Norwegian youths return to Utoya
Dignitaries join campers to reclaim site of massacre in 2011 that left 69 dead
UTOYA, NORWAY— With songs, volleyball games and defiant displays of summer languor, more than 1,000 Norwegian youths Friday joined the secretary general of NATO and other dignitaries on the island of Utoya, reclaiming the bucolic summer retreat from the horrors of a 2011attack by a right-wing extremist that killed 69 people here.
The reopening, under heavy police guard and cloudy skies, of the Labour Party summer youth camp — equipped with a new dining hall but still scarred in places by the murderous rampage of Anders Behring Breivik — marked the latest stage in a long and painful process to heal the wounds left by Norway’s worst terrorist atrocity since the Second World War.
“It is good to be back,” Mani Hussaini, an immigrant from Syria and leader since last year of the Workers’ Youth League, the Labour Party’s youth wing, said at an opening ceremony. “We are here because we intend to change the world,” he added, vowing that young people would defeat the forces of violent xenophobia that had led Breivik to murder 69 people, mostly youths, on Utoya and kill eight others in a bomb attack the same day in central Oslo.
Breivik, who is serving a 21-year prison sentence, the maximum under Norwegian law, has told investigators that he attacked the youth camp on July 22, 2011, because he wanted to wipe out future leaders of the Labour Party, which he denounced as an instrument of the “Muslim colonization” of Europe.
Breivik, who rejected court efforts to have him classified as insane, claimed to be serving a noble cause and posted rambling manifestos on the Internet to propagate his beliefs, a toxic stew of paranoia, neo-Nazism and delusions of grandeur.
The Utoya attack, however, did nothing to slow the rise of far-right politicians who, while disavowing violence, have surged in recent years across much of Europe amid widespread hostility toward immigrants and perceptions that Islam is challenging national values. Norway’s anti-immigration Progress Party, of which Breivik was once a member, won a place in government after elections in 2013.
With local elections scheduled for next month, Hussaini, the youth leader, called on the Labour Party, once Norway’s dominant party, to rally behind its traditional values.
“We have 35 days to paint Norway red,” he said, adding that the Work- ers’ Youth League wanted to ban all nuclear weapons, a position at odds with Norway’s membership in NATO, which includes the United States and other nuclear powers.
Ina Libak, a leader of the Labour youth wing who was shot four times by Breivik, returned to the island Friday and celebrated.
“I am just happy to be back at kitchen service, taking the dishes, doing the normal stuff, what we used to before,” Libak said.