One of Us

by Åsne Seierstad

  Breivik smiled. ‘Isn’t it the same as psychopathy, then?’

  He said the subsequent questions would be more personal in nature.

  ‘Question five: Are you nationalists or internationalists? Number six: Do you support multiculturalism? Number seven: Have either of you had any connection with Marxist organisations?’

  ‘How will you judge whether we are telling the truth, if we answer your questions?’ they asked.

  He grinned. ‘I already know. Thousands of hours as a salesman have taught me to predict with seventy per cent accuracy what the person I am talking to is thinking. So I know that neither of you is of Marxist orientation, but you are both politically correct and support multiculturalism. It’s all I can expect.’

  ‘Do you guess, or do you know what other people are thinking?’

  ‘I know,’ said Breivik. ‘There’s a big difference.’

  He said he had studied a great deal of psychology and was able, for example, to tell the difference between people from the east and the west end of town by their clothes, make-up and watches.

  At the end of the session he decided he would accept them. He looked at the experts and smiled.

  ‘I think I’ve been lucky.’

  * * *

  In the first ‘Status præsens’ that they wrote, Sørheim and Husby drew a number of conclusions. ‘The subject believes he knows what the people he is talking to are thinking. This phenomenon is judged to be founded in psychosis,’ they wrote. ‘He presents himself as unique and the focal point of everything that happens, believing that all psychiatrists in the world envied the experts their task. He compares his situation to the treatment of Nazi traitors after the war. Indicative of grandiose ideas,’ they noted. ‘The subject clearly has no clear perception of his own identity as he shifts between referring to himself in the singular and the plural,’ they concluded. ‘The subject uses words that he stresses he has invented himself, such as “national Darwinist”, “suicidal Marxist” and “suicidal humanism”. This phenomenon is judged to be one of neologism.’ Such ‘new words’ could be part of a psychosis.

  At the end of the thirteen sessions, the psychiatrists concluded that Anders Behring Breivik suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. They adopted the view that he was psychotic while carrying out the attacks, and that he was still psychotic when they were making their observations. He was therefore in criminal terms not responsible for his actions and should receive treatment rather than a sentence.

  Breivik was permitted to read the report when it was submitted in November 2011. He said he thought they were trying to make a fool of him. They called his compendium ‘banal, infantile and pathetically egocentric’, motivated by his ‘grandiose delusions about his own exceptional importance’. But they also described him as ‘intelligent rather than the opposite’.

  He had boasted of having an extremely strong psyche, stronger than that of anyone else he had ever known. Otherwise he would never have been able to carry out his attack on Utøya, he emphasised.

  Then he started getting letters from supporters around Europe who felt he would serve their cause badly if he were deemed to be not accountable for his own actions. He suddenly understood what was at stake. He could be declared insane.

  Then it would all fold.

  The court could rob him of all honour. Judge him to be an idiot.

  Just before Christmas he rang Geir Lippestad, who was basing his preparations on the conclusions of the psychiatric report. He asked the lawyer to come and see him right away.

  He had sounded worked up on the phone, so on 23 December Lippestad assembled the whole defence team – four people – and went to see him at Ila prison. They listened to him through the glass wall in the visiting room. Anders Behring Breivik asked them to change strategy.

  ‘I want to be found accountable for my actions,’ he said.

  * * *

  The defendant was supported in this by those with the clearest grounds for hating him. Several next of kin and bereaved family members had been upset to hear that he might escape serving a formal sentence. Mette Yvonne Larsen, one of the coordinators of the public advocates’ group, asked for another set of experts to be appointed so that the court would have two reports to compare. More and more of the public advocates began to press for a new assessment to be carried out.

  The prosecution did not want it. They had already started their work based on the first report. Lippestad was against it. Breivik said he’d had enough of shrinks. There was also the risk that a second observation would produce the same result as the first, thought Lippestad, making it even more difficult to advance the case in court that Breivik was of sound mind, as he now wanted to affirm.

  ‘It has never done a case any harm to shed some extra light on it,’ concluded Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen, the judge appointed by the court to lead these negotiations. She requested that two new forensic psychiatrists be designated.

  Norwegian forensic psychiatry circles are small, and many of the higher-profile experts were ruled out because they had already expressed their opinions in the media. But the court found Terje Tørrissen and Agnar Aspaas, who met the criteria of neither being close colleagues, nor having commented publicly on the case.

  In addition to his conversations with the experts, Anders Behring Breivik was now to be observed around the clock for four weeks. Early each morning a team of a dozen nurses, psychologists and auxiliary psychiatric nurses were to come and spend the day with him, talk to him, eat with him, play board games with him and then submit written reports, which the new pair of experts would have to take into account.

  In mid-February 2012, two months before the trial was to begin, the first session with the new forensic psychiatrists took place. Breivik asked for the interview to be recorded, so Lippestad could listen to it afterwards.

  Terje Tørrissen was a short man with a furrowed brow and flyaway hair. He greeted Breivik, who entered the room flanked by two prison officers.

  ‘I want to inform you that we have not read the previous report,’ said Tørrissen, speaking quietly in his lilting western Norwegian accent.

  ‘Well I’m extremely impressed that you’ve been able to restrain yourselves,’ smiled Breivik. ‘I didn’t think there was a psychiatrist left in the whole of Norway who hadn’t made some comment, as it’s very tempting in such an important case as this.’

  Once Breivik had seen how he was being perceived in the media, he realised he had miscalculated the impact his trappings of chivalry would make. The uniforms, the martyr’s gifts, the awards and decorations, the titles, even his language were ridiculed. He decided to tone down his rhetoric, referring to himself from then on as a foot soldier rather than a messiah.

  ‘Just to put you fully in the picture,’ he told Tørrissen, ‘I have never behaved threateningly to anyone, apart from a window of three hours on the 22nd. I am polite and pleasant to everybody. The picture the media has constructed of me as a psychotic monster who eats babies for breakfast…’

  He laughed. Tørrissen noted that the laugh was self-deprecating, reasonable and appropriate.

  ‘… is pure rubbish and there’s no need for you to be apprehensive about me. I look forward to our working together.’

  Tørrissen asked him about his conduct during the open committal hearing ten days earlier, when Breivik had made a short speech. It provoked laughter from AUF members in the hall when he declared himself a knight of the indigenous Norwegian people. He called the murders defensive attacks, undertaken in self-defence, and demanded his immediate release. The laughter spread as he spoke, and after a minute had passed the judge halted him.

  ‘If you know me, you’ll realise that was just an act I put on,’ explained Breivik. ‘I am actually talking to a tiny group of people, a few thousand within Europe, though that number can grow. I know very well it’s a description of reality that’s wholly alien to most people. But it’s a show … I play my role. If I say I expect to be awarded the War Cross with Three Swo
rds, I know I’m not going to be, of course. And when I say I expect to be released immediately, I know that isn’t really going to happen either. I’m only following the path I’ve set out all along.’

  ‘But why not just be yourself?’

  ‘In a way I am myself, because I represent an entirely different picture of the world, which has been unknown since the Second World War. It exists in Japan and South Korea, but it’s alien to a Marxist society.’

  ‘What you call a Marxist society is really more of a social democratic society, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t mind calling it a social democratic society. I can tell the two apart. But when I say cultural Marxist, that’s to be provocative. In a way, it’s a domination technique. They use such techniques on the left and they like calling other people obscurantists, so now we’re using those tactics against the left. By the way, are you familiar with the seven questions I asked the previous experts?’

  ‘No, but you can ask me them now.’

  ‘When something big like 22 July happens in a country, it’s impossible not to be emotionally affected. The psychiatry profession has no experience of politically motivated aggressors, and that’s a major problem. You don’t know how militant nationalists think, or how militant Islamists think, or for that matter how militant Marxists think. It’s a separate world that I think very few psychiatrists have any knowledge of. You weren’t taught about it at college, and I don’t know if there’s any additional professional training available either. Maybe you can tell me about that.’

  Tørrissen could not. He replied that his mandate was to find out whether the subject was ill; that is to say, whether he was suffering from a severe mental illness or not.

  Psychiatry’s great weakness was that it had no response to religion or ideology, argued Breivik. ‘If it had been up to your profession, all priests would no doubt have been shut up in lunatic asylums because they had had a calling from God!’ he laughed, and described at some length how Islamists prayed five times a day to become fearless warriors, and how they got to have sex with seventy-two virgins in Paradise if they were killed. For his part, he had used Bushido meditation. He said that this involved manipulating your own mind to suppress fear, but also other feelings. ‘That’s the reason I seem de-emotionalised. I couldn’t have survived otherwise.’

  Nor should the psychiatrists underestimate the importance of what he had learnt from al-Qaida, he said. Islamic militants were his source of inspiration. He was like them. A politically motivated aggressor.

  In contrast to the first two psychiatrists, Terje Tørrissen and Agnar Aspaas studied the language and opinions of websites on which Breivik had been active, such as Gates of Vienna and document.no.

  ‘You can’t isolate the ideological, even if you decide to leave it out of a report,’ Breivik had stressed.

  Just a couple of days before the trial, the new report was presented. This pair of psychiatrists concluded that Breivik suffered from dissocial personality disorder with narcissistic traits. He had a ‘grandiose perception of his own importance’ and saw himself as ‘unique’. He had a vast appetite for ‘praise, success and power’ and was totally lacking in ‘emotional empathy, remorse or affective expression’ vis-à-vis those touched by the acts he had committed.

  In legal terms, a narcissistic personality disorder means that a person is criminally responsible, because the disorder is not considered to be based in psychosis. Tørrissen and Aspaas concluded that Breivik was not psychotic either at the time of the acts of which he was accused, nor during the observation. He could therefore be held criminally liable.

  These two reports were then pitched against each other as the case opened on the morning of Monday 16 April 2012.

  * * *

  For weeks the rain had deluged bare trees. Dirty grey snow had melted and run along the streets, leaving in its wake the detritus of winter, grass covered by the previous year’s rotting leaves, and a season’s dog mess. The city had still not had its spring cleaning.

  The night-time frosts kept seeds and buds slumbering and daytime temperatures that crept a few degrees above zero were not enough to wake them. But in the course of the night, the cloud cover had broken. This Monday morning there were glimpses of colours that people had not seen for a long time. Wasn’t that a little bud on the branch of the cherry tree? And that tulip on its way out of its sheath of leaves, would it be pink or yellow?

  It was worse in nice weather, Gerd Kristiansen said. The grief was hardest to bear in the sunshine because Anders, her Anders, had so loved the sun.

  Those who were to attend the first day of the trial had risen at dawn. Hours of queuing were anticipated to get through the security checks. Some white marquees with plastic windows, the sort you have at summer parties in case it rains, had been erected in front of the entrance to house mobile scanners.

  There was barely an empty spot in front of the Law Courts; every square metre had been taken over by crush barriers or the press. Vans with antennae on their roofs were transmitting live pictures worldwide. The TV faces had momentous expressions.

  The rays of the early morning sun created haloes round the journalists in the security queue; they glinted on the crush barriers and dazzled the police officers holding weapons loaded with live ammunition by the solid front door.

  Beyond the first few metres of daylight, the building darkened. The staircase to the first floor wound its way round a glass lift. Black ropes divided the Law Courts into zones. The colour of your admission card indicated which zones you were allowed to be in. The blue ones were for those affected by the case: survivors, next of kin, the bereaved and public advocates. The black were the parties in the case; the green were healthcare workers. The press had red cards. All had to wear their laminated cards round their necks for the duration of the case. The lanyards were black, apart from for those with red cards. They also had red lanyards which they were to keep visible, so they could easily be spotted if they strayed into the wrong place. On the cards were your name, your photo, your status and a bar code so the scanner would detect it if you tried to enter a restricted zone.

  The whole first floor was set aside for the case. There were two large rooms with work stations for the press, one of them with simultaneous interpretation and an editing room for TV transmissions. There were waiting rooms for witnesses, rest areas and a big room where next of kin, the bereaved and the survivors would be left undisturbed. In the depths of the building was room 250, guarded by another team of police officers. Only a small band of people entered there.

  * * *

  The silver-grey hands were both pointing to the number nine.

  The seats had filled up. Necks with black lanyards and necks with red lanyards created a striped effect in the rows. There were roughly equal numbers of each, about a hundred red, about a hundred black.

  On the public side of the partition, selected photographers were standing ready to capture the entrance of the parties. The photographers were allowed to take pictures until the court was in session.

  There were a number of wall-mounted cameras in the room; their lenses covered most angles. In the editing room, a TV producer from the Norwegian Broadcasting Company was seated in front of a bank of screens. She cut continuously and expertly from one shot to another: ‘Camera 1, there, Camera 2, hold, over to Camera 6.’ The pictures went direct to the live TV broadcast and to courtrooms all over the country.

  Seventeen district courts were showing what the public in the courtroom could see. The regional courts had set up big screens and loudspeakers for the transmissions from Oslo.

  In Nord-Troms District Court sat Tone and Gunnar Sæbø. Gerd and Viggo Kristiansen were there too. Now they would see him, hear him speak. The one who had taken their boys from them.

  The Rashid family had fled the whole thing. For weeks the papers had been full of details of the coming trial. Mustafa, Bayan, Lara and Ali had just wanted to get away, so they were on a trip to Spain. They could not bring themse
lves to give the perpetrator the attention that following the trial would accord him.

  The prosecution found their places. Then the public advocates, the defence. Police guards were already in position.

  He is in the building, wrote a journalist from a news agency. The words flew out across the world: Er ist in dem Gebäude. Il est dans le bâtiment.

  It was ten to nine.

  * * *

  The door of the waiting cell was opened. He stood up from the bench and was put in handcuffs. Court guards in pale blue shirts took him out and along the hallway.

  The lift doors opened and he stepped inside with two guards. The lift was cramped. The three men were pressed close against each other.

  The doors opened onto a white corridor. They stepped out, rounded a corner and turned into another corridor. The last stretch had been redecorated at the same time as room 250. The windows along the corridor were frosted. Their bolted frames were painted an industrial grey. The daylight barely penetrated from outside.

  There was a court guard in front, then him, then another guard behind. He filled his lungs with air. He straightened up, pulled back his shoulders. The door to room 250 was opened. He went in.

  Nobody there. He had entered a little corridor running along the side of the courtroom, a space where no one could see him. He followed the blue shirt barely ten more steps – then the hail of flashes, a cascade of clicking cameras. He is in the room, tapped the news reporters. Shining lenses were directed only at him.

  They zoomed in on a pale face. He was less toned than before, a little jowlier.

  He was unable to resist a smile. The moment he had been waiting for, preparing for, dreaming of. Now it was here. He pursed his lips to control the smile, nodded to his defence team and took his seat between them as he stole a glance at the audience. His eyes darted round the room; after all, this was not for him to look at them, but for them to look at him. Still, he just had to see, see them all, all those people looking at him.

  His hands were cuffed in front of him and connected to a wide belt fastened round his hips. A broad-shouldered detention guard fumbled with a key to unlock the handcuffs. The accused gave an almost apologetic look to the audience as the man struggled to remove the cuffs. Once they were off, dangling from the hip belt, he clamped his right fist to his chest, thrust his arm out straight and then raised it in a salute. Long enough for the photographers to immortalise the moment, he held the clenched fist at head height. A gasp ran through the courtroom. It was five to nine.