ANALYSIS:The slaughter on Utoeya must visibly fail to damage the political dialogue nurtured there
THE CONFLICT between light and shade, between hope and hatred flows starkly to us all from the tiny Norwegian island of Utoeya, where the Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking (AUF), or youth league of the Norwegian Labour Party, has held its annual summer camp for decades.
Anders Behring Breivik meticulously prepared his slaughter of at least 85 of the AUF participants. His car bomb in central Oslo looks to have been a deadly diversion to draw off the police, leaving him free to pursue his macabre massacre until he ran out of ammunition.
The AUF camp is better known by the name of the its nearest mainland village, Sundvollen. Its somewhat swankier Swedish rival is Bommersvik.
These camps express much of what is wonderful in Nordic culture, including the human co-operation essential for survival in a challenging environment. They offer intellectual dialogue drawing on revered traditions and global inspiration. There is a palpable community of joy in the long summer days of northern latitudes.
Seizing the moment to meet and make merry, motivated teenagers, young politicians and sometimes provocative speakers come together to reinvent the world. In structured sessions and impromptu workshops are discussed subjects ranging from how we live our lives to how our planet might be better organised.
Norway’s 52-year-old prime minister Jens Stoltenberg was a key Sundvollen figure 20 years ago. A decade earlier it would have been Thorbjorn Jagland, now secretary general of the Council of Europe.
The AUF has opted to maintain the sylvan simplicity of Utoeya although international visitors, as I once was, tend to favour the hotels on the nearby mainland that must have appeared so desperately remote from the fleeing participants last Friday.
The AUF’s Swedish counterpart, the SSU, purchased Bommersvik manor just south of Stockholm in 1937. One of the earliest international speakers there was a political refugee from Nazi Germany, Willy Brandt, who warned of the murderous threat hanging over Europe in December 1940. Although Bommersvik has become more comfortable over the years, it has been able to preserve some of the easier informality of Sundvollen.
It is that informality which has helped make the summer camps of the Norwegian and Swedish social democratic youth organisations such a valuable and discreet force for good, for conflict resolution and for human progress.
There are no delegations, few documents and hardly a formal resolution in sight. Down the years, over coffee or during lakeside strolls, individuals from different backgrounds and countries have explored possible solutions, weighed pros and cons, and teased out workable approaches to many a problem.
In the 1970s you might have caught a glimpse of senior figures from various Soviet organisations quietly chatting with western counterparts about detente and nuclear disarmament.
By the early 1990s they had been replaced by background figures from the Middle East. Rivals and enemies who had boxed themselves into impossibly exclusive positions held deniable dialogues amid the pine trees. Some of the foundations for what later became the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation were laid on the shores of the Steinsfjorden at Sundvollen.
The clear air and the success of the Nordic countries in building fairer and more equitable – if far from perfect – societies pose a stimulating challenge to those seeking solutions to other conflicts and problems.
When those explorers of solutions found themselves trapped within the bounds of past wrongs or their self-generated impossible conditions, they would be confronted by fresh-faced and open-minded young Nordic social democrats whose very presence attested to humanity’s ability to overcome its difficulties.
Those young people often helped, if only passively, in driving the most deadlocked of negotiators back to see if there was another angle to be explored or another formulation of words which might prise open the door to a solution.
Their sometimes infuriating pragmatism reminded guests that war, with all its unavoidable barbarity, can at best only contribute to creating the conditions for political solutions to problems, conditions which dialogue and mutual respect can also, but much less bloodily, achieve. All we need is the courage to confront our demons, to learn from, without being imprisoned by, our gory pasts.
Sundvollen has regularly posed the challenging question of how it would be if we went directly to considering the political solution without first passing through the slaughter stage.
Breivik had only slaughter to offer as he cut his murderous swathe across Norway last Friday.
He wanted to take us back into the ancient darkness of racial superiority, xenophobia and winning arguments solely by murdering those with whom we differ. It behoves us all to show him that he has not only failed but failed utterly.
Norway’s slain deserve nothing less.
Tony Kinsella is a former international secretary of the Labour Party. He blogs about global events at tonykinsella.eu