Youth camp resumes on isle 4 years after Norway massacre

Private visitors a day earlier will include North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, a former Labor Party leader who was also Norway’s prime minister at the time of the massacre. “22nd of july will forever be a part of the story of Utoya, all what we have to go through the very hard days”, said Mani Hussaini, the leader of the Labour Party’s youth wing.

The killings in the capital and the island, which is owned by the Labour Party’s youth wing and located about 40km from Oslo, shocked the nation of five million people where such acts of violence are a rare occurence.

“The day when Labour Youth’s summer camp again gathered here at Utoya”.

Police patrol around Utoya island, Norway August 6, 2015.

Hussaini told reporters taken to visit the island earlier this week that Utoya was “a meeting place for young activists, a political workshop, a place for culture, sport, friendship, and not least, love”. “Utoya is also the site of the darkest day during peacetime here in Norway”.

After arriving disguised as a police officer, the anti-Islamist extremist spent an hour and 13 minutes systematically hunting down the 600 delegates, aiming to wipe out the next generation of the Labour Party, which he blamed for developing a multicultural Norway. It was not a certainty that we would return to Utoya in 2011.

Trapped on the island of just 30 acres (12 hectares), the campers had nowhere to go, some of them throwing themselves into the surrounding chilly waters.

Just before the shootings, Breivik had killed eight people with a bomb that exploded near the government headquarters in Oslo, some 40 kilometres (25 miles) away.

Norwegian authorities were harshly criticised for their lack of preparedness and their slow response to the attacks at the time.

But bullet holes still remain in the walls of the café building, where Breivik killed 13 of his victims in one of the bloodiest episodes of his massacre.

Ahead of the opening of the camp on Friday, Emilie Bersaas, a camp organiser, said those attending will not allow “that dark day to overshadow the nice and bright” memories of past camps or future weekend youth meetings and social events.

Some of the island’s cabins have since been rebuilt, a new hall has been resurrected and a memorial steel ring bearing the victims’ names has been hung high in the woods.

But 22-year-old survivor Ole Martin Juul Slyngstadli was not one of them.

“There are of course a lot of emotions linked to the scene but I focus on the positive ones”, he says. “I think everyone was thinking ‘I have to do something,”‘ he said. Officials later said that Breivik had written a post on Swedish neo-Nazi forum Nordisk explaining that he was trying to “save Norway and Europe from cultural Marxism and a Muslim takeover”.

But his sentence can be extended indefinitely if he is considered to be a danger to society.

The attack appears to have had the opposite effect to what was intended with the AUF’s membership rising by nearly 50 percent to just under 14,000.