One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Åsne Seierstad Read Free Book Online

happened on the estate. A number of the unsold flats were bought up by Oslo City Council and allocated to refugee families. Asylum seekers from Iran, Eritrea, Chile and Somalia moved intothe flats round the blue, green and red gardens, and gradually the scent of garlic, turmeric, allspice and saffron drifted out through open balcony doors.
    Until the early 1980s, Oslo’s Skøyen was a district of dazzling whiteness. Few foreigners found their way to Norway. At the start of the preceding decade, Norway had fewer than a thousand non-Western immigrants: 1971 saw the first influx offoreign workers as the Norwegian state tackled a labour shortage by issuing an invitation to Pakistan. Six hundred single men came over to work that year, taking jobs that most Norwegians did not want. But the foreign workers did not move into Skøyen. They lived in cramped and miserable conditions in run-down parts of the city.
    In 1980, the first asylum seekers arrived. Refugees presented themselvesat Norway’s borders, asking for protection. This had never happened before. In 1983, the first year the Breivik family lived at Silkestrå, 150 asylum seekers came to Norway. The year after that, three hundred. Three years later, the number was almost nine thousand.
    A Chilean family moved in on the floor below the Breiviks. They had fled Augusto Pinochet’s persecution, and after almost a yearat the asylum seeker reception centre in Oslo they were given a flat at Silkestrå. Wenche was the first person to turn up on their doorstep, with a warm ‘Welcome’ and a child in each hand.
    Anders took a liking to the youngest daughter of the family, a little tot with curly hair, two years younger than he was.
    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 withfreshly 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 theright 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 thesupport 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 carriedforward 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 focuson 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