Norway’s Labor Party will return Friday to the island of Utoya for its first youth camp at the site since 2011, when a gunman professing far-right-wing ideology attacked the youth camp and killed 69 people.
On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik set off a bomb in Oslo’s center, killing eight people, then traveled to the nearby island and began his rampage. He said he chose the target—and his victims—because he blamed the then-ruling Labor Party for promoting multiculturalism in Norway.
The Labor Party’s youth camp was canceled in 2012 and was held in other location in the subsequent years.
“Those who are preparing to return to Utoya are helping to write a new page in the history of the island,” Mani Hussaini, a 27-year-old from Syrian Kurdistan who was elected the head of the party’s youth wing last year, told Agence France-Presse ahead of the three-day camp that begins Friday.
Among the more than 1,000 students who have enrolled for the camp is Astrid Willa Eide Hoem, 20, who survived the 2011 massacre.
“Utoya has to continue to be a workshop where young people learn about democracy, politics and activism,” she told AFP.
But not everyone who survived is ready to return.
“I'm not sure I want to return to the camp, so I prefer to wait until I really want to go,” Marie Hogden, who also survived the violence, told the news agency.