the face of a clock is still half missing.
“In the labour movement we talk about solidarity, sticking together. I’ve seen since Friday that these are not just words: they are true and real inside people in the whole country,” says Eskil Pedersen, the 27-year-old chairman of the Labour Youth Movement (AUF) that organised the fated summer camp on Utoeya island.
He managed to escape but lost dozens of friends in the slaughter. In the days since, he has given one perfectly poised interview after another. Look closer, though, and you see a young man running on empty, surviving on his wits and carried along by the strength of Norwegian resolve.
“I don’t know where this strength comes from,” he says. “It comes from our history and it’s passed on from one generation to the next.”
To outsiders, Norwegian nationalism seems a robust, if romantic, affair. Independence was hard won, shaking off Swedish and Danish occupying neighbours only to be lost again under Nazi occupation. The country went to work after the war to rebuild its ruined cities and, parallel to the physical reconstruction, a remarkable cradle-to-grave welfare state.Financed by high taxes, it has given Norway one of the highest living standards in the world.
Unscathed by the recent financial crisis – and with a €370 billion sovereign wealth fund from oil revenues – Norway has managed better than its neighbours to hold together the Nordic social model.
This model, equidistant from the Anglo-American and continental European social models, pushes an unfettered individualism, underpinned by solidarity and trust in fellow citizens and state institutions. The shock left by Breivik’s attack is not just down to his bullets and bombs but his hate-filled attack on the country’s centuries-old social contract.
It’s a contract that is feeling the strain of late: this small country of 4.8 million people has an immigrant population of 10 per cent, half of whom are from non-European backgrounds.
“Growing numbers of immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees constitute a deep challenge to the social cohesion of Nordic society, and the political consequences are already visible in the rise of anti-immigrant parties throughout the Nordic countries,” write the historians Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh in their study of Nordic model, Social Trust and Radical Individualism.
Breivik spent a decade in Norway’s populist Progress Party, until it softened its anti-immigrant rhetoric, in public at least, prompting him to leave and take matters into his own hands. In his manifesto he proposes saving “traditional” Norwegian values by triggering a revolution against Islam, multiculturalism and “cultural Marxism”.
The unspoken tragedy of the Utoeya attacks is that the Labour Youth Movement was trying something similar: inviting into its 10,000-strong membership teenagers from migrant families, to ease social pressure and preserve the Nordic model by integration.
BY WEEK’S END, away from the government quarter, the only visible trace of the attacks are the flowers lying on every available surface. In front of the cream and white royal palace, roses were arranged to form a huge heart. Behind the palace, the prime minister’s residence, a Jugendstil villa, is guarded by police, a metal detector and three excitable Springer spaniels sniffing for explosives. Inside, beneath an ornate ceiling of smiling stucco cherubs, the prime minister arrives, his haggard face a stark contrast to his perfectly sitting suit.
It’s the end of a hellish week in which the Norwegian leader lost friends and colleagues and the “paradise of my youth” that he has visited annually since 1974.
In hindsight, Stoltenberg delivered a masterclass in political leadership and communication. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, he refused to join the media speculation about an Islamist background to the killings. The next day, as the facts became clear, he seized control of the narrative and has yet to let go.
In carefully crafted speeches, he worked to sublimate feelings of anger, urging more democracy and openness as the best reaction to violence. In doing so, Stoltenberg and his speech-writers have whipped the narrative out of the hands of Breivik and his rambling manifesto. The strategy worked: the shaken Norwegian people listened to his message gladly and, in a poll published on Thursday, 90 per cent of people said he had managed the crisis well.
Stoltenberg has been watching his words all week, sending out a consistent message, and has seldom dropped his political guard.
Has he cried this week? Yes. Has he thought about Breivik? No. He’s thought about Breivik’s terrible acts, but kept busy in an effort to “keep a distance to that man”.
“For me, this week, as a private person, it has been a comfort to be able to comfort people,” he says, doleful eyes wandering before focusing on the political message. “We have to distinguish here between extreme opinions, which are completely legal legitimate to have, and trying to implement those extreme views by using violence, which is unacceptable in a democratic and open society.”
In the face of unprecedented hate and violence, Jens Stoltenberg has urged his fellow citizens not to retreat behind locked doors and security barriers to lick their wounds. Instead, in a long and painful week, they put their shattered beliefs and broken hearts on show for the world to see.
