A special report by Fife journalist David MacDougall in Oslo.
The last thing anyone wants to do at 5 o’clock on a Friday afternoon is answer a phone call from work. I’d been on the verge of going out for early dinner with a fellow Scottish transplant to Finland, when my newsroom in London called to say there were reports of an explosion in Oslo. I called my friend and told him to go on without me, I’d catch him up. It was probably a gas leak or something. After all, nobody sets off bombs in Norway.
I moved to Finland for work just four months ago, part of a new initiative by my employers, Associated Press Television, to cover more news across the eight Nordic and Baltic countries.
After spending the previous two years in Pakistan, and almost six years before that in Iraq, I thought the change of location would bring an end to urgent phone calls about car bombs and terror attacks (of which there had been far too many already in my career as a journalist).
But the events of Friday, July 22, showed not even the Nordic region is immune from the sort of violence that has impacted many other parts of the world including Scotland over the past decade.
Soon, more details were coming in about the situation in Norway. A bomb in the centre of Oslo had seemed to target government buildings and the office of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. The first photos from the scene, which I saw online while racing to the airport to catch a flight by the skin of my teeth, showed a great deal of damage at the site of the blast.
My initial thought like many other people, I imagine was that large-scale bombings might well be the work of Islamic extremists. It had happened in Madrid, in Bali, and countless times in Iraq and Pakistan when I worked there, but by the time I landed in Oslo I learned there had also been a shooting incident on an island where Norway’s Labour party was hosting a camp the same political party that Prime Minister Stoltenberg belongs to.
The twin attacks were now starting to sound more like domestic terror, and my colleagues at Associated Press were first to break the news that Norway’s government and intelligence agencies had quickly ruled out an Islamic terror link.Lazy summerAt this time of year, half the population of the Nordic region is on holiday, enjoying the lazy warm summer days before the prolonged darkness of winter sets in. From Reykjavik to Helsinki, capital cities are emptied as folk embark on trips to the country or to their lakeside cottages.
Even taking seasonal holidays into account, I was struck by just how empty Oslo was when I arrived there on Friday evening, just a few hours after the explosion in the city centre.
Oslo was like a ghost town. Almost nobody walking on the streets. Few cars driving around. Authorities had urged people to avoid the compact and picturesque downtown area, and stay at home. Oslo residents were clearly heeding that advice.
Of course, I wasn’t the only Associated Press Television journalist in Norway by the end of that first Friday. We had rapidly deployed four colleagues from other parts of Europe, with two more on the way by morning from our Paris bureau. We covered the key locations as the story unfolded at Utoya and in Oslo.
By the time I went to bed, the death toll from the bombing had risen to seven, and police were saying 10 people had been shot by a gunman on Utoya island. After two hours sleep, I woke in the early hours of Saturday morning to the shocking news that the death toll on Utoya had risen dramatically.
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Police now said 80 people had been killed by a gunman there, although the situation seemed very confused. While the death toll in Utoya would be revised downwards by police in the middle of the week, the sickening details of what transpired on the island would horrify the country and unite Norway in an unprecedented outpouring of emotion.
I was able to interview three survivors from Utoya Dana, Hajin and Hana Barzingi immigrant siblings from Kurdistan who are members of the young Labour party, and who had gone to the summer camp to become more engaged in democracy and the political process of their adopted country.
When I spoke to the Barzingi family, the pain of their ordeal was still very raw. They were also extremely distrustful of the media.
Dana (21) had been asked by one journalist to put on the same bloody clothes he’d worn on Utoya, to retell his story. Of course Dana refused … and I’m not certain they really wanted to meet with me either, until I broke the ice talking about my visits to northern Iraq, and we joked about the Kurds’ almost obsessive love of picnics in the summer. Slowly, their story unfolded.GunshotsHajin had been talking on her mobile phone when she heard the first gunshots, and ran into a bathroom with other teenagers to hide. Her sister Hana had also taken refuge in a building, but looked out the window and saw the gunman shoot two of her friends. Dana had tried frantically to find his sisters, stopping to drag wounded friends out of the open ground to what he hoped was a safe place.
Eventually, after what must have been the longest 90 minutes of their lives, the shooting stopped. Dana and Hajin were alive on the island. Hana risked her life further, by swimming from Utoya’s rocky shore to the mainland. Some others who tried to do the same were apparently shot in the water. The police delayed by a series of mishaps from reaching the island had arrested Anders Breivik, a Norwegian with a right-wing manifesto who thought his country had become too multicultural.
Soon, Breivik’s name and face would be known to people across the country and across the world. Breivik had calmly surrendered to police, and outlined the smallest details of his plan in a wordy manifesto right down to what he wanted to wear in court, and what he might say during his first media interview.
The most remarkable event I witnessed last week was the reaction of the Norwegian people. Scandinavians are not known as the most outwardly emotional people. But the grief which the country felt showed itself in countless floral tributes. On statues, outside churches, in parks, in front of government buildings, in public squares and private homes, Norwegians left flowers and lit candles.
They placed hand-written notes next to photos of victims. They grieved openly, they comforted and supported each other. They responded to violence not with the promise of revenge or retribution, but as a drained Prime Minister Stoltenberg said in the hours after the attacks with more openness and even more democracy. This is the Norwegian way.
There will, of course, be trying times ahead for Norway as dozens of funerals take place. Then, the long legal process of bringing Anders Breivik to trial will inevitably reopen wounds and a period of introspection for the country. The painful questions of what could have been done if anything to prevent Breivik’s carefully rehearsed plans coming to fruition; or if authorities could have responded faster, better, will all have to be asked and answered.
In the months to come, I will return to Norway to follow this story. I hope to meet the Barzingi family again and find out how they cope with life after the massacre.
The mental scars of what happened on Utoya will take a long to start to heal. But already there are positive signs.
Last Thursday I asked Hajin Barzingi what she thought about Anders Breivik, how she feels about him. “I don’t want to think about him,” Hajin told me. “He doesn’t earn any thought of mne. He wants attention, he’s not getting attention of mine.”
Like the whole of Norway, Hajin is hurt but defiant. Bloodied, but unbroken. And like Norway, Hajin will surely see brighter days ahead.
* David MacDougall is a journalist with Associated Press Television based in Finland, from where he covers the whole of the Nordic and Baltic region.
He grew up in Fife and after leaving Inverkeithing High School, he went to work for the Foreign Office in London. Later, he was posted as a diplomat to British embassies in Finland, Israel, the Congo, Guatemala and Iraq.
Discovering a passion for news and current events, David took a leave of absence from the FCO and went to study journalism in America, where he also worked as a producer at a local television station. That eventually led him to be a reporter for Fox News Channel in Baghdad, where he covered the war in Iraq for almost six years and became a familiar face on American television, reporting from the front lines as US and coalition forces battled insurgents. During his time in Iraq, David also filed reports for Sky News and BBC Radio Scotland.
David has spent most of the past two years living in Pakistan, and working at the Associated Press bureau in Islamabad. However, he’s also covered a variety of stories in the past 12 months, such as last year’s South Africa World Cup, the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, large scale democracy protests in Bahrain and President Obama’s recent visit to Ireland.