The local press offered continuous coverage of the conflicts. There was finally something in the district worth reporting on. The townspeople followed events from a distance.
When the centre had been open for a few months there was the first scuffle between us and them. Fists, pool cues and knives were used.
A brawl outside the pub in Salangen led to criminal proceedings against both the Norwegians and refugees involved. Thirty people were formally interviewed in connection with the case; the county sheriff took a dim view of fighting.
‘Our investigations reveal that Norwegian youngsters have been play-acting to blacken the reputation of the asylum seekers,’ declared the sheriff. ‘It’s part of young men’s lives to prove themselves in front of girls,’ said his subordinate.
The young Norwegians told the local press that the asylum seekers had surrounded them, beaten them up and held bread knives to their throats. The refugees, for their part, claimed the partying Norwegians had threatened them, saying they would get killed if they did not leave the pub.
‘There’s a lynch-mob mentality in town now,’ one of the protagonists told the local paper. ‘I think the safest thing would be to send the asylum seekers away from Sjøvegan as soon as possible.’ The young man was pictured from behind, with a denim jacket and mullet hairstyle.
‘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 halclass="underline" ‘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.’