The Freedom Flotilla had received considerable attention from the media, and that was something, but the expedition itself was a fiasco. Due to a sawn-off propeller shaft and strange decisions by the Greek port authorities, the boats never left Piraeus that summer, so Håheim was spared the ordeal of encountering the Israeli special forces at sea. Instead, Comrade Håheim (as she called herself on her blog) sat on the grass on Utøya, attentively following Støre's analysis of the Netanyahu government's likely reaction to the application for UN membership being prepared in Ramallah by the Palestinians. Håheim had a pinch of snus under her lip, the kind of tobacco snuff popular in Norway.
Further up the grassy slope, Anzor dozed in the sunshine. His thoughts circled off high up into the sky, but the lad from Lillestrøm nodded in agreement when he thought he heard Støre support a boycott of Israel. Attitudes, expectations and bias affect your understanding, and Anzor misunderstood the foreign minister on this point – otherwise the 2011 summer camp would have made even bigger headlines than usual that evening.
It was part of the nature of the AUF to criticize its mother party. From the very start, the militantly anti-militarist youth had admonished the Labour Party for lacking revolutionary vigour and pandering to the parliamentary system. The conflict peaked in the early twenties. Should the Labour Party remain a member of the Soviet-led Comintern and choose to follow a revolutionary line, or should it participate in the democratic institutions of non-socialist Norway? The AUF members saw themselves as the spearhead of revolution, genuine communists, and they were activists by nature. One of their leaders, Einar Gerhardsen, who would later become prime minister, turned up outside the premises of Aftenposten in Akersgata and threatened the editors with dynamite. He was prosecuted and convicted for his conduct.
In November 1923, the youth organization broke away from its mother party and endorsed the Moscow-loyal Communist Party of Norway, which was formed by dissenters from the Labour Party. Among the minority who stayed to create a new organization, named the Left Communist Youth League, was Einar Gerhardsen from Oslo. But, while the communists would be a footnote in Norwegian history, the split heralded a century of social-democratic hegemony: the century of the Labour Party. The war changed the Labour Party's stance on defence and alliance politics, but the AUF remained a left-wing ideological stone in the shoe of the pragmatic governing Labour Party.
During the so-called Easter Rebellion of 1958, when the AUF branch known as the Sosialistisk Studentlag [Socialist Student Group] proposed a resolution criticizing NATO and the deployment of nuclear weapons in West Germany, another group of AUF members disappeared off to the left. In protest against Norway's membership of NATO, the excluded AUF members and their sympathizers established the Socialist People's Party. Traditionally, the AUF's anti-militarism resulted from the perception of the army as a tool of the upper class. Although the war changed the relationship between the army and the Labour Party, a latent scepticism remained in the AUF towards the use of force and the alliance with the USA. The mother party's attitude towards the AUF resembled that of a proud but slightly patronizing parent who thinks that her children's piercings are a bit ridiculous, that their opinions are sweet, but that her offspring will turn out well in the end. We all grow up eventually, after all.
‘The youth organization is much more capable than the Party and the trade union movement when it comes to schooling socialist-minded and socialist-inclined women and men,’ the late Haakon Lie once said. Lie would go on to become an influential secretary of the Labour Party from 1945 to 1969.
Forty years later, he dismissed the AUF as ‘half-educated scamps’ when they interfered in the debate about the EEC referendum in 1972. Utøya nurtured utopian socialists rather than pragmatic social democrats. The attitude towards the AUF as an optimal cadre factory but a political lightweight was most clearly expressed by Haakon Lie, but he was probably not the only one with that view in the Labour Party.
‘We Must Be Vigilant Now’
After the Middle East debate was over, Ida had led the workshop about the world's newest state, which was introduced by Liv Tørress from Norwegian People's Aid. The sun was still shining on the grass and on Spjelkavik's ‘global group’. Tørress's stories from the war in the country now known as South Sudan, and her thoughts about future developments, attracted a large audience. To top it all, Jonas Gahr Støre came and perched on one of the logs at the Oslo branch's camp, where the international guests had gathered in the afternoon. Støre had asked Natia how things were in Georgia and had asked Sam about the situation in Uganda, but Ida thought that what made the greatest impression on the international guests was not Støre's wealth of knowledge, but the simple fact that a foreign minister in trainers was speaking to them on equal terms, quite informally and without any bodyguards or advisers.
Ida Spjelkavik and ‘the global group’ with Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre on Utøya, 21 July 2011; from left to right: Ritah from Uganda, Tamta from Georgia, Thabile from Swaziland, Natia from Georgia, Jonas Gahr Støre, Bassel from Lebanon, Sam from Uganda, and Ida Spjelkavik (photograph by Tore S. Bekkedal)
In the background, the team from Norwegian People's Aid shuffled about. The organization did not only contribute experts from its comprehensive international humanitarian work for the international workshops. The team from Hadeland in south-eastern Norway also comforted the young ones who missed their parents, put plasters on those who grazed themselves on the rocks and brought ice packs to those who got injured on the football pitch. While other state-supporting parties had militia or paramilitary wings, the Norwegian Labour Party had its own humanitarian organization. Norway in a nutshell, Ida thought, this odd country out, on the very edge of the world map.
Norwegian People's Aid also had its roots in an age with more conflict. The organization's baptism of fire was in Finland during the Winter War of 1939–40, but in the summer of 2011 the wars were further away, in Afghanistan and Libya. On Thursday 21 July, Norwegian People's Aid had national representatives from Palestine and South Sudan. They were there to give substance to the notion of international solidarity.
The summer camp on Utøya is situated not only in the middle of the Tyrifjord but also in the middle of the slow news season. An appearance there almost guaranteed space on the evening news, and there was an election looming in September. In that respect, there was a certain logic in the Labour Party leaders dividing the days between them, interrupting their holidays to pop in and see the AUF. But Utøya was also one of the places where Støre could bring himself up to speed with political activists. As the foreign minister drove back to his holiday cabin in Tvedestrand that afternoon, he sorted his impressions in his head. So many different faces. All those young people would build a common future for themselves and for the country. Who would these young people become, and what would they do when it was their turn?
One of the exciting things about the AUF was that the participants on Utøya not only represented the whole country but increasingly came from all over the world. In the football match, he had played on a team with a girl from Somalia. She had hurt her foot, and, even though she had been bandaged up by the people from Norwegian People's Aid, she was still limping afterwards.