One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (26 page)

‘Racial hatred in Sjøvegan,’ wrote
Nordlys
. ‘Asylum war in Salangen’ ran the headline in
Troms Folkeblad
. Arne Myrdal of the Stop Immigration Party rang the interviewees to offer support.

‘Young Norwegians will have to show they have been brought up better
than the asylum seekers,’ said the town’s mayor, adding that it might have been a mistake ‘to let the asylum seekers straight out into Norwegian society’ as soon as they arrived.

‘The reception centres should be in bigger towns,’ asserted two school pupils interviewed by the local press. Salangen simply was not large enough for an asylum seekers’ centre.

Sjøvegan Upper Secondary School tried
to defuse what
Nordlys
called ‘the racial hatred that has also found a breeding ground in Salangen’. The school arranged a public debate between local residents, asylum seekers and the council. One of the young Norwegians on the panel addressed the refugees in the hall: ‘You immigrants bring diseases, violence and drugs with you. Why do you come here? Is it just to get a better life?’

A girl
rose from her seat and said she thought there must be something wrong with the Norwegian boys’ self-image. Were they afraid the foreigners would come and take their girls from them?

People went home. The town had divided into two camps.

Something had to be done. Events were organised. There were get-to-know-you evenings and football matches to help people bond. The asylum centre invited people
in for cultural evenings at which the refugees performed dances and songs for the locals, while the residents of Salangen in turn provided children’s choirs, traditional fiddle concerts and the Sami singer Mari Boine, who merges the indigenous music of her roots with jazz and rock. An evening course was started for volunteer befrienders, who were to be the link between the refugees and the permanent
residents.

*   *   *

Twenty years after the first asylum seekers reached Salangen, community liaison officer Lene Lyngedal Nordmo was going through her lists. Norway had by now developed its system for receiving refugees. Two decades had taught the authorities something.

Those who were young today had grown up with the asylum centre. The refugees had become part of daily life in Salangen. That
is to say, they were there and yet they weren’t. Despite the passing of time, divisions between life at the centre and life in the town remained watertight.

Lene set her ambitions higher. Peace and quiet were not enough; she wanted to see the refugees included in Norwegian society. But it wasn’t easy, because most of them did not want to be up here. They wanted to go to Oslo.

For a time, Lene
had responsibility for minors who were there on limited leave to remain. This meant they would be sent out of Norway the day they turned eighteen. As a consequence, they saw no point in learning Norwegian. This was a difficult group to deal with, often depressed and sometimes resorting to aggression.

Before 2008, under-eighteens were always granted residence in Norway. That led to a dramatic
increase in minors seeking asylum in the country. Tighter restrictions were imposed. Limited leave to remain was the step taken by the red–green coalition to limit immigration. In practice, it meant that anyone over fifteen on entering Norway, and at least sixteen when the decision was made, was only granted temporary rights of residence. As soon as they reached eighteen they had to leave the country.
If they did not go voluntarily they were deported, many on the very day they turned eighteen.

In Salangen there were about thirty individual under-eighteens who had been granted residence in Norway. As Lene moved her pen up and down the sheet of paper, her bangles jingled. She wondered what to do to motivate her refugees to learn.

Well, she did know what they wanted more than anything.

A young
Afghan had come into her office one day.

‘I would like to have a friend,’ he said.

She gave him a sad look.

‘You know what, there’s lots I can help you with. Just not that.’

Even though the youth club had put up posters and invited the asylum seekers to Velve, it didn’t really help. The two groups still ended up sitting at separate tables. Some of the local girls felt the asylum seekers stared
too much, and adult refugees way above the club’s age limit started to come along too. A few of the asylum seekers sold drugs and smoked hash there, and the young Norwegians gradually stopped coming. The foreigners took over the club.

And they were no nearer integration.

Lene sighed. The only time the girls of the area had flocked up to the centre was just after the war in Kosovo, because they
thought the young Kosovars were so good-looking.

If the young refugees were to have an active future in Norway and not remain stuck on benefits, it was crucial they did well at school. They had been put in classes of their own and received extra support with their homework so they could keep up. Lene had an idea: if she could get kids of the refugees’ own age to help them with their homework,
it would work better than the adult befrienders she had been using.

Her sheet of paper filled up with names of young people in the area who she thought would be suitable. As a mother of teenagers herself, she had a fair idea who they all were.

She rang the first person on her list, a boy who lived near by.

*   *   *

‘Hi, Simon here,’ came the quick reply at the other end.

‘Could you pop round
to the office for a minute?’ Lene asked.

She applied some fresh lipstick and was standing by the window as he arrived. Simon had just passed his test and was driving round in an old red Ford Sierra. He swung recklessly into the council office car park, parked the car across three spaces, jumped out, slammed the door shut and sauntered across the forecourt. Everything about him signalled that
he owned the world.

‘How amazing to see you driving a car,’ smiled Lene as he came in.

Then she told him why she had asked him to come. Was he free on Monday to Thursday evenings, between six and nine?

‘Four evenings a week? But I’ve got school and football, and skiing and the AUF and…’ Simon was about to start his final year at upper secondary school.

‘How about three evenings, then?’ asked
Lene. ‘We need some good homework buddies. People who can inspire others to learn.’

Three evenings, he could do that. He of all people did not want to miss out on being part of the council’s integration work. He stood up to go; he had to get to football practice.

Lene had drawn up a list of those she thought would work well together. Simon would be paired with three different people, one each
evening. A boy from Somalia, a boy from Afghanistan and a girl from Ethiopia.

A few days later she rang him again.

‘Could you just drop in with your tax details?’ she said.

‘Tax details?’ exclaimed Simon. ‘Am I getting paid for this?’

*   *   *

It was a great job, in fact. Not very much homework was done, though.

‘How can I get to know some Norwegian girls?’ was one of the first things Mehdi
asked him.

‘Well, it’s like this…’ said Simon with a smile. The three hours passed in a flash.

Mehdi turned up faithfully to every Monday-evening session. The two boys were the same age, born only a few months apart. Simon into his family of teachers in Kirkenes, Mehdi into a farming family in Wardak Province, Afghanistan.

His grandfather had been a major tribal leader in the wide circle round
the old king Zahir Shah, who was deposed in a communist-supported coup in 1973. That was the start of the family’s downfall. The next catastrophe was the Soviet invasion of 1979, which led to the killing of 1.5 million Afghans.

In 1992, the year Mehdi was born, civil war broke out between warlords hungry for power. After four years the men with the black turbans were the victors. Mehdi came from
the Hazara people; the Taliban showed no mercy to the Hazaras and engaged in ethnic cleansing of towns and villages.

Like most people in Wardak, Mehdi’s parents could neither read nor write. They kept animals, but much of their grazing land was taken from them by the Taliban. Mehdi and his brother were sent to the
madrasah
while their four sisters were kept at home.

‘When you can read, people
respect you,’ Mehdi’s father told him. ‘Read and grow wise.’ At school they had their heads filled first and foremost with religion. The teachers were an extended arm of the Taliban.

The boys learned about the godless foreigners who had occupied their country. The foreigners wanted to destroy Afghan culture, to crush Islam. ‘In Europe, the women go about half naked,’ they were told.

But Mehdi
did not entirely trust his teachers. He had grown up with stories of what the Pashtuns had done to his people in the past. They wanted to be rid of the Hazaras and took their land, he had heard. He also knew that in earlier times people in the region had worshipped Buddha. He had heard that the Taliban had blown up two enormous thousand-year-old Buddha statues in the neighbouring province of Bamyan
because they were naked. They wanted to destroy everything that was not in line with the true teaching of Islam.

Just before Mehdi’s ninth birthday, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. Barely a month after the terrorist attack, America began its bombing raids on his country. The Taliban fled from Wardak Province to Pakistan and the Hazaras could hold up their heads once
more. But within a few years the Islamists were trickling back and inciting the people to resist the Western occupiers. They started recruiting soldiers from among the local farmers to fight the international forces. From 2008 onwards Wardak Province was again under de facto Taliban control. The men with the black turbans advanced across the country. They came to recruit Mehdi and his brother. Their
father refused. But he knew that if they had come once, they would always come back. How long could he go on refusing?

He sold land and cattle.

‘Go,’ he said. ‘Go to Europe. Find a better life than the one we have here. War could break out again, any time now. In Europe, there’s no war,’ his father said. ‘People are given everything they need there, you can go to school, you get books … it’s
a
democracy
there.’

It was a word Mehdi had heard many times on the radio. But he had no idea what it meant.

Before long the two brothers were sitting on the back of a truck on their way to Kabul. From there, they took a bus to the border with Pakistan. Then they walked, drove and took to the saddle, reaching Iran, Turkey, Greece …

‘Don’t talk to anyone on the trip,’ their father had impressed
on them. ‘Don’t make friends with anyone before you get there.’

*   *   *

Mehdi told his story to Simon in dribs and drabs over the course of the year.

Squeezed under the driver’s seat of a long-distance lorry, he had finally reached Oslo.

‘It is a big place with nice cars, lots of girls and beautiful buildings like the Oslo City shopping centre,’ Mehdi told Simon. ‘The thing I longed to see
was what the women looked like,’ he smiled. His dreams had been of discos, ladies and dancing.

For a couple of weeks they were in paradise. But in November 2009, when Mehdi was seventeen, the brothers were sent to an asylum centre in Finnsnes, a small place north of Salangen.

It was dark and dismal. They felt trapped. Both suffered from severe depression and regretted having ever made the journey.
At least in Afghanistan there was sun.

The brothers were in perpetual conflict with the staff and sabotaged the centre’s usual procedures. They were meant to keep their room clean and scrub the corridor once a week. They refused to do so. At home, their mother and sisters had done all the cleaning. It was beneath their dignity; it was humiliating.

Mehdi’s brother threw down the scrubbing brush
and emptied a bucket of water over a female assistant at the centre. Was she going to stand there watching him scrub the floor? Why couldn’t she do it herself?

It was all unfair and so bloody stupid. But whenever they rang their parents, they told them how great everything was, what a nice place they lived in, how much they had learned at school. They wanted their parents to believe their money
had been well spent.

Eventually the elder brother was sent south and Mehdi got a place at the asylum centre in Salangen. Life seemed less of a trial. Even if it was not like hanging out in Oslo City and watching the girls, maybe things would still work out for him up here in the north.

But, ‘The Norwegian girls are scared of me,’ Mehdi complained.

Simon advised him to go easy. Let things take
their time.

Easy enough for him to say. From Monday to Monday he disappeared out of Mehdi’s life to all his other activities: to conferences, duties and tasks, football practice, skiing and ski jumping, his family and girlfriend. While Mehdi waited for Simon from 9 p.m. each Monday to 6 p.m. the following Monday.

For Simon it was a job, for Mehdi it was clutching at straws.

After the last homework
session of the summer, Simon took him along to Millionfisken, the annual festival where you could win a million kroner if you caught a fish of a certain size, decided by Lloyd’s of London. Nobody had ever won the million.

‘If I hold hands with someone, does it mean she’s my girlfriend?’ asked Mehdi. Simon just laughed.

‘How many beers will I have to drink before my head feels hot?’ Mehdi went
on.

‘I reckon you’ll have to find that out for yourself,’ answered Simon.

After four beers, Mehdi was pinching girls’ bottoms, pointing at Simon and grinning.

‘Not like that Mehdi. Not like that!’ Simon shook his head. But Mehdi did not hear. It was the first time since he came to Salangen that he just felt happy, thoroughly happy. He was a young guy at a festival and he didn’t want to be anywhere
else. He felt so cool being with Simon. So cool and hot and happy.

‘Don’t make friends with anyone before you get there,’ his father had said.

Well, now he was there.