Destination Paradise: Among the jihadists of the Maldives

Many Western tourists don’t even notice that this is a Muslim country. But in fact, the Maldives are the non-Arab country with the highest number of foreign fighters per capita: 200, more or less, out of 400,000 inhabitants. The government denies it. But each and every one has a brother or cousin in Syria. While the rest of the world watched the Olympics in August, everyone here was watching the battle of Aleppo. And rooting for al-Qaeda.

In theory, the Maldives are an archipelago of 1192 islands. But for the Maldivians it is just one island: Male. The islands contain only a couple of shops and one school. Plus a tiny football pitch. Sometimes they don’t even have electricity. For whatever you need, you come to Male. It may look like a town like a thousand others, but it covers 5.8 square kilometers, has 130,000 inhabitants and a real population which is double that: in Male every nook and cranny is inhabited.

Walking along one of the main avenues, the Buruzu Magu, I sneak into a gap, every bit a post-card view – a blue house, a green and a yellow one. At the end there’s a spiral staircase. There are five living behind the first door to the right, nine behind the first on the left, behind the second one they are all immigrants from Bangladesh – just one room with 18 living in it, sleeping in shifts. In the next house, behind a door made out of a plank of rotten plywood, mother and daughter are chatting in the dark, and next to them, on some worn-out matting there’s a old woman, also worn-out, wheezing and groaning, her wispy grey hair looking like the filaments of a burnt-out light-bulb. There are 16 of them living here in a heap of rags and worn-out shoes, the walls patched up with jute and sheets of corrugated iron and the stench of bodies hangs in the air. The kitchen is a camping-stove. There are no tables, chairs, nothing in the rooms, not even windows and everything is just thrown together in a jumble, the washing hanging from the ceiling to dry. On the wall there’s a plasma television acquired at the last elections in return for a vote. The average monthly wage here is 8,000 rufiyah, 470 euros. The rent, for three rooms, is 20,000 rufiyah.

Kinaan grew up in a house like this. With six people in one room, with their parents constantly fighting. The sea was their shower. He’s 31 now and he is the most notorious, and feared criminal in Male. Hang out with him and everybody will stand aside. Male is divided by about thirty gangs, each one with 50 to 500 members. We are talking one tenth of the inhabitants at most: a fifth of all young people. In the first and most recent study on street violence, in 2009, 43% of the interviewees said that they didn’t feel safe, not even in their own houses.

Kinaan ended up in prison, for the first time when he was 15. For getting into a fight. Ever since he was 17 he’s been a heroin-addict and an alcoholic. Even now, to make ends meet, he still sells drugs. “Because here no-one gives you a second chance”, he says. “I’m prepared to do any kind of work, but nobody ever wanted to take me on. Not even as an unloader down at the port. Sooner or later we all get arrested, and all of us for drugs, because when you live ten to a room, the truth is you are living in the street. Male is a hell-hole, you have no future, nothing: and alcohol is forbidden. Heroin costs a lot less than a vodka. And the crazy thing is that sentences are really harsh. Steal a mango and you risk is getting a year in jail and being branded for life. But at the same time, there’s zero tolerance: because we’re in the service of politicians. With a price-list too. 1200 dollars for breaking a shop-window, 1600 for mugging a journalist. You get hired for anything, from distributing leaflets to knifing someone. So if they want it, if you can be of use to them, they’ll get you out of prison”. Kinaan has been convicted twice, but has never served time. Like his friend Naaif. And so what do you do for a living? I ask him. “I’m doing 25 years of prison”, he laughs.

Picture: Tommaso Bonaventura

Kinaan has been trying to change his life for ten years now. So now he’s taken things into his own hands and decided to give himself a second chance: he has decided to go to Syria. “It’s not difficult. Nobody stops you. They have every interest in getting rid of us, we have committed all their crimes for them, we know all their secrets. And we all want to leave. Anything is better than Male”.

“In Syria, if I’m killed, at least it’ll be for a good reason”.

For many here Syria is an economic and moral opportunity: a sort of deliverance. The only thing stopping Kinaan is that he’s trying to save his brother Humam. After a sixty-year moratorium, the death penalty has been reinstated. And Humam is top of the list, accused of having knifed a member of parliament. He retracted his confession, maintaining that it was given under police pressure, and above all, according to Amnesty International, that he has shown frequent signs of mental disturbance. But the fact remains that he is the mere executor of what is clearly a political homicide. Afrasheem Ali was a presidential candidate and Maumoon Aboul Gayoom, who had been president of the Maldives for thirty years, from 1978 to 2008, and is to this day still considered to be the father of the country, had declared that his party would support the candidate with the best credentials in terms of Islam. Afreesh Ali then, rather than Abdulla Yameen, the current president. 

But one evening, on his way home, Afrasheem Ali was killed.

Apart from reintroducing the death-penalty, the new criminal code, for the first time, a year ago, officialised the sharia. But here in the Maldives Islam has always been political, not just a religion. When Gayoom came to power, the Maldives were an archipelago of fishermen in the wild. Because in actual fact, they are not at all a paradise; they don’t even have a freshwater spring. Gayoom had done his studies at al-Azhar university in Cairo: at the time, his word for the Maldives was less that of a president than the word of God. It was Gayoom who had the idea of creating resorts, tourism at $5,000 a night. It was a way of modernizing the country: but also of controlling it. By concentrating the population in Male – and, above all, preventing any contact with other cultures. Only 199 of the 1192 islands are inhabited and 111 are resorts: but there’s no interaction between them. Not even within the resorts themselves. Once finished their shift, employees are forbidden from hanging around. Moreover, the resorts have been built by foreign entrepreneurs. The law stipulates that they must be in partnership with a Maldivian; a Maldivian who is obviously – in general – a friend of a politician. Or a politician himself. In the Maldives 5% of the population owns 95% of the wealth.

Moreover, every opponent is no mere opponent: he is an infidel. As the 38 year-old Shahindha Ismail, head of Democracy Network, the main human rights organization, says: ‘They have politicized religion and sacralised politics’.

Even the tsunami in 2004 was interpreted as God’s punishment. Many videos are shown in which the water washes away everything in its path on an island – except for the mosque.

The result is that today many young lads, very many of them, are like Iyaas. On their way to Syria. Iyaas is a thin 22 year-old, humble-looking, almost ascetic, in flip-flops, jeans and a mandarin-collar shirt that looks a bit like a tunic. And with a beard three or four centimeters long. A quiet, shy lad. But prepared: he has saved up almost $3,000 for the journey – by selling hashish. He’s never been outside the Maldives. Now though he has a portable with all the maps of Turkey and knows everything about the front. Less about Syria: its complexity, the clashes between rebels, the looting and smuggling – even if it’s not really Syria he’s going to: as he tells you: “I am going to paradise”. What do you expect to find there? I ask him. He has no doubt about that: “Brotherhood”. A new life. A different life. “A society in which we are all men and not vultures and carrion like here, where everyone takes advantage of each other. Why do you think you don’t believe in anything” he tells me, “in fact you do believe, you believe in the world as it is. You believe as much as I do”.

When it comes to the Islamic state in which he would like to live, more than anything he knows what it should not be. But Aiham laughs when I tell him that back home it’s said that foreign fighters do not know what Islam really is. When I tell him about the English boy who bought himself an ABC of the sharia at the airport: “No Muslim, unless he is an imam, would ever define himself as an expert on Islam”, he says. “But the Koran begins with the words: ‘Study…’. Then he looks at me and says: “Like Kant, no? Sapere aude.” He is 20 years old and looks what he is: a student, a brilliant one too: jeans, a T-shirt and a shoulder-bag. Sharia faculty. “Islam is justice. We could be like Switzerland, but instead here everything is a question of favours. If you fall ill, you knock on the president’s door and they’ll pay for you to get treatment abroad. Which is the reason for nobody rebelling. That’s how everybody settles their problems here. “We are not citizens, but beggars”. So why not, I ask him, start with the Maldives? “We are Muslims. We are a single community. And Syria is simply the top priority. It would be strange if it were otherwise – that with 500,000 dead we should start thinking more about ourselves than Syria”. His role-model, after Mohammed, is Malcolm X.

That said, in the Maldives he would have his work cut out for him. Only Muslims here can be citizens, at school Islam is the main subject, and five times a day the shops close for prayers: even if the employees stay inside drinking coffee. They don’t go to the mosque. Ditto with alcohol: it’s forbidden, but sold at the Island Hotel bar, next to the airport. All you need is the money to pay for it. Even a judge of the Supreme Court was filmed inside with two prostitutes.

However, if you’re a woman, any woman for that matter, and have extra-marital sex, you will be whipped in public before the court.

None of this, however, happens to tourists. Not even those who choose the guesthouse option, a recent idea of Mohamed Nasheed, who in 2008 succeeded Gayoom in the first democratic elections in the history of the Maldives. Unlike the resorts, the guesthouses are located on the inhabited islands. So they not only bring in a bit of income, but break with cultural isolation: the guesthouse option means that in theory you are living alongside the Maldivians. The first one opened on Maafushi, a two-hour ferry ride from Male. Four lost-looking Neapolitans are wandering around what the signs call “bikini beach”, the beach for foreigners. They’ve been here since yesterday, two separated businessmen, one with his two twenty-year old sons. They had no idea that the Maldives were a Muslim country. And a den for ISIS, I tell them. ‘Jesus!’ Andrea exclaims, opening his eyes wide. Then he says to his friend: “Guagliò, did you hear that? ISIS is here. Not a single woman to be had”.

Picture: Tommaso Bonaventura

In point of fact there is nothing on Maafushi, nothing at all. In 2012 Nasheed was ruined by a coup d’état, and this is the way the present government tries to make life difficult for the guesthouses: they levy the same taxes as in the resorts in which a double room costs not $100, but $1000 a night, with zero investment in the islands. Apart from the beach, Maafushi has only a couple of cafés. “The evening’s only entertainment is the crab-race”, says a disconsolate Andrea. You pay for the brand and that’s it. Just to say you’ve been to the Maldives”. At sundown, one of the two boys, wanders bare-chested around the minimarket checking out every bottle of fruit-juice in a desperate search for beer. He hasn’t discovered yet that in fact there is beer: there’s a boat moored off the coast which sells alcohol. But on Maafushi no-one sells it: there the Koran is respected. We are in front of the mosque. The men glower at him. He understands what I’m thinking, “It’s hot”, he says. “And I’ve got salt all over my skin. My T-shirt sticks to me”. A woman in a niqab comes past, embarrassed. “Blimey, you’re as ugly as sin”, he says. “Who would want you?”. Her husband looks on. “Tinatill”.

Very many women wear the niqab. Completely covered and completely in black. “You know”, Mariyath Mohamed, a thirty year-old journalist tells me, “this type of Islam, so extreme, is not traditional, it’s an innovation”. Same as in Gaza and Baghdad. Thirty years ago nobody was veiled”. Here in the Maldives, Islam was grafted onto Buddhism. Even though there was an assault on the national museum in 2012 and its statues were demolished by hammer-blows, all you have to do is go into one of the older mosques. They used to be temples: the position of Mecca was put there on the floor afterwards, installed diagonally. But then Gayoom came along. And not only him. “A couple of years after that, all those who, after 1967, after the Six Day War and the defeat of Nasser – the secular Arabs who had gone to study in Saudi Arabia – came along too. They were a danger to Gayoom and his ideological monopoly. So they ended up in prison. They were tortured and killed – and turned into heroes. To many they represented not Islam, but opposition to the regime.” Then, he continued, came the tsunami. And now, “this other tsunami – which is Syria”.

But for the government, fundamentalism does not exist. At the news of the first two Maldivians killed in Syria in 2014, President Yameen rejected any responsibility. “We have always urged our compatriots abroad to behave themselves”, he declared.

“The government tries to avoid clashes, but actually shares certain ideas. Like everyone else”, says a young lawyer I’ll call Anaan. He is one of the most renown human rights activists of the Maldives. But he is also Iyaas’ best friend.
And they are very close. Even so, he’s not trying to stop him. “I can’t judge his choice. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a lost battle”, he says. It is not, that is, a wrong war in itself: for Aneen it is wrong only because it is doomed to defeat. He is looking to do a PhD in Europe. “You can’t study here in the Maldives. Quite literally, the tourists have a whole island to themselves and yet we don’t have a single quiet corner to concentrate on a book. Then, every so often, they turn up in front of your house and photograph your poverty, calling it folklore. Just look where we are”, he says. We are standing on Male beach, which is artificial, and poisoned, moreover, by hospital waste. “We don’t even have the sea left. What alternatives do we have? If you come from a rich family, you go and study abroad. Otherwise you go to Syria.”

Kinaan is still ready to leave. To assist the oppressed, he clarifies. Not to exterminate the infidel. “One of the gangs is called Bosnia. I wonder how many, one day, will be called Aleppo”.

Glass Girl

Anonymous regards ØYGARDEN, WEDNESDAY 4TH JUNE, 2014: “I’m going to set fire to the house. Just you wait and see.” She claims she had warned them several times. It wasn’t her who had asked to be put in this shithole far out in the mouth of the fjord. Cooperation, the caseworker had said on the phone. The only thing that would make things better for Ida was cooperation. But she was going away now. She’d set fire to the house if breaking windows didn’t help. She was 15, had a scar on her back, crusted blood on her knuckles and a wounded soul; dreaming of being just an ordinary girl. A girl who could sit quietly on a sofa with her mother and watch films, eat crisps and be free. A girl who could walk out of the door without people from the institution following her. She’d warned them. She’d do everything to get away. Absolutely everything. “I don’t give a shit if I die,” she’d said.

3 STAVANGER, AUGUST 2014. I knew nothing about the fire in the coastal community of Øygarden. There are so many fires. A new email was in my inbox when I got to work one Tuesday two months later. “STRUGGLING BECAUSE I’M NOT BEING HEARD BY THE CHILD WELFARE SERVICE,” was in the subject line. It was sent at 01:53. I sighed. Parents in deep despair or former child welfare service children asking us to write about their battle against the child welfare service contact the editorial department regularly. We chose to investigate a few of the cases more closely. Most of them quickly ended up in the bin. Investigating them didn’t automatically mean that they made it into the paper. We rang back and said that we couldn’t take the story further, mostly. There could be many reasons. The case was too complicated. Allegations couldn’t be verified. The story did not belong in public. We didn’t have adequate resources to go into the matter, even though it was disturbing. Checking out a child welfare services case often means giving somebody hope, only to disappoint them. Desperation, sobbing, yelling, silence was on the other end of the line. They were phone conversations in which I tried to be sympathetic and professional. “HI, I’M A 16-YEAR-OLD GIRL. I’ve been in the Child Welfare Service’s care for 7 months and am now going to move to my 7th place. The Child Welfare Service isn’t listening to me. I demand an intense investigation of the Child Welfare Service. Police who have cooperated with the Child Welfare Service have also often used aids such as handcuffs, where you’re put in handcuffs chained to your leg. They’re not allowed to use these on a 16-year-old girl. I need help to be heard by the Child Welfare Service and it’s gone too far. I’d appreciate people reading this. Greetings, Anonymous.” I read the email several times. Then I replied. Could we have a discreet chat? I got a call from an unknown number ten days later. It was her. 4 Ida explained that she now lived in an acute care institution in Stavanger under strict conditions. She came from Karmøy, would turn 16 in a few weeks. “Does the Child Welfare Service know you’re calling me?”. “No. And I’m not allowed to leave here by myself. And I have to return the mobile at 16:00.” I looked at the clock. We had just 20 minutes. “Should I tell my whole story now?” She seemed gladdened. “We probably won’t manage that,” I said. “But perhaps you can start?” Ida’s view from the institution in Øygarden. Photo: Jarle Aasland “I don’t want to hurt anyone”

ØYGARDEN, WEDNESDAY 4TH JULY. She hadn’t planned to set fire to the institution that evening. She was just in a bad mood and tired after not having eaten or slept properly for several days. Now she was sitting in her room, a white-painted garret on the first floor of a house she hated. 5 She drew out the black plastic sack from under the bed, fished out the six pack she’d stolen from the shop, and felt the cider trickle down her throat. She grabbed a bottle of perfume on impulse and threw it. Threw it as hard as she could towards the window. It hurtled through the glass pane. Shards rained down on the ground one floor below. Then she heard footsteps on the stairs. She had punched her fist right through the same window once, and had to be taken to the emergency outpatients’ clinic to have it put in plaster. She’d thrown the PC through the pane another time; a lamp the third, and a bedside table the fourth. She’d broken all of the windows in the house, perhaps, since arriving at the end of April. And she’d done that either with her fist of what she had to hand. They’d once nailed a chipboard plate in front of the window and the daylight disappeared for a longer while. They shouted to her. Steps on the stairs. They were on their way up. She pulled out a bag from under the bed. There was the fish knife she’d got hold of some days earlier lying in it. About 20 cm, a black shaft, stickers on top; a bit of rust or old fish blood on the blade. They stood in the hallway looking at her. “What is that, Ida?” they asked. “Do you see this knife?” she said, and looked at them. She had long hair then. Large brown eyes. She was slim and tall, almost 1.80. She was pretty. She’d actually once walked along a catwalk at a fashion show to applause. Pictures of her from the spring of 2014 showed her smiling warmly. Now she just felt cold and calm. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. Can’t you please go downstairs?” That’s how she remembers the exchange of words. Both child welfare service workers backed down the stairs. Ida remembers the man’s expression. She’d never seen him like that before. He seemed scared. She threw a couple of cider cans at them. The roles 6 were reversed. Suddenly she had the power to control what was going to happen. That was actually a good feeling. She stood in her girl’s room that was soon going to be transformed to embers and ashes, and took out the lighter she’d hidden away. House rules forbade lighters. “I thought that “OK, they’re not listening”. So I have to do something. Then I set fire to the institution.” The County Governor only considers implementing an inquiry a year and a half after the fire in Øygarden, and following a long series of serious incidents connected to Ida. She stuffed the duvet under the bed, lit fires in several places and made sure that the flames grabbed a hold. Then she went down to the ground floor. She didn’t see the two employees and assumed that they’d locked themselves in the office. 7 “I’m putting the fire extinguisher here, outside the door,” she shouted. She set one of the jackets alight on the row of hooks in the hallway. She made sure it caught fire. The fire alarm wailed. She went out.

IT WAS A NICE SUMMER’S EVENING, scattered clouds, warm. The girl who wanted to be an ordinary girl couldn’t remember having stopped outside the garage, picking up a huge stone, throwing it through the rear window of the estate car belonging to the institution. She passed the county road and clawed her way up a rocky crag between the houses in the small housing estate in Oen. She looked down upon the house where she’d lived for about a month, apart from the five days that she’d spent in the town’s adolescent psychiatric facility. It looked like a completely ordinary home in an idyllic small cove. A white-painted house in ‘80s style. A garden with a lawn, hedges, vegetation. A garage with antlers above the door. A trampoline. But everyone in the neighbourhood knew. Perhaps they didn’t know that it was an institution with two teenage girls on forced placement. But they certainly knew that it was a child welfare institution. And it was the most desolate place that 15-year-old Ida had ever experienced until then. “Do you know what I’ve done, Mum?” She said while speaking on the phone that thick, grey-blue smoke billowed out of the broken window. She cried and sniffled while she paced to and fro on the mountain. Then she rang her lawyer and confessed to him too. Fire engines, police cars, ambulances, and TV2 drew up in front of the house. She stood behind a bush to watch. The smoke, the blue lights, the wailing alarm, the firefighters who were working hectically, all the neighbours standing round and watching. She remembered that she suddenly felt like she was one of them, astonished by what she had done. The police officers were armed with pistols and had dogs on leashes with them. Somebody suddenly pointed towards the hill, pointed at her. Then they came towards her, the policemen and dogs. Ida ran along the mountain and through the heather, undergrowth, and houses. The sea on one side; the archipelago on the other. She ran into the scant housing estate, heard them calling her name while she looked for hiding places and escape routes. She ran into a garden where a box was, which she 8 opened. Some cushions were in the box, but there was room for her too. She crept into in, shut the lid, and it got dark. They weren’t more than five metres away, perhaps, when she opened the lid ajar. She looked right at the policemen and dogs. They were so close. But they didn’t see her. And went on. Why hadn’t she taken the longboard with her? She could have skated towards town then. She walked to the bus shelter down the road, but no buses were running. She stood leaning against the back of the shelter, didn’t know what she should do, when she heard someone shouting to her. It was Robin Dale Oen. The neighbour who ran a youth activity centre. She’d said hello to him at the weekend. He seemed on the level and had said that she could join in on what she wanted. She’d quite like to paddle a canoe. “You’re more than welcome,” he’d said. “Don’t be scared, Ida,” he said now. She sat in the bus shelter and told him what had happened. Robin thought it best that she came with him to talk to the police. One of the police cars passed by, screeched to a halt, and reversed in their direction at full speed. She ran behind the bus shelter again but got no further; her path blocked by hedges and bushes. Robin walked calmly after her, held her. The rest was like a thick fog. The aggressive shouting. Pistols, back against the hedge. Shields. The knife that rubbed against the inside of the trouser lining. The barking dogs. One policewoman who shouted: “I won’t let go of the dog if you stand still.” After a while, she recognised a new voice. She’d med Geir the policeman twice before. He once found her in the middle of the road, at the bottom of a hill. She’d fallen flat on her face off her long board and had fainted. He’d gone out to the institution one night because of trouble, had sat down and talked with her. Then she began to explain, and he had all the time in the world. 9 Geir was speaking with her again now; just talking calmly, asking her if she could look him in the eyes, didn’t stop before she lifted her gaze. The smoke spread over the evening sky and, according to the report that police officer Geir Fjelstad wrote later, Ida had said: “This actually isn’t me.”

Ida’s life in 28 minutes

STAVANGER, FRIDAY 22ND AUGUST. She had 20 minutes left before the phone would be confiscated. “When were you taken away from your mother?” I heard she was leafing through the papers. “14th January 2014.” “14th January this year? But that’s just seven months ago. Have you been in institutions for seven months?” “Yes. That’s why I want to raise this. I’m being moved from pillar to post, and it irritates me.” She was soon 16 and had become an expert at summing up her life story for adults who had little time. She’d grown up with her mother in Haugesund, and didn’t know who her father was. When Ida was 11, her mother had taken her with her to an African country. They lived there for three years. They moved to Karmøy in the summer of 2013. “Everything went fine,” said Ida. “Then I was going to text my friend. But I sent it to the wrong number. It went to a teacher instead. Personal things were in it. Then the Child Welfare Service came and picked me up at school and put me in an emergency home on Stord.” “Something serious must have been in that text?” “I wrote that I’d taken Valium. And one personal thing: that I was raped in Africa. But it wasn’t Mum’s fault,” she hurried to say. “Mum tried to set limits.” The way in which Ida told the story was that everything painful in her life had begun in January 2014, when the Child Welfare Service was standing 10 on her doorstep. She’d been at school before that day and her marks were satisfactory. She played football and handball, had friends, contact with the family, and a home. She’d never got in touch with police or tried drugs. “I was a right-minded girl that did many activities,” she said, sounding like an adult viewing herself from the outside in. Everything was turned upside down some months after the Child Welfare Service took charge of her care. She had been moved from institution to institution, had dropped out of school, had almost no contact with her mother or family, had no friends or leisure activities, had debuted with drugs, and there’d been a lot of nonsense with the police. She was regularly in court to fight the Child Welfare Service’s decision: a care order. Emergency placement. Enforced placement. She and her mother lost each time. FACTS: A CARE ORDER The last was that the Child Welfare Service’s had decided to forcibly place her at an institution in Indre Troms following the fire at Øygarden. She was to be there under forced placement until the following summer; alone under supervision by personnel 24 hours a day. Her mother refused. Ida refused. The case was appealed to the County Social Welfare Board. The decision would fall next month, in September. Everyone asked her to wait and see. Everyone asked her to be patient. But Ida was soon 16 and fed up of waiting. FACTS: THE COUNTY SOCIAL WELFARE BOARD She was extremely unhappy at the emergency centre in Stavanger, where she’d lived since the fire. Youths in Norway were never meant to sit and wait patiently in emergency institutions for three and a half months. “I just want people to see what the Child Welfare Service is doing,” said Ida. Her voice was like a song. She seemed right-minded and likeable. I couldn’t manage to make myself believe that the girl at the other end of the line had set a house alight out of pure evil. “I’ve got all the papers. You can read them.” 11 I answered neither yes nor no. She hung up, photographed the case documents with her mobile, emailed them to me, and gave them her phone. Eight minutes past the deadline.

“I was a happy girl … fuck the night watch”

STAVANGER, JUNE-SEPTEMBER. We were located in the same city, but in realities which hardly intersected. I still hadn’t decided whether to investigate Ida’s case. I read the papers, an extremely limited excerpt from the entire caseload, I later realised, and travelled to see her lawyer in Haugesund to discuss the case. I lived my standard life seven kilometres away, and imagined that Ida was sitting in her room in anticipation of the County Social Welfare Board’s decision. It wasn’t until several months later that I was allowed to read the journal’s descriptions of broken panes, swallowed glass shards, of a girl who could be calm by day, but who at night began walking restlessly in the corridors before escaping unhesitatingly and ending up in the police’s arrest van or, if she got away, going to Burger King on Torget in the centre of town. Sitting down beside the window, looking at the nightlife, and dreaming of slipping into the crowd. She wanted to go into town one Saturday; never mind what the institution’s lights-out time rules said. She roamed back and forth and threatened to burn the house down, and they knew that she might be capable of it. “What would have happened if I hadn’t had a knife on me?” she asked. “Then we’d have to search you,” they answered. But she refused to let them do it. They called the police. She threw the lighter on the floor, taking a carpet knife out instead and fiddled with it, before she handed it over. They searched her room and found a razorblade under the bed. Then they asked her to get some sleep. She began to throw rubbish out of the window the same evening. She set off the fire alarm by stuffing paper underneath the electric wall-mounted radiator and wrapping a duvet around it. She blocked the bathroom sink up with paper. Water ran all over the floor. She was taken to have a serious chat. A scuffle between her and the staff arose. According to them, who were the only ones describing these events afterwards, it happened because Ida threatened 12 them and tried to kick one of them. They put her on the floor twice. She began breathing strangely after the second time, so they drove her to the emergency outpatients’ clinic where an x-ray examination showed that she’d swallowed something. On the x-ray picture, it looked as though she’d swallowed some jewellery. It was not until after personnel first returned to the institution that they noticed all the tagging. The mirror and wall in her bathroom were full of it. Fuck the night watch, you deserve to die, and I’ll make sure of that. Pay close attention to what’s happening behind you. I was a happy girl at my mother’s. I miss her. A new chance would be good. Yearning. My life is fucked. I don’t give a shit about the rest of it. My life will never be good. Please. Give me one more chance. SHE WAS SUBJECTED TO 26 FORCED INTERVENTION MEASURES during the course of the 16 weeks at the Stavanger emergency centre. Ten of these took place in situations of acute danger where she was restrained, ideally, or put on the floor. They refused to let her go anywhere without personnel for extended periods, she was isolated in a separate flat, or refused the use of a mobile. There was breaking institution windows, and her speciality: swallowing glass shards. One day, personnel found her in the bathroom. She was holding a tool in her hand suited to ending it, and she said: “My life is ruined.” 13 The seemingly ordinary-looking house near the mouth of the fjord was closed down as a child welfare institution after the fire. Shown here during restoration.

Missed call 

WHY DID SHE SWALLOW GLASS SHARDS? She was at the emergency outpatients’ clinic in Stavanger 12 times during the autumn of 2014. She was admitted to hospital five times, twice at the child and adolescent psychiatric outpatients’ clinic. She underwent x-rays – or CT scans – eight times, usually after having swallowed glass, but a carpet knife and other objects too. She told hospital psychologists that she struggled in relation to staff putting her on the floor and placing her in the institution’s sluice flat. She ended up there when she lashed out, resisted rules and the like. One psychologist wrote in the hospital journal: “She felt confined with personnel in these situations and had frequent flashbacks from traumas, something which made her desperate, at risk of 14 wanting to force her way out to get away from highly unpleasant feelings. These episodes often ended with lash outs and swallowing glass shards, according to Ida.” The psychologist asked for a meeting with Stavanger emergency centre several times. The request was allegedly turn down. She rang the centre eight times on 22nd September, without anyone answering. It wasn’t possible to leave a message either, she noted in the journal. She got through by phone on Wednesday 8th October. She was informed that Ida had been moved to Northern Norway. The psychologist sat down and wrote a final entry about the young patient. “The undersigned asked for permission on several occasions to come out to the emergency centre to discuss the situation and guide personnel in relation to safeguarding Ida’s mental health. But the centre turned this down each time. Several instances, including a head of department, pointed out that they didn’t require guidance and this was unnecessary. When the undersigned pointed out that this was important both for Ida’s health and for us to be able to do our job, this was plainly turned down, nonetheless. In October 2014, we were told that Ida had been moved to another part of the country.”

Rapporteurs on Ida

That year, 14,495 children and youths in Norway were placed away from their own homes. Slightly more than 1,300 of them were put in a child welfare institution. Ida was a thin pile of paper on the tip-off shelf behind my office chair. I had a lot of other things to do. She had to wait. A couple of weeks passed before I realised that she had been moved to Indre Troms at the end of September. A long time later, I read how Stavanger emergency centre had praised her in their final report for being a resourceful, positive, and fun girl. The institution’s management apologised that she had been at the emergency centre for far too long. Three and a half months. Conclusion: The stay had been harmful for her. The final report from Øygarden, the institution she almost burned to the ground, described many of the same problems. But there was one 15 important difference: The Øygarden report contained no self-criticism. If one read the Øygarden report and many of the case documents that the municipal lawyer on Karmøy had sent to the County Social Welfare Board, it was almost as though a monster had taken shape: The institution in Øygarden had called the police for assistance handling Ida 16 times in April and May. Reconstructing the institution after the fire would take six months and cost a million kroner. The institution wrote that Ida’s behaviour had been so extreme, that police had seen it necessary to use both pepper spray and handcuffs despite reinforcements. The only reason for her not ending up in a solitary confinement cell in Bergen was that a police lawyer had put their foot down and said that this was no place for a 15-year-old. Instead, they’d placed her in seclusion, isolated her at another institution. She’d broken almost all of the house’s windows, some of them several times. She’d threatened staff with glass shards, and had said that she would kill employees and their children. “The girl can be perceived as being extremely calculating when she issues the threats, and both police and personnel consider none of the threats to be made in the heat of the moment,” states the final report from Øygarden. She certainly had “many positive interests and skills”. But she had not managed to “make use of these resources”. Her behaviour was “destructive for herself and her surroundings”. While Stavanger emergency centre accepted self-criticism on behalf of the Child Welfare Service, the management at the institute at Øygarden formulated themselves in the following way: “Ida’s expression was so extreme, that the unit did not see itself as capable of safeguarding her youth to the degree necessary for her development.”

The toilet floor

INDRE TROMS/STAVANGER, SUNDAY 19TH OCTOBER. “Hi Thomas! I wonder if you think my going to the media with my case might help me?” 16 It was Sunday. I discovered the email late in the evening. But I’d made up my mind. I was going to ring her during the week, tell her that I wanted to delve into her story. Why? Ida was exposed to massive coercion and use of force. But she’d also done the most horrible things. Everything had happened in less than a year in the care of the Child Welfare Service. What makes a 15-year-old girl set an institution alight? Why does she suddenly begin breaking windows and threatening the lives of staff? Had Ida been some sort of ticking time-bomb that just had to explode in the summer of 2014? Was she so damaged following neglect that this just had to happen? Or was it what Ida claimed? Had the Child Welfare Service provoked a type of behaviour that Ida did not recognise as being hers? What type of child welfare service was this, then? Why did the Child Welfare Service and the Police see it necessary to use force and coercion? Could it have been avoided? And what was it like for a teenager to be forcibly placed in an institution? These were questions about Ida. But they were also fundamental. They were about a universe that most of us will never know anything about. These were questions that I wanted to find the answers to.

BUT SHE GOT NO ANSWER from me that Sunday. I exist in a world where one day more, or one day less did not matter. It was a completely different world to Ida’s. That same day, she tried to take her life, according to the journals that I subsequently read. When she awoke the next day, Monday 20th October, she apparently felt more optimistic. She was driven to school in Bardufoss, 40 minutes away. During the course of the day, she left the classroom to go to the toilet. There she swallowed several tablets of medication that she was allegedly given by another pupil at the school. I went to work, got a coffee; thought that I would ring her soon. Ida sent her mother a text, said goodbye, and passed out on the toilet floor.