One of Us

by Åsne Seierstad

  * * *

  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.’

  Three evenings, he could do that. He of all people did not want to miss out on being part of the council’s integration work. He stood up to go; he had to get to football practice.

  Lene had drawn up a list of those she thought would work well together. Simon would be paired with three different people, one each evening. A boy from Somalia, a boy from Afghanistan and a girl from Ethiopia.

  A few days later she rang him again.

  ‘Could you just drop in with your tax details?’ she said.

  ‘Tax details?’ exclaimed Simon. ‘Am I getting paid for this?’

  * * *

  It was a great job, in fact. Not very much homework was done, though.

  ‘How can I get to know some Norwegian girls?’ was one of the first things Mehdi asked him.

  ‘Well, it’s like this…’ said Simon with a smile. The three hours passed in a flash.

  Mehdi turned up faithfully to every Monday-evening session. The two boys were the same age, born only a few months apart. Simon into his family of teachers in Kirkenes, Mehdi into a farming family in Wardak Province, Afghanistan.

  His grandfather had been a major tribal leader in the wide circle round the old king Zahir Shah, who was deposed in a communist-supported coup in 1973. That was the start of the family’s downfall. The next catastrophe was the Soviet invasion of 1979, which led to the killing of 1.5 million Afghans.

  In 1992, the year Mehdi was born, civil war broke out between warlords hungry for power. After four years the men with the black turbans were the victors. Mehdi came from the Hazara people; the Taliban showed no mercy to the Hazaras and engaged in ethnic cleansing of towns and villages.

  Like most people in Wardak, Mehdi’s parents could neither read nor write. They kept animals, but much of their grazing land was taken from them by the Taliban. Mehdi and his brother were sent to the madrasah while their four sisters were kept at home.

  ‘When you can read, people respect you,’ Mehdi’s father told him. ‘Read and grow wise.’ At school they had their heads filled first and foremost with religion. The teachers were an extended arm of the Taliban.

  The boys learned about the godless foreigners who had occupied their country. The foreigners wanted to destroy Afghan culture, to crush Islam. ‘In Europe, the women go about half naked,’ they were told.

  But Mehdi did not entirely trust his teachers. He had grown up with stories of what the Pashtuns had done to his people in the past. They wanted to be rid of the Hazaras and took their land, he had heard. He also knew that in earlier times people in the region had worshipped Buddha. He had heard that the Taliban had blown up two enormous thousand-year-old Buddha statues in the neighbouring province of Bamyan because they were naked. They wanted to destroy everything that was not in line with the true teaching of Islam.

  Just before Mehdi’s ninth birthday, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. Barely a month after the terrorist attack, America began its bombing raids on his country. The Taliban fled from Wardak Province to Pakistan and the Hazaras could hold up their heads once more. But within a few years the Islamists were trickling back and inciting the people to resist the Western occupiers. They started recruiting soldiers from among the local farmers to fight the international forces. From 2008 onwards Wardak Province was again under de facto Taliban control. The men with the black turbans advanced across the country. They came to recruit Mehdi and his brother. Their father refused. But he knew that if they had come once, they would always come back. How long could he go on refusing?

  He sold land and cattle.


  ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Go to Europe. Find a better life than the one we have here. War could break out again, any time now. In Europe, there’s no war,’ his father said. ‘People are given everything they need there, you can go to school, you get books … it’s a democracy there.’

  It was a word Mehdi had heard many times on the radio. But he had no idea what it meant.

  Before long the two brothers were sitting on the back of a truck on their way to Kabul. From there, they took a bus to the border with Pakistan. Then they walked, drove and took to the saddle, reaching Iran, Turkey, Greece …

  ‘Don’t talk to anyone on the trip,’ their father had impressed on them. ‘Don’t make friends with anyone before you get there.’

  * * *

  Mehdi told his story to Simon in dribs and drabs over the course of the year.

  Squeezed under the driver’s seat of a long-distance lorry, he had finally reached Oslo.

  ‘It is a big place with nice cars, lots of girls and beautiful buildings like the Oslo City shopping centre,’ Mehdi told Simon. ‘The thing I longed to see was what the women looked like,’ he smiled. His dreams had been of discos, ladies and dancing.

  For a couple of weeks they were in paradise. But in November 2009, when Mehdi was seventeen, the brothers were sent to an asylum centre in Finnsnes, a small place north of Salangen.

  It was dark and dismal. They felt trapped. Both suffered from severe depression and regretted having ever made the journey. At least in Afghanistan there was sun.

  The brothers were in perpetual conflict with the staff and sabotaged the centre’s usual procedures. They were meant to keep their room clean and scrub the corridor once a week. They refused to do so. At home, their mother and sisters had done all the cleaning. It was beneath their dignity; it was humiliating.

  Mehdi’s brother threw down the scrubbing brush and emptied a bucket of water over a female assistant at the centre. Was she going to stand there watching him scrub the floor? Why couldn’t she do it herself?

  It was all unfair and so bloody stupid. But whenever they rang their parents, they told them how great everything was, what a nice place they lived in, how much they had learned at school. They wanted their parents to believe their money had been well spent.

  Eventually the elder brother was sent south and Mehdi got a place at the asylum centre in Salangen. Life seemed less of a trial. Even if it was not like hanging out in Oslo City and watching the girls, maybe things would still work out for him up here in the north.

  But, ‘The Norwegian girls are scared of me,’ Mehdi complained.

  Simon advised him to go easy. Let things take their time.

  Easy enough for him to say. From Monday to Monday he disappeared out of Mehdi’s life to all his other activities: to conferences, duties and tasks, football practice, skiing and ski jumping, his family and girlfriend. While Mehdi waited for Simon from 9 p.m. each Monday to 6 p.m. the following Monday.

  For Simon it was a job, for Mehdi it was clutching at straws.

  After the last homework session of the summer, Simon took him along to Millionfisken, the annual festival where you could win a million kroner if you caught a fish of a certain size, decided by Lloyd’s of London. Nobody had ever won the million.

  ‘If I hold hands with someone, does it mean she’s my girlfriend?’ asked Mehdi. Simon just laughed.

  ‘How many beers will I have to drink before my head feels hot?’ Mehdi went on.

  ‘I reckon you’ll have to find that out for yourself,’ answered Simon.

  After four beers, Mehdi was pinching girls’ bottoms, pointing at Simon and grinning.

  ‘Not like that Mehdi. Not like that!’ Simon shook his head. But Mehdi did not hear. It was the first time since he came to Salangen that he just felt happy, thoroughly happy. He was a young guy at a festival and he didn’t want to be anywhere else. He felt so cool being with Simon. So cool and hot and happy.

  ‘Don’t make friends with anyone before you get there,’ his father had said.

  Well, now he was there.

  Patriots and Tyrants

  It was a declaration of war.

  A very exhausting declaration of war. The same phrases came over and over again. Scattered around in the text. Sometimes they were identical, sometimes words had been changed. Some of the phrases he had polished for a while, whereas others came tumbling one after another. He repeated his arguments. His tips and advice remained the same from one page to the next. The purpose of the text was to inspire fighting spirit, to fire up the reader.

  No one would be able to remain indifferent! No one would be able to ignore him now, duck out of answering and avoid him. Indifference ranked among the worst sins. Many great men had said that, in many impressive ways. He had quoted and requoted their words.

  His attention had been caught by a Thomas Jefferson quote, which he repeated six times in the last part of his book, each time as if it were the first. ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. The tree of liberty…’

  Many would have to bleed before society was drilled the way he wanted it. The last part of his book was bloody. It was more malicious, more ruthless than the first two, where he had largely pasted in texts that were already in circulation on the web. This was his own. His manifesto, or his will and testament.

  The murders were planned along the way. The campaign took shape as he wrote. He had various ideas about who he would kill and how. A bomb at the journalists’ annual conference? And some concerted shooting afterwards? Ninety-eight per cent of them were multiculturalists, and it was their fault the Progress Party had collapsed at the last election. Or a car bomb in Youngstorget when thousands of communists and cultural Marxists gathered on 1 May to march through the streets of Oslo. Maybe disguise himself as a fireman and hurl grenades and use a flame thrower in the auditorium at the Labour Party National Congress at the House of the People? He could park a car packed with explosives outside, timed to go off just as the delegates swarmed out to escape the flames. Those who survived would be branded. Badly scarred cultural Marxists would serve as living examples of what ultimately happens to traitors. People would realise you cannot commit high treason and go uncensured.

  ‘The Phase for Dialogue is Over’ he called the opening chapter of Book 3. He rattled off a list of the accused. There were cultural Marxists, multiculturalists, suicide humanists, capitalist-globalist politicians, state leaders and parliamentarians. There were journalists, editors, teachers, professors, university leaders, publishers, radio commentators, writers, comic-strip creators, artists, technical experts, scientists, doctors and church leaders who had knowingly committed crimes against their own people. The charge was that they had been complicit in the cultural genocide of the native inhabitants of Europe and in foreign invasion and colonisation of Europe by systematically allowing Muslim demographic warfare. This they had done by silently condoning the rape of between half a million and a million European women and actively supporting feminism, emotionalism, egalitarianism and Islamism.

  Punishment would be administered according to the crimes they had committed and the class they belonged to. ‘A’ traitors were leaders of political parties, trade unions, cultural institutions and the media. They would be sentenced to death. ‘B’ traitors were less important cultural Marxists. They would also be sentenced to death, but could in certain circumstances have their punishment reduced. ‘C’ traitors wielded little influence themselves, but aided and abetted traitors in the two higher categories. They would receive fines and prison sentences. All multiculturalists would be pardoned if they capitulated to the Knights Templar before 1 January 2020.

  This was also the date on which the deportation of Muslims would begin. To avoid expatriation, Muslims would have to convert to Christianity and be baptised with a new Christian forename, middle name and surname. They would b
e forbidden from using their mother tongues of Farsi, Urdu, Arabic and Somali. All mosques would be demolished, all traces of Islamic culture in Europe eradicated, even places of historical interest. No ex-Muslim couple would be permitted to have more than two children, and there would be a strict ban on telephoning, emailing or exchanging letters with Muslims outside Europe. For two generations after their conversion, the travel of ex-Muslims to countries that had populations of which more than a fifth were Muslim would be prohibited.

  But in spite of all that: ‘DO NOT for the love of God aim your rage and frustration at Muslims.’ If a pipe is leaking in your bathroom, what do you do? ‘It’s not very complicated after all. You go to the source of the problem, the leak itself! You DON’T mop it up until after you have fixed the actual leak. Needless to say, our regime is the leak, the Muslims are the water.’

  * * *

  The declaration of war was set out pedantically, with the resistance struggle divided into phases. At the time of writing, the author was in phase 1 of the civil war that was to last until 2030. In that phase, the campaign was to consist of shock attacks carried out by autonomously functioning secret cells that were not in contact with one another. In phase 2, planned to last from 2030 to 2070, more advanced resistance fronts would emerge. This phase would also see preparations for final coups against the governments in power in Europe. In the third phase, post-2070, the execution of traitors in categories ‘A’ and ‘B’ would start and a culturally conservative agenda was to be initiated. From 2083 there would be peace; the revolutionary brigades of cultural conservatives would have won the civil war and the ideal society could be built.