By Doug Saunders - from The Globe and Mail
It would be a terrible shock in any capital, but Friday’s attacks were particularly devastating in Oslo, a city that has made peace a major industry. It is, after all, only a few blocks’ walk from the government square where a car bomb exploded Friday to the headquarters of the Nobel Peace Prize.
This is a quiet and orderly city built on deep foundations of order and tranquillity. It is the site of countless peace-treaty summits, UN peacekeeping initiatives and large-scale aid projects funded by the vast oil wealth of Norway, a country of five million that has around 40 murders per year – a figure that has barely changed since the Second World War.
Beneath this surface, there are tougher undercurrents: a country that eagerly participates in military missions; that has been warned by the United States and other countries about extremist movements within its borders; and that has a small but surprisingly vocal and active extreme-right movement whose members are often furious with the government over immigration policies.
Still, it should be no surprise that Norwegians seemed stunned and inarticulate after the attack and the news that it appeared to have come from within their own community. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that their Prime Minister responded not with anger and vengeance but with a call for “more openness and more democracy.”
“I have a message to the person who attacked us and the people who are behind it: You’re not going to destroy us,” Jens Stoltenberg told a news conference shortly after the attacks. “You’re not destroying our democracy and our work for a better world. We’re a small country but a very proud country. No one can bomb us to be quiet. No one can shoot us to be quiet. No one can ever scare us from being Norway.”
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