Arntzen’s fellow judges were leaning back, slightly sunken into the chairs with the tall black backs. Their eyes were fixed on the accused, while their faces were calm, revealing nothing. The corners of their mouths slowly sank into a resting position as Breivik’s speech dragged on.
The accused drank from a glass of water.
‘Have you finished, Breivik?’ asked Arntzen.
‘I’ve got one page to go.’
He set down the glass.
‘Sarkozy, Merkel and Cameron have admitted that multiculturalism has failed in Europe. It doesn’t work. In Norway, the opposite is happening: we’re going in for more mass immigration from Asia and Africa.’
He looked down at his papers and hesitated for a couple of seconds, then exclaimed, ‘Well I’m censoring myself now, right, just so that’s clear!
‘We are the first drops of water heralding the coming storm! The purifying storm. Rivers of blood will run through the cities of Europe. My brothers and sisters will win. How can I be so sure? People are living with blinkers of prosperity. They are going to lose everything, their daily lives will be full of suffering and they will lose their identities, so now it is important for more patriots to shoulder responsibility, as I have done. Europe needs more heroes!’
His presentation had been polished in advance and his arguments built logically on each other, within his own universe, and he could not resist, as in the manifesto, repeating the best.
‘Thomas Jefferson said the following: The tree of freedom must be watered from time to time. With the blood of patriots and tyrants…’
He cleared his throat.
‘I’m almost at the end. The political elite in our country are so brazen that they expect us to applaud this deconstruction. And those who do not applaud are branded as evil racists and Nazis. This is the real madness – they are the ones who should be the subjects of psychiatric evaluation and be branded as sick, not me. It isn’t rational to flood the country with Africans and Asians to the point where our own culture is lost. This is the real madness. This is the real evil.’
He drew breath.
‘I acted on the principle of necessity on behalf of my people, my religion, my city and my country. I therefore demand to be acquitted of these charges. Those were the thirteen pages I had prepared.’
‘What is your own relationship with Christianity?’ asked the public advocate Siv Hallgren the following day. The lawyer, who had herself been a teenage mother, represented several of the bereaved relatives.
‘Well, I’m a militant Christian and not particularly religious. But I’m a bit religious. We want a Christian cultural heritage, Christian religious instruction in schools and a Christian framework for Europe.’
‘But what about you personally? Do you profess the Christian faith? Do you believe in the resurrection?’
‘I’m a Christian, I believe in God. I’m a bit religious, but not that religious.’
‘Have you read the Bible?’
‘Of course. I used to, back when we were taught about Christianity in school. Before it was abolished by the Labour Party.’
Hallgren asked him to define Norwegian culture. The one he had killed for, in order to preserve it.
‘You could… yes, you could say that the very heart of Norwegian culture is the Norwegian ethnic group.’
He hesitated for a moment, reflected and found the answer: ‘Everything that’s in Norway, from door handles to designs to beer labels to habits. It’s all culture. Phrases, ways of addressing people. Absolutely everything is culture.’
Said Breivik.
The Heart of the Matter
At the centre of the court case there was a beating heart.
The dead.
The murders had almost been pushed into the background by the discussions of the perpetrator’s psyche and ideas in the run-up to the trial. But it was the murders he was to be punished for, not the ideas.
Svein Holden and Inga Bejer Engh had been given responsibility for planning the trial the previous autumn. They were both young parents with a couple of children each and lived ordinary, privileged Norwegian lives. Holden went straight from leading a press conference about the first psychiatric report to the hospital for the birth of his second child.
The two public prosecutors spent a lot of time talking to the bereaved relatives and survivors as they planned the proceedings, fetched their children from nursery, prepared the trial, changed nappies, read interview transcripts, sang lullabies. Their meetings with other mothers and fathers only a few years older than them had a profound effect. Some were angry, others were weighed down by sorrow. Something was broken in all of them. The public prosecutors encountered both aggression and the story of my son. My daughter. Our child.
It was important both to retain the emotions and to keep them out of it. This was how the public prosecutors were reasoning as they asked themselves how best to set the parameters for the trial.
Svein Holden made a list:
Good contact with those affected.
Good procedures for the police.
Good overview of the trial.
Treat it like any other criminal case.
But it was not like any other criminal case. The scale was so large. Seventy-seven murders.
The Director of Public Prosecution had insisted that every single murder must be investigated. Time and place were to be established, when and how. Those who had lost their loved ones needed as much detail as possible; it was said to help in the healing process.
The police had learned from the response to the bombings in Madrid and London. In those trials, the cause and time of death were not established for each person, their individual fates were not treated as separate events by the court. They were simply referred to as victims of a terrorist attack.
The investigations must also be as thorough as possible so that they would stand up to potential conspiracy theories that might emerge in years to come.
Many wanted to make their mark on the trial. A campaign had started, pressing for all those who had been on Utøya and all those who had been in the government quarter to be named as victims in the charges. They had all been subjected to attempted murder, after all. In a standard trial, attempted murder would always be part of the charge.
The general rule was that if you were named in the charge, you also had to be called as a witness. It would exceed all time scales.
So where would they draw the line?
The two prosecutors were sitting in the office of the Director of Public Prosecution, counting. How many people were hit by projectiles in the government quarter? How many were hit by bullets on Utøya?
They ascertained the numbers and used that as the basis of who would be named in the charge. Those physically hit by metal or lead. In the government quarter there were nine, in addition to the eight who were killed. On Utøya there were thirty-three, on top of the sixty-nine killed.
The Director of Public Prosecutions made a few calculations; the timescale of the trial had already been established. It was to last ten weeks. Yes, it would work. They could all be called in as witnesses. There would be just enough time for that within the period they had at their disposal.
But how many had suffered direct harm in the terrorist attack?
With regard to the government quarter, they decided to write that ‘an additional two hundred people were physically injured by the explosion’. That included cuts, fractures and hearing damage. As for Utøya, they wanted to focus on the trauma suffered by many of the youngsters as a result of seeing people they knew murdered, of losing their friends.