One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (14 page)

In the Oslo West
gang he got to know a girl who was the same age as him, but who was already making a career for herself in the party. Lene Langemyr was as thin as a rake with a playful expression and short, untidy hair. Smart and always ready with an answer, she sailed effortlessly into Anders’s life. They went to pre-parties, parties and afterparties together, visited each other, watched films and talked, went
on outings and attended meetings with the other would-be politicians.

They fell for each other. She thought he seemed intellectual and rather exciting. She wasn’t the studious type herself, she laughed, as he lectured her on Adam Smith and Ayn Rand.

She was from the town of Grimstad in the south of Norway, not far from where Anders’s mother grew up. But really she was from New Delhi. There,
she had been left on the doorstep of one of the city’s many orphanages one April day in 1979. Six weeks later she was brought to Norway. On Whit Sunday, a couple stood waiting at Oslo airport for the tiny girl. The information pack from the adoption agency had advised them, ‘If you cannot see a dark-skinned child fitting into your home then do not take the risk of adopting a baby from another country’
as the children could ‘turn out to be quite dark-complexioned’. In addition, the skin could darken with age.

Dolly, as she had been called at the children’s home, found herself growing up in a ready-made family of three older brothers. She tried to emulate them, her body grew strong and swift, she wanted to prove herself their equal and never cried when she hurt herself. Lene was eight when she
first learned to fire an airgun; she loved the shooting range and being taken along on hunting and fishing expeditions.

Lene showed no interest in researching her roots. What would be the point? She was Norwegian and had a family who loved her. But sometimes the feeling of having been unwanted overwhelmed her.

‘I wasn’t loved by my mother,’ she told Anders. ‘I wouldn’t have been left there otherwise.’
She struggled with her sense of guilt at not having come up to scratch, she skipped school, wanted to get away, broke any rule she could, left upper secondary in the second year and rang the local recruitment office of the National Service Centre. The summer she turned eighteen she passed the physical tests and was called in for evaluation at Camp Madla, Norway’s largest recruit-training
college, just outside Stavanger.

‘Hah, you’ll be home after a week,’ predicted her mother.

After two weeks she was elected to represent the other recruits. She was the first girl, and the first dark-skinned recruit to fill the position.

Lene was absorbed in being Norwegian and saw red on manoeuvres when Muslim recruits would not eat because they were served pork in their field rations. She
was not sympathetic to those who asked for the kitchen to use special pots and pans to prepare halal food.

‘What if there’s a war? Is the field kitchen going to take special pans on operations for you? No, everybody has to adapt to conditions,’ she informed them.

Adapt, as she had done herself. She felt it in her bones. These guys had been born in Norway; they were Norwegian and couldn’t expect
special treatment.

‘It brings out the hatred. I find it so dispiriting,’ she told Anders later. ‘My mother always said that wherever you go, you ought to adapt to the local way of life. Out of respect. They’ve got to do that too.’ The armed forces should stand for integration, not segregation.

It was her experiences in the military that prompted her to get involved in politics. She had moved
to Tromsø, where she got in touch with two right-wing parties and asked them to send their material. The Progress Party Youth got in first. Within a few months, Lene was its leader in Tromsø and the regional chair in the Troms county organisation. In October 2000, Norway’s largest paper,
Verdens Gang
, published a big feature: ‘Dark-skinned and leader of Progress Party Youth’. A barrier had been
broken, the paper said. Lene was quoted as saying that ‘tougher immigration policies and strengthening the armed forces are the things I care about most’.

Then restlessness set in again and she moved to Oslo, where she became the manager of a clothes shop in the Oslo City shopping centre. Once the shop closed for the day she made her way on high heels over to Youngstorget. There she would hang
out at Progress Party HQ or prepare meetings and speeches. It was there she and Anders met.

A critical attitude toward Islam was common ground for Lene and Anders at the time. Because Lene’s appearance meant she was often mistaken for a Pakistani girl, she was frequently on the receiving end of comments in the street. ‘Get dressed!’ Muslim men would shout at her if she were wearing a strappy
summer dress. She complained to Anders that men sometimes harassed her when she was lightly clothed, rubbing up against her in queues or groping her in the street. She was annoyed that it was immigrants, not Norwegians, who called her Norwegianness into question. She felt she was more exposed than her blonde sisters, and if she tried to buy a smoky-bacon sausage at a kiosk, she would often be asked
if she realised it had pork in it. ‘I know that, and I love them,’ Lene would answer, in her sing-song Grimstad dialect.

‘“We do what we like with our women, so keep out of this or you’ll be sorry”,’ she had been warned when being critical of Islam, she had told Anders. ‘It must be awful to be a woman in that culture,’ she said to him one evening when they were on their own.

*   *   *

The Progress
Party was a young party. Its forerunner had been set up in 1973 by Anders Lange, a forestry technician and anti-communist, under the name
Anders Lange’s Party for a Major Reduction in Taxes, Duties and Public Intervention
. The role of the state was to be minimal, in direct contrast to Labour’s welfare state. The party received support from the apartheid regime in South Africa for their 1973 election
campaign. Lange said of Idi Amin’s regime in Uganda that ‘blacks needed white people to be in charge’.

He was critical of the fight for women’s liberation and of welfare provision such as maternity leave. ‘No one who has a good time with her husband in bed deserves financial help as a result,’ he said in one of his speeches.

But the year after founding his party, the colourful racist died and
the young, ambitious Carl Ivar Hagen succeeded him as party chairman. In 1977 the name was changed to the Progress Party, and in the early years the party hovered at around 3 or 4 per cent in the polls. What had started out in the 1970s as a movement among individual members of the public against taxes and other duties developed a wider populist appeal in the yuppie era of the 1980s, when the country
was caught up in the liberal spirit of the age. Even so, the People’s Party was not exactly mainstream and failed to attract the mass of voters.

Then the letter from Mustafa arrived:

You are fighting in vain Mr Hagen! Islam, the one true faith, will be victorious here in Norway, too.

It was 1987. The number of asylum seekers and refugees coming to Norway had shot up. From around a hundred per
annum, the figure had risen: almost nine thousand had sought refuge in the last year. The Labour government planned a campaign to explain to people why Norway would have to take more refugees.

At an open election meeting in Trøndelag Hagen started reading out parts of the letter. ‘“Allah is Allah and Muhammed is his prophet,”’ he read. ‘“One day mosques will be as common in Norway as churches
are today. My great-grandchildren will see this. I know, all Muslims in Norway know, that the Norwegian population will find its way to the faith one day, and this land will become Muslim! We are having more children than you, and a considerable number of true Muslim believers come to Norway every year, men of a fertile age. One day the infidel cross will be wiped from your flag!”’

This threat
shocked the audience. The letter from Mustafa proved to be a turning point in the immigration debate, which came to dominate the election campaign that year. It later turned out that the letter was bogus. It was clearly a gaffe, but Hagen protested his innocence. He had done nothing but read from a letter he had received.

In any case, the party’s support tripled in comparison with the general
election two years before, gaining 12 per cent of the vote. In the big cities, where immigration was at the highest levels, the party polled between 15 and 20 per cent.

‘A political earthquake,’ declared the party chairman. The Progress Party was here to stay.

Hagen was an absolute master at setting groups against each other. He particularly favoured referring to the elderly on one hand and
the immigrants on the other as examples of worthy and unworthy recipients of state subsidies. Through the 1990s the party demanded that some kind of migration accounting system be set up to establish the cost and calculate the long-term consequences of the growing number of immigrants from foreign cultures. The party spokesman on immigration policy, Øystein Hedstrøm, took the line that the influx
of refugees was eroding people’s morality as taxpayers because they were unwilling to make contributions that went to finance immigration. Many asylum seekers were not prepared to work because they could live well on financial support from the state, he said. What was more, the foreigners provoked in the Norwegians feelings such as ‘frustration, indignation, bitterness, fear and anxiety that could
lead to psychosomatic illnesses causing absence from work and instability at home’. He claimed that hygienic standards in the shops, restaurants and stalls run by foreigners were so poor that they could make customers ill, which again would have an economic impact on society.

Hedstrøm foresaw that the rising levels of immigration would lead to violence perpetrated by Norwegians. ‘There is a great
risk that these negative emotions will find an outlet in violent reactions in the not so distant future,’ he predicted in 1995, at about the same time as Anders Behring Breivik gave up tagging and weeded the immigrant slang out of his vocabulary.

Before the election that year it emerged that Hedstrøm had close contact with racist organisations such as the Fatherland Party and the White Electoral
Alliance. The party leadership muzzled him, but the links did not appear to damage the party, which in Oslo had its best-ever election and gained 21 per cent of the vote.

In 1996, the year before Breivik joined the Progress Party, it had turned its rhetoric against immigrants in the direction of a critique of Islam. In his speech to the party conference that year, Hagen launched an attack on
the imams. The state ought not to be supporting fundamentalism. ‘The imams are against integration and interpret the Qur’an in a way that is dangerous to the Muslims and the new generation. They should not gain any power in this country. It is a kind of racism that gives the imams in Norway power over others. The imams require education in Norwegian practices and customs and training in how to behave
here,’ he claimed. In his opinion, the Muslims had taken no decisive steps towards integration and the growth of fundamentalism had frightened Norwegians. He cited the demand for Muslim schools, segregated swimming lessons and protests against religious education lessons based on Christianity, as well as the demonstrations against
The Satanic Verses
, and the attack in 1993 on the book’s Norwegian
publisher William Nygaard, who was shot several times in the chest and shoulder, but survived.

‘Gangs are prowling the streets, stealing, going to discos in a group, fighting and committing rape in Oslo. The immigrant associations are fully aware of the situation but don’t want to cooperate with the police for fear of being called informers. They have to protect their own. These bullies are not
seen as criminals but as brave, bold heroes in this section of immigrant culture. If no one speaks out against this macho culture now, it could become a time-honoured tradition in our country.’ This was the way Hagen sounded in the 1990s. ‘When the imams preach that the Norwegians are infidels, there are automatic consequences. It means among other things that it is the duty of the Muslims not
to pay taxes, that they can steal from the shops with no moral scruples and that they can tell lies.’

*   *   *

After al-Qaida’s terrorist attacks in America on 11 September 2001 the Progress Party stepped up its rhetoric, in line with world opinion. Muslims were ruthless and dangerous. The Progress Party saw the world as George W. Bush did: us and them.

The party was flying high in the opinion
polls. With the upturn in public support, the party wanted to expand its organisation. To reach out to more people, the party had to be visible at the local level and particularly among young people. That was when it decided to set up local branches, the ones that had appealed to Anders as party fortunes prospered.

He seldom spoke in plenary sessions. The few times he did address the floor, he
gabbled nervously. He had written anything he said down in advance and read it in a monotone, without emotion.

He was not at home at the lectern. The internet was to be his territory.

The summer of 2002 was approaching. After an almost snowless winter and a glorious spring, the meteorologists said Norway could expect its hottest year in over a century.

As people sweated away in their offices,
the parties’ nomination battles were in full swing. There was vicious jostling for places on the lists for the city council elections the following year. Anders was staking everything on a political career, so he simply had to get nominated. He made himself as visible as possible and was an active contributor to the Progress Party Youth’s new online debate forum.

‘We needn’t be ashamed of being
ambitious!’ he wrote one light night in May, in one of his first posts. ‘We needn’t be ashamed of setting goals and then reaching them! We needn’t be ashamed of breaking with established norms to achieve something better!’ Norway had such a loser mentality, he argued. A Norwegian would just stand there waiting, cap in hand. He would never put himself forward, but would follow the example set by
our unassuming forefathers. This had to change, wrote Anders, using the new members of the royal family to illustrate his argument. In one of his first posts he expressed his support for Crown Prince Haakon’s marriage to Mette-Marit, a single mother with a four-year-old son, and for Princess Märtha Louise’s fiancé Ari Behn, an author whose books were steeped in drugs and dark, wild lifestyles. He
praised the two new spouses for being individualists. Had they been rich, dull, conservative figures, no one would have criticised them, he wrote. No, Norway should learn from the US, where the key to success was: 1. You’re the best. 2. You can make all your dreams come true. 3. The only limits are those you set yourself. ‘Meanwhile, the wise goblins will sit on the hill and say something completely
different: 1. Don’t think you’re anybody. 2. Don’t imagine you can achieve anything. 3. Don’t imagine anybody cares about you.’