OSLO: He gives a Nazi-style salute when he arrives in the courtroom each morning. He tells the court he rejects its authority because its mandate comes from political parties that support multiculturalism. And he admits that because he hates Muslims he killed 77 people and wishes it were more.
But Anders Behring Breivik is treated with grave civility in Oslo’s District Court and has five days of testimony in which to expound his twisted political views. To those used to the rigid laws of evidence in the British-style system of justice, the openness of this trial is extraordinary and, some have suggested, dangerous.
Why give the narcissistic Breivik a soapbox when that is just what he wants? Could he inspire other sick loners into copycat crimes? Is it right to allow him to wound victims’ families yet again by allowing him to denigrate the loved ones he killed?
In his first day of evidence, Breivik said the many teenagers he slaughtered at a Labour Party youth camp last July were not childlike innocents but more akin to Hitler Youth. He also attacked by name journalist Marte Michelet, who writes on Islamophobia and whose Iranian-born partner, Ali Esbati, survived the massacre on Utoya Island.
Breivik said Michelet, who had lectured at the camp, was an extreme Marxist and a traitor for having had a baby by Esbati, and her attendance showed how corrupt Labour’s youth wing was.
But Mr Esbati still strongly defends the openness of Breivik’s trial, and is one of many Norwegians who feel the court should have allowed Breivik’s evidence to be televised (the court has banned TV cameras from some parts of the proceedings: Breivik’s own testimony, the evidence of victims, and the screening of footage of his bomb blast).
Mr Esbati has said it was important to hear Breivik’s reasoning because his views could be found elsewhere in Europe: “These views are extreme but unfortunately, to a growing degree, they have been normalised and moved into the mainstream of European political debate; the idea that Muslims are problematic per se, the proposition that there are warlike situations in European countries and that we should take political action against that.”
Even those uncomfortable with the trial process acknowledge it has its merits. One of the rescuers at Utoya, Allan Jensen, told Sky News: “I don’t like him getting speaker’s corner for a whole week. I don’t think that’s good. But that’s democracy.”
More generally, many Norwegians are recoiling from the blizzard of Breivik media reports. Before his trial began, a survey found that one-third of Norwegians thought there had been too much coverage of his crimes. The newspaper Dagbladet has offered a no-Breivik button on its website. Before he committed his atrocities, Breivik wrote that the purpose of a trial for someone like him was to win more sympathisers.
The reporter Asne Seierstad wrote that the trial would give him what he wanted, “a stage, a pulpit, a spellbound, notebook-clutching, pencil-wielding audience … are we puppets on a string, or are we doing what’s right and necessary?”
Jon Johnsen, professor of law at the University of Oslo, told the Herald the openness was in accordance with Norwegian law and would help to debunk myths that might otherwise be created about Breivik’s motivation for what he had done. “Of course his views are offending but the question is whether they become more dangerous if he’s allowed to express them than if he’s not.”
Svein Bruras, associate professor of journalism at Volda University College, had been critical of some of the media coverage. But he too supports the openness of the trial, critical only of the decision to ban broadcasting of Breivik’s evidence.
“This is the most serious act of crime in Norway since World War II,” he said. “It affects the entire nation and a lot of people are following the court proceedings through the media and when they are denied the possibility of listening to Breivik, they are not given a full account of proceedings.” He said it was important for people to see his demeanour for themselves, given that a central question is whether Breivik is sane.
“I know he had other supporters out there, maybe not very many, and there’s a danger he may inspire other people, but I think we need to hear his explanations.”
Professor Bruras said the media had been responsible in their reporting and had not published gruesome details of the killings. In one example of such a judgment call, the Guardian journalist Helen Pidd refused to tweet some of Breivik’s comments at one point, saying they were “too heartless”.
Thomas Mathiesen, professor of sociology of law at Oslo University, said Breivik had not been able to distort the openness of Norway’s system because what he says is filtered through lawyers, journalists and the Norwegian people themselves, whose view of him is “markedly critical, and that means he doesn’t get across his message”.

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.

OSLO: The man in the white shirt was doomed. You knew it as soon as you saw the time he appeared on the grainy closed-circuit TV footage, walking towards the parked van in which Anders Behring Breivik had stashed a 950kg bomb.

The people watching the video in Oslo’s central courthouse knew that the blast went off at 3.25 pm. The man appeared in the video just three minutes before that.

The film showed that Breivik himself had already taken off on foot, walking steadily towards his next dance with death on Utoya Island, knowing that he had seven minutes to get out of range before his bomb’s fuse burned to its lethal end. The man in the white shirt, blurry, nameless and faceless to his hushed audience, had no such awareness.

In action movies, people are shown blown off their feet before being consumed by a blast. That did not happen here. An orange ball of flame spouted like dragon’s breath across the screen where the man had been. He was not seen again.

The blast that killed eight people was seen again, over and over, from cameras in different vantage points: the building whose windows blew out and shattered to the ground, shards of glass beating fluttering sheets of paper to the ground; the building surrounded by clouds of smoke, emerging grey and ghostly and covered with ash; the convenience store where customers ducked groceries that were flying off the shelves as if poltergeists were throwing tantrums and tins.

In court, Breivik sat impassively, apparently unmoved by his handiwork.

He seemed equally untouched by other dramatic evidence in this first day of his trial for the terrorist attacks in which his bomb and his shootings killed 77 people, mostly teenagers, last July.

Prosecutors played a desperate phone call that Renate Taarnes, 22, made from a toilet cubicle in a building on Utoya Island as Breivik systemically hunted down and killed the staff and teenagers at a summer camp for the Labour Party’s youth wing.

Taarnes, who had locked herself in the cubicle, told the operator: “There’s shooting all the time and there’s complete panic here!… There’s someone shooting, walking around shooting!”

Her voice dropped to a whisper: “He’s coming! He’s coming!”. She sobbed, and then grabbed at self-control and fell silent but for her panicked breathing.

Then the shots came. Crack crack crack crack crack. At least 23 shots were fired as she hung on to the phone and to her hope of rescue. Taarnes survived, but around her, seven people died and six were injured. In the next building he entered, Breivik killed another five. Then another 10, on the ill-named Lover’s Path.

At some point during this tale, Breivik, who has said he regrets not having killed more people, licked his lips, as if unsettled. But it was his lawyers who showed the emotion he should have been feeling; lead defence counsel Geir Lippestad looked grim and troubled, rubbing his hand over his face, and the face of second counsel Vibeke Hein Baera was crumpled with distress.

Breivik had remained blank-faced earlier in the day too, as a prosecutor took one hour and 10 minutes to read the indictment, a ghastly litany of relentless slaughter, of torn flesh and maimed lives. Every victim was named and their injuries described: Breivik’s bullets went through eyes and took sight, they destroyed arms and legs that had to be amputated, they ripped through brains and mouths and breasts and scrotums.

But the man of stone did weep at one point. The prosecutors showed a video Breivik had put together vilifying Muslims and glorifying his alleged crusade against them. To stirring music, it called for “infidels” to revolt against the domination of Islam in Europe. It showed a picture of a bloodied blonde woman with text that asked: “Has your daughter, sister or girlfriend experienced cultural enrichment by the Muslim community yet?”

As the video played, Breivik was apparently moved to tears and had to put a hand over his eyes.

He showed himself to be a man capable of being moved, but only by his own propaganda.

After all, every man has his breaking point.

First published on smh.com.au