One of Us

by Åsne Seierstad

  An enormous question mark filled the whole screen on the wall.

  Judge Arntzen interrupted to ask if it was time for a short break.

  ‘That would be a pity,’ exclaimed Malt. ‘But we can leave that question mark there, because now we’re coming to the really exciting part.’

  Breivik was furious. ‘He’s got to stop!’ he told Lippestad in the recess.

  What enraged Breivik was that the testimony was being beamed directly to the TV viewers. Unlike the autopsy reports and witness statements from Utøya, this was going out live. And it was about his mind. People could switch on their sets, sit on their sofas and laugh at him. Yes, he would be allowed to defend himself at the end of each day. But whereas the psychiatrists’ evidence would be broadcast, his responses would not. His comments would be filtered through cultural Marxist journalists and would never get out to people directly.

  After the short break, Lippestad asked to speak and demanded that the witness be dismissed, because he had crossed the legal boundaries of personal privacy.

  ‘The diagnoses he is presenting are, in parts, highly stigmatising.’

  Malt was in the witness box, raring to continue. The whole thing degenerated into heated exchanges. The court retired to deliberate and reach a conclusion.

  There was lively debate among those left sitting in the courtroom to await the outcome. Some of the public abandoned their seats in favour of the outdoor cafés around the Law Courts. The psychiatry seminar spilled out into the streets.

  The trial had undergone a pronounced change of mood. While even the most seasoned crime reporters had been chastened as the courtroom mourned during the autopsy reports and the brutal witness accounts, the intellectual game of diagnosis loosened their tongues.

  The same lively discussions were in full swing round canteen tables at work, between mouthfuls at top Oslo restaurants, among friends and colleagues, between couples. People on the bus started arguing about whether Breivik could be held accountable for his actions. Dinner-party guests were engrossed in the topic from their aperitifs through to the brandy and beyond. The case had turned the whole nation into amateur psychologists.

  So many people in Norway had been affected by his actions, he had forced his way into their thoughts, and now they were wondering:

  ‘What was wrong with Breivik?’

  Their answers had a tendency to divide along party lines. People on the left were overrepresented among those who saw him as a right-wing extremist terrorist. He had tapped into contemporary trends, and these ideologies and ideologues had to be crushed by debate. In other words, he was of sound mind. The further to the right you looked, the more likely you were to find people who thought him insane. That he could not be taken seriously and was an irrelevance.

  Insanity was also the view of those he most admired. The work of a madman. ‘Is he crazy? Yes that’s probably exactly what he is. Nuts. Clinically insane,’ Fjordman wrote in a blog post. His conclusion was shared by several international anti-jihadists. Before 22 July, they had shared the same critique of Islam, the same world view. It had been so fine and pure. Now Breivik had sullied it with blood.

  * * *

  Breivik was overruled. Malt was permitted to go on. The enormous question mark came up on the screen again.

  ‘It is one thing to set off a bomb. It is quite another to go ashore on an island and shoot young people and talk about it as if he had been picking cherries. Is there an illness that could account for what I would choose to call mechanical killing? And there is also a change in sexual behaviour, we know that.’

  ‘Chairman. It’s ridiculous for me not to be allowed to object here. This is being broadcast. It’s offensive!’ Breivik interrupted.

  Arntzen asked him to be quiet.

  ‘But my comments aren’t being broadcast!’

  ‘No, they are not.’

  Malt had reached his conclusion.

  ‘Autism, or Asperger’s syndrome. Struggles to understand social signals. Has problems getting to grips with what others think and feel. What most people do to cope with this is to acquire expertise in social interaction. They become extremely polite, extremely proper and try to learn the rules of the game as best they can. But the point is that for them, empathy remains theoretical. They are incapable of sharing someone else’s suffering. They can have friends. They can run businesses. It works fine, but when you want to have a close relationship with someone … And the two of you are meant to share feelings … They can’t do it. And thus we come to the most important thing of all, and also the most painful…’

  He paused for breath. ‘The first time I saw Breivik enter this courtroom – and as psychiatrists we attach great weight to the first two or three milliseconds – it is important to note. I did not see a monster, I saw a deeply lonely man … Deeply lonely … Then quick as a flash he was inside his shell, making himself hard … But … At his core there is just a deeply lonely man. We have with us here not only a right-wing extremist bastard, but also a fellow human being who, regardless of what he has done to the rest of us, is suffering. We must try to put ourselves inside his brain, make his world comprehensible. His personality and extreme right-wing ideology are combined in an effort to get out of his own prison. He ends up ruining not only his own life but that of many others. We have with us here a fellow human being who will be left not only in his own prison but also in an actual prison. It is important for us to appreciate that this is something much more than a pure right-wing extremist. This is a tragedy for Norway and for us. I think it is also a tragedy for Breivik.’

  The dissection was over. The cameras were turned off. It was Breivik’s turn to speak.

  ‘I would like to congratulate Malt for such an accomplished character assassination. Initially I was quite offended, but I gradually came to see it as quite comical.’

  He had jotted various points on a sheet of paper. ‘I never deviated from normal behaviour as a child,’ he said. ‘As for the assertion about loneliness: I have never been lonely. Not capable of friendship, that has in fact been disputed by my … er, that is, the people I was friends with before. Periods of depression: I have never been depressed. The claim that I have the right to decide who is to live and die: Che Guevara and Castro killed people in Cuba because people who call for revolution inevitably open up the possibility of people getting killed. It is claimed that I have never been in a long-term relationship. I have had two relationships of about six months’ duration since 2002. When you are working twelve to fourteen hours a day you have no time for a relationship. But I have been on dates during that period and I have had no problem making contact with women. The impression has been given that I hate women, but I love women. I hate feminism. Once I decided to carry out an armed operation I did not feel I would be justified in establishing a family, with a wife and children. Narcissism: as described here, half of Oslo West would fall into that category. It seems an idiotic diagnosis. Malt has been called in by the public advocates and it’s important to be clear about their agenda of making me appear as crazy as possible, but not so much so that I am declared unaccountable for my actions. The judge in this case should dismiss all the psychiatric witnesses. This case is about political extremism and not psychiatry. Thank you.’

  * * *

  The next day, seven new witnesses were called, all of them psychiatrists and psychologists. The day after that, five more. Some had met him, others had not. Diagnoses flew this way and that.

  Young psychologist Eirik Johannessen was among those who had spent most time with Breivik. He was employed by Ila prison and had held extensive conversations with the defendant about his ideology and his grand fantasies. As the trial proceeded, he was still having sessions with him, and had found no sign of psychosis. Breivik’s ideas were an expression of extreme right-wing views, and the way in which he presented them could be accounted for by his inflated self-image, Johannessen concluded. He underlined that a succession of people had been observing Breivik weekly for te
n months without detecting any psychotic traits.

  The team at Ila ended up with a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, just as Tørrissen and Aspaas had. Whereas Husby and Sørheim saw Breivik’s references to his role in the Knights Templar as a sign of psychosis, Johannessen had a simpler interpretation: he is lying.

  It was just something Breivik had made up. Something he well knew to be non-existent.

  ‘Why do you think he tells these lies?’ queried Inga Bejer Engh.

  ‘He wants to recruit people to a network, but that’s not easy if he’s on his own. And then it helps to generate fear, and he wants his opponents to live in fear.’

  ‘He lies in order to make us more frightened?’ the prosecutor went on.

  ‘And to make himself appear a more exciting person. Rather than a failure.’

  When the word failure came up, Breivik produced a slip of paper and wrote something on it. He sat there uneasily, swinging his chair on to its back legs.

  Johannessen cited a former friend of Breivik’s who had told the court that Breivik always had great ambitions.

  ‘Not achieving them, being a failure, was so hard to bear that it helped to push him towards extremism. His ideology became important to him as a way of saving himself.’

  Johannessen saw Breivik’s childhood and adolescence as a history of rejection. And when he decided to dedicate himself entirely to his ideology he found himself rejected even there, as in the case of his attempt to make contact with Fjordman.

  Breivik took lots of notes as this witness was speaking. Every time the young psychologist intimated that he had lied or exaggerated his own importance, he lurched forward and made a note. Lippestad, sitting beside him, remained calm and chewed the arm of his glasses.

  Johannessen drew attention to Breivik’s ability to see himself from the outside, something a psychotic individual would not be able to do. ‘At the end of a day in court, he might say, “Today I came across as a bit less accountable,” and then we would see this same conclusion borne out by the commentators on TV in the evening.’

  Johannessen left the witness box. Breivik had his chance to speak. He was incensed; he raised his head.

  ‘It’s completely wrong that Fjordman rejected me,’ snarled Breivik. He had only contacted Fjordman to get his email address, and he had been given it.

  ‘I have never been rejected by anyone in my whole life,’ he concluded.

  * * *

  Finally, the two pairs of psychiatrists were invited to present their observations. The first duo had not changed so much as a comma of their original report. Nothing they had observed in court had changed their conclusion. Nor had they wished to receive the round-the-clock observations from the team that had followed Breivik for four weeks, which were ready just before the start of the trial. Sørheim and Husby had completed their report in November 2011, and they were standing by what they had written. Breivik was not accountable for his actions.

  During the examination of the psychiatrists, judge Wenche Arntzen wondered how the two of them had reached their conclusion about all Breivik’s delusions.

  ‘His ideas about who should live and who should die, did you term them a delusion because they are so immoral?’

  ‘Now I’m confused,’ replied Synne Sørheim.

  ‘Acts of terrorism can be ideologically justified, isn’t that something a person can feel themselves called to, however absurd that may be?’ asked Arntzen.

  ‘I think we take a simpler starting point than the judge is able to do. Our approach is that he sat there alone in deadly earnest and devoted years to finding out who would have to die.’

  In the psychiatry they represented, there was no category for moral deliberation.

  The other pair of psychiatrists admitted they had been in doubt. All those days in court in which Breivik had not shown the slightest emotion had made Terje Tørrissen uncertain and he had asked to talk to him again. He went down to the basement and met him in the waiting cell. There he found him to be the same man he had got to know in the course of the observations, friendly, polite and adequate. In order to get through the trial he was playing a role, Tørrissen judged. In the supplementary statement that Aspaas and Tørrissen delivered during the trial, they described Breivik as a special case. His dulled state was a challenge to ‘the prevailing classification systems and models of understanding, particularly in the matter of drawing the line between lack of reality and political fanaticism’. Under examination by Inga Bejer Engh, the pair withdrew their diagnosis of dissocial personality disorder. All that remained were the narcissistic traits. They were thus left with the conclusion that he was accountable for his actions.

  Once all the evidence had been heard, the prosecution had to reach a conclusion. Was he accountable for his actions or not? They were not sure he was not accountable, but they had serious doubts. It is an important principle of the rule of law that doubt should not be discounted. This had to apply, regardless of the crime. That was how they argued.

  The prosecution’s conclusion: not accountable for his actions.

  * * *

  On the final day of the trial, the aggrieved parties were to make impact statements, as is standard procedure in Norwegian courts. An employee in the government quarter grieved for lost colleagues; three mothers remembered their children and talked about how losing them had affected their whole family. The General Secretary of the AUF spoke about the loss to the political organisation; and finally, a girl who had lost her sister was to end the session.

  The seventeen-year-old had been called by her public advocate the previous evening and asked if she could make the closing statement of the trial.

  I can’t do it, Lara thought.

  She said, ‘Yes, I can.’

  On the busy morning ferry into the city, the ferry that Bano had loved, she sat looking out over the fjord, wondering what she was going to say.

  How could she explain what losing Bano meant?

  She was going to meet four friends at Check Mate, the café by the courthouse. The waiter lent her an order pad and a pen. She started writing, and then read it out. Her friends listened and made criticisms and suggestions. More of this, less of that. Only the best was good enough here. ‘You’ve got to include where you all come from!’ they said. ‘Who you are, who Bano was!’

  She wanted to opt out. She couldn’t go through with it. She was freezing in her white crocheted top and her jeans felt too tight. But it was time to go. Her feet carried her past the security check, in through the heavy doors, up the winding staircase and into room 250.

  Now she was on her way up the central aisle. Now she was going to face her sister’s murderer.

  She took her place in the witness box, afraid her voice would give way. Then she noticed a pair of eyes on her. The pregnant Colombian lay judge with the long dark curls was looking at her. She has kind eyes, thought Lara, and put down her piece of paper. She would say the most important things about Bano. What she had in her heart.

  ‘Bano and I fled from Iraq in 1999. We fled from the civil war and Saddam Hussein. I had a real struggle with all the trauma and it took me a long time to feel safe here. I had nightmares that the police would come and get us. Bano helped me. There’s two years between us, but we shared all our secrets. I remember her saying, “Even if you happen to lose friends, you’ll never lose me.”’

  Her voice held. ‘I had no idea then that she would be the one I lost first of all.’

  Lara spoke of how she had done nothing but sleep in the time after Utøya. ‘I dreamt that I was dead and she was the one alive. I mixed up what was real and what wasn’t, and when I woke up I thought real life was the nightmare. It took me several months to understand what was what. It’s made me feel guilty seeing how sad people are. It should have been me who died, then not so many people would have been sad.’

  She managed to be entirely honest.

  ‘When everyone was grieving, I just felt I was in the way. It wrecked my self-
confidence. I was born as a little sister. I’ve never lived a life just as a big sister.’

  There were ripples of movement along the rows of seats. It was the last day. It was over. But not for Lara.

  ‘I had to learn to do things myself. I had to learn to start trusting other people. It’s been a difficult time and I don’t want to live like this. He didn’t only take away my security, he took away the safest person in my life. The sorrow is as great as ever, the sense of loss is even greater, but there’s something new.’

  She paused.

  ‘Hope. It wasn’t there before. Bano didn’t die for nothing. She died for a multicultural Norway. There’s a huge empty hole and I’m heartbroken that she won’t be at my wedding or see my children. But I’m proud of her, and I know she wants me to be happy.’

  That was the way she ended. Bano was with her.

  She turned towards her parents as she left the witness box. Their eyes were moist. Her father raised his hand and gave a little wave. So did her mother.

  Lara felt warm all over. Their looks said: We are proud of you. We are so glad you are alive.

  The Verdict

  On 24 August 2012 the verdict was to be pronounced. The courtroom filled once more with the world press, who had lost interest after the first couple of weeks. There was pressure on seats again.

  The accused was in place, his right-wing extremist salute was back, the prosecution came, the public advocates, the defence, the audience.