One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (6 page)

Eva gradually started to tag along with the boy from the second floor wherever he went.
For his part, he thawed out with the new girl, grew more talkative and taught her new Norwegian words every day. With the Latin American family, he felt secure.

Eva got a place at his nursery in Vigeland Park, and when Anders moved on while she still had two years left at nursery he waited for her every afternoon after school.

Smestad was a school for conditioned children who had fathers with
freshly ironed shirts, posh middle names and villas with big gardens. King Harald went to school there after the war, and was later followed by his own children, Prince Haakon Magnus and Princess Märtha Louise. The Prince was six years older than Anders and finished his last year at primary just as Anders was starting.

This school district is a dark blue belt in Oslo and it helped deliver the
right wing’s election victory in 1981. A wave of privatisations and deregulation of property prices followed. The value of housing-cooperative flats soon soared.

In the spring of 1986, the year Anders Breivik started school, the Labour Party returned to power. The Conservative Prime Minister Kåre Willoch had faced a vote of confidence after proposing to raise petrol prices and failed to win the
support of the right-wing Progress Party.

Suddenly, Gro Harlem Brundtland was Prime Minister again. This time she was better prepared. She became the first head of government in the world to form a Cabinet with as many female ministers as male ones: eight out of seventeen Cabinet posts, plus herself at the top.

This was a new Labour Party, which tapped into the spirit of the age and carried
forward many of the economic changes brought in by Kåre Willoch’s Conservative government.

At the same time, Brundtland’s policies gave women a set of rights that no other country could match. Pragmatic as she was, Gro set out to make life more practical for women, and for men. Her government extended maternity leave, built nurseries and gave more rights to single parents, and there was a focus
on improving children’s and women’s health. In the wake of these reforms came a stream of new, confident women who wanted to play their part in society.

Not everyone was happy. State feminism was the insult hurled by some. A matriarchy, complained others. The term ‘vagina state’ was later coined. But it was still Gro Harlem Brundtland who put her stamp on Norway more than any other politician
in Anders’s school years.

Anders himself was growing up in a female world consisting of his mother, his sister and Eva. It was fun playing with Anders, Eva thought, at least for a while. Because Anders was always the one who decided on the game. It was only when they were at her flat that she had a say. They built a den in the living room, played with her dolls or just hung around in the kitchen
with her parents. When they were upstairs at Anders’s place they never played where his mother was. Round there, they were never allowed to stay in the living room, which was always kept pristine, nor in the kitchen. They were only allowed to be in his room and they had to keep the door closed. That was where Anders had his toys and games, all arranged in neat rows on the shelves. Wenche really
preferred them to play outside. Because Anders’s mother liked peace and quiet.

Whenever Eva tried to play with other children Anders pulled her away; he wanted to keep her to himself. He liked it best when there were just the two of them.

But sometimes the group took over. There were so many youngsters at Silkestrå it was difficult to keep the others at bay. In the basement there was a room
where some parent had installed a table-tennis table. The children would take their cassette players down there and dance to Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna, and later to rap music. Anders found his own spot. He always sat on the ventilation pipes in the corner and did not join in the dancing or the table tennis. From there he could see everything, and was left in peace. There was a smell of urine
in that corner. Whenever the smell spread through the basement, Anders got the blame. ‘It stinks of pee, it must be Anders!’ the others laughed.

*   *   *

The ants in the wall had a permanent path from the grass, across the tarmac, along the edge of the footpath, across a grating and up the steps. Anders would sit there waiting.

‘You’re going to die!’

‘Got you!’

He picked them up one by one
and squashed them. Sometimes with his thumb, sometimes his index finger. ‘You and you and you and you!’ he decided, there on the steps, master of life and death.

The little girls found him disgusting. He was so intense, and he was cruel to animals. For a while he had some rats in a cage and would poke them with pens and pencils. Eva said she thought he was hurting them, but he took no notice.
Anders caught bumblebees, dropped them in water and then brought them up to the surface in a sieve so he could watch them drown. Pet owners at Silkestrå made it clear to their children that Anders was not to come anywhere near their cats or dogs. Anders was often the only one not invited to come and stroke other children’s new puppies or kittens.

Little by little, Eva started to get a feeling
that something was wrong. But she dared not tell her parents that she did not want to play with Anders any more, because her mother and Wenche were by now good friends. Wenche was teaching them how to adapt to life in Norway, and she passed on clothes that no longer fitted Anders and Elisabeth.

Eva never told her parents that it was Anders who broke the heads off the neighbours’ roses, leaving
just the stalks; who threw stones through open windows and ran away; or that he teased and bullied kids who were smaller than him, ideally the new arrivals who had not acquired the language to defend themselves.

One of his victims was a skinny little boy from Eritrea. On one occasion, Anders found an old rug, rolled him up in it and jumped up and down on him. ‘Don’t do that, you’re hurting him!’
cried Eva. But she stood on the sidelines, watching.

There was only one thing Anders could not abide. Being told off. Then, he would melt away while the other kids were left there to take a scolding for scrumping apples or ringing on doorbells and running away. Anders would creep out again when things had calmed down.

Once, he could not get away in time and was caught by Mrs Broch. To get his
revenge after her rebuke, he peed on her doormat. He peed on her newspaper. He peed in her letterbox. Later, he went and peed in her storeroom. It was from then on that he got the blame for the stale urine smell in the basement.

One of the victims of his bullying was a girl with a mental disability. One day, Anders squashed a rotten apple into the face of the girl’s favourite doll just as her
father was going by. ‘You bother my daughter one more time and I’ll hang you on the clothesline in the cellar,’ her father, a university professor, roared.

Anders took notice. A father’s threats were something he had respect for. He never went near the girl again.

*   *   *

He was by now seeing his own father in the school holidays. The first time, he was four and a half and his father took
him for a week’s summer holiday at a cabin by the sea. Jens would occasionally ring Wenche and say he wanted to see his son. The boy sometimes ran and hid, and the other children were sent out to look for him.

Jens usually spent his summers at a country cottage in Normandy. Then Wenche would deliver Anders to the Scandinavian Airlines staff at Oslo airport, and after a two-hour flight he would
be picked up by his father in Paris. Sometimes his older half-siblings would be there. They went on family outings or to the beach. At the summer cottage it was mainly Jens’s third wife who took care of the little boy. She had no children of her own and grew fond of Anders, who also became attached to her. He was overjoyed whenever she offered to read him a story. ‘Do you really want to?’ he would
ask her. ‘Are you sure you’ve got time?’ He would sit curled up on her lap for hours while he was being read to. He calmed down there. And seemed to forget everything around him.

*   *   *

When Eva started school, Anders was in Year 3. He would not acknowledge her any longer. Not at school, that is.

The blue garden, the park and the forest were separate from school – like different continents.
Their friendship only belonged in one of them.

This gave the little girl the space she needed to find her own friends. One of them was the girl who lived on the ground floor of their block of flats. She was scared of Anders too. Every time she went out of the door, she was afraid he was going to spit on her from the second floor. It had only happened once, but that was enough to make a horror
of gobs of spit dog her entire childhood.

Eva finally got her own group of friends. She was now tough enough to say no to Anders when he wanted her to come out and play.

*   *   *

Anders was on his own again.

But one day he latched onto some classmates. It proved not to be so hard, after all. He just said hello, and they said hello back.

In his primary-school years, there was nothing very
remarkable about Anders. He was there, but did not draw attention to himself. He joined the Scouts, he played football and rode round on his bike with his friends.

What marked him out from the others was that his parents were never there for him. The football team relied on parents to take turns driving the players to matches and tournaments. He always had to get a lift with others, mostly with
Kristian, who lived close by. Team sports were never really Anders’s thing. He had poor ball control and often misjudged passes, but he was there.

Anders was average at most things: average height, average at school, an average sort of bully. He was far from the worst, and also capable of showing a kind of concern, like helping a bullied child who’d been hit in the face with a snowball look for
his glasses. If the glasses were covered in snow he would brush them clean before handing them back.

One boy in the class was a particular target. Ahmed was nicely dressed, tall and dark – the only Pakistani in the school. He would generally sit and read in the library at break time so he would not have to face the school playground alone.

They called him Brownie.

Then one day Ahmed retaliated
for the first time, and knocked Anders over. When Anders struggled to his feet, battered and bruised, everything had changed.

It was the start of a friendship.

They ran around the forest together, played basketball, went to each other’s flats to watch films. Even at primary school, the two of them were keen to earn money. Every day they waited for the newspapers to arrive. Once the copies of
Aftenposten
had been delivered they transferred them to their trolleys and lugged them round to the front doormats in the neighbourhood.

Anders had found a friend.

Al-Anfal

Remember when God revealed to the angels: ‘I am with you, so grant believers resolve. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. So strike above the necks, and strike their every finger!’ For they defied God and His Messenger, and who so defies God and His Messenger, God is severe in retribution. Here it is: so taste it! For the unbelievers the torment of the Fire!

The Qur’an, 8:12–14

It was no coincidence that Saddam Hussein chose a chapter from the Qur’an to name the assault he was planning on the Kurds.
Al-Anfal
means spoils of war and is a reference to God’s order to Muhammad to do battle against the infidels with all his might.

And the unbelievers shall be herded into hell
, said God to Muhammad after the first great battle for Islam in Badr in 624,
in order that God may distinguish the depraved from the pure. He shall heap the depraved one upon the other, piling them all up, and deliver that pile to hell. These are truly the losers.

The officers of the Iraqi army in 1988 similarly ordered their soldiers to tie the Kurds together head to toe, blindfold them and dump them from trucks into ready-dug mass graves in the desert. The victims landed
on top of the still-warm bodies of dead neighbours, brothers and other relatives, and lay there waiting to be shot.

Al-Anfal
is the Kurds’ holocaust – a genocide committed with the ultimate aim of Arabising Kurdistan. Arabisation had already been going on for decades. The Kurds and other minorities had been forcibly moved from border areas, while Arab tribespeople were brought in from the south
under the supervision of the Iraqi army. It was important for the government to take control of the oil-rich areas around Kirkuk and Khanaqin.

The Iraqi army command calculated how to kill the maximum number of people quickly and efficiently. The villages to be cleansed were first surrounded by soldiers, then the people were forced from their houses and driven away. On reaching the place of execution
they were handed over to firing squads from the elite security forces. Bulldozers covered the bodies with sand and earth, and the Kurdish problem was on the way to a solution.

By naming the campaign of extermination after a sura of the Qur’an, the Iraqi government sought to legitimise its executions as a war against unbelievers. The Kurdish mosques in areas selected by the Prohibited Villages
Committee of Central Security were razed to the ground by the army’s corps of engineers. First with dynamite, then with bulldozers. A decree from the highest level ordained that no settlement was to be spared. After the raids, the destruction was inspected by helicopter, and if as much as a single building remained standing the area commander was held to account.

One lovely spring morning, the
scent of flowers and sweet apples came wafting across the rooftops in a village high up in the Kurdish mountains. Then people’s eyes began to water and their skin to burn. The babies died first, then the toddlers, then the old people, and finally even the strong. Those who survived were left blind or with other serious after-effects.