World

South Africa’s jailed ex-president Jacob Zuma was allowed to leave prison on Thursday to attend his brother’s funeral, the government said.

Zuma, 79, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for contempt of court last month after snubbing graft investigators probing his presidency.

He turned himself in on July 8 to start serving his sentence in the southeastern town of Estcourt, and his brother Michael, 77, died several days later.

His incarceration sparked riots and looting that escalated into the worst violence since the end of apartheid, killing at least 276 people, according to the official tallies.

Zuma was discreetly driven early Thursday to his rural home in Nkandla, 175 kilometres (110 miles) from Estcourt, where the funeral was to be held, a government official who did not wish to be named told AFP.

Soldiers manned the road leading up to a cluster of thatched-roof houses where Zuma’s extensive family resides, surrounded by rolling hills.

An occasional convoy of black BMWs roared up the fence-lined tracks, lifting clouds of dust. Police vehicles also patrolled the area.

Zuma’s brother died on July 11 after a long illness, according to local media.

The former president was granted a 24-hour “compassionate leave” for the funeral as a “short-term, low-risk” prisoner, the correctional services department said in a statement.      

It added that inmates were not required to wear “offender uniform” outside correctional facilities, implying Zuma would not be donning orange prisoner dungarees for the ceremony.

The media were denied access to the ceremonies to allow the family to mourn in privacy, but a picture published by a local newspaper showed Zuma arriving in a navy-blue jacket and a white Panama fedora hat.

– Still popular –

Inmates in South Africa are usually allowed to attend relatives’ funerals — a right denied to the country’s first black president Nelson Mandela when he was in jail for fighting the apartheid regime.

Zuma himself spent a decade in prison for fighting white-minority rule, after which he fled into exile and became a feared head of intelligence.

Charismatic and jovial, he succeeded Thabo Mbeki as president in 2009.

After nine years in office, Zuma was ousted by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) over a string of graft scandals that arose during his presidency. 

Yet he retains a fervent support base both within the ANC and among the general public.

Crowds of supporters had gathered in Nkandla after South Africa’s top court sentenced Zuma to jail on June 29, decrying his conviction and vowing to block his arrest.

But the area was deserted on Thursday, with only locals on everyday errands strolling across a football field facing the precinct.

Despite the scandals that have tarnished his reputation, Zuma has remained particularly popular among rural communities in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal.

Starting off his life as a herdboy, he is widely viewed as a “people’s man” and still appeals for his strong family and cultural values.

A teetotaller and non-smoker, he married seven times and has at least 20 children.  

Zuma is separately on trial for allegedly taking kickbacks from an arms deal with several international companies in 1999, when he was deputy president. He denies any wrongdoing. 

A dozen Thai pro-democracy student activists were charged with royal defamation and sedition on Thursday, their lawyers said, over a rally last year that demanded reforms to Thailand’s unassailable monarchy.

The pro-democracy movement, which has been largely led by student activists, kicked off a year ago due to public discontent over Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha’s administration.

One key protest demand that emerged was monarchy reforms, a once-taboo issue that spilled into public discussion due to the student-led rallies that drew tens of thousands at their peak.

At one such protest in October last year, thousands marched to the German embassy in defiance of the king, who has spent long periods of time in Germany.

“All 12 have been charged with 112 (lese majeste) and 116 (sedition), with the youngest being 20 years old,” said the Thai Lawyers for Human Rights group (TLHR), which represents the students.

“The main reason for the charges is the rally and speeches delivered in front of the German embassy.”

The students were bailed by the end of the day under several conditions, including that they “must not commit further wrongdoings related to the royal institution”, TLHR said.

A 13th protester — who was part of the rally — is also expected to appear in court Friday to be indicted on the same charges. 

Abolishing Thailand’s draconian lese majeste law is among one of the key demands in the pro-democracy movement, as critics have long said it is interpreted too broadly to target political opponents.

Scores of protesters have been hit with the royal insult law, with the most prominent figures earning multiple charges for different protests.

It carries a maximum penalty of 15 years per charge.

– Condemnation from Germany’s Greens –

Ahead of the court’s indictment, Germany’s Green Party had thrown their support behind the young protesters.

“It must be ensured that they receive a fair trial and that representatives of the German embassy are given the opportunity to accompany the process,” its members said in a statement issued Wednesday. 

“We clearly condemn the draconian crackdown on peaceful demonstrators, including politically motivated charges.” 

Student leader Patsaravalee Tanakitvibulpon — better known as “Mind” — told AFP after she left the court she was “overwhelmed with joy” by their backing. 

“This shows support of an international principle that aligns with what we do.”

Other key demands of the movement include the resignation of Prayut — a former military chief who masterminded the 2014 coup — and for a rewrite of Thailand’s military-scripted constitution. 

In recent months, as Thais weather a deadly Covid-19 surge, protesters have pivoted their grievances to Prayut’s handling of the pandemic. 

This week, the hashtag “Prayut Get Out” started trending as Thailand placed more provinces under a partial lockdown amid a record number of new infections on a near-daily basis. 

Currently, there are more than 453,000 Covid-19 cases and 3,697 deaths in Thailand — the bulk of the toll detected since April after an outbreak in night clubs frequented by Bangkok’s political elite.

Church bells rang out across Norway Thursday as the prime minister called on the country to stand up against the hatred that drove right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik to wage devastating attacks a decade ago that left 77 people dead. 

Speaking to survivors and relatives of the victims on the 10-year anniversary of the attacks, Prime Minister Erna Solberg urged empathy and tolerance. 

“We must not let hate stand unopposed,” Solberg said in a speech at a memorial ceremony near the government headquarters in Oslo, the site of the first attack.

Breivik set off a bomb outside the office, killing eight people before going on a shooting spree at a summer camp for left-wing youths on the island of Utoya, lwaving another 69 dead — most of them teenagers. 

The Scandinavian nation had been mostly spared from extremist violence until the attacks on July 22, 2011, the bloodiest in Norway’s post-war history.

Solberg stressed that much had been done in the past decade to improve security and combat radicalisation and extremism.

“The most important preparedness, we have to build within each of us,” she said, adding it would serve as “a fortified bulwark against intolerance and hate speech, for empathy and tolerance.”

Briefly after noon (1000 GMT), church bells nationwide rung out in honour of the victims.

Another ceremony on Utoya itself in the afternoon will mark the anniversary.

– ‘Still present’ –

Shortly after the attacks, the then-Labour Party prime minister and current NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg promised to respond with “more democracy” and “more humanity”.

“Ten years ago, we met hatred with love,” Stoltenberg said in a speech during a church memorial service on Thursday.

“But the hatred is still present,” he added.

Just this week vandals scrawled “Breivik was right” on a memorial for Benjamin Hermansen, who was killed by neo-Nazis in 2001 in what was billed as Norway’s “first racist crime”.

Stoltenberg also referenced the 2019 attempted attack by Philip Manshaus, who opened fire into a mosque on the outskirts of Oslo before being overpowered by worshippers preventing any serious injuries.

Just before the attack, Manshaus had shot and killed his Asian-born stepsister over racist motives.

Ten years on, many of the survivors of Utoya feel that Norway still has not truly faced up to the ideology that drove Breivik. 

“The deadly racism and right-wing extremism are still alive and well in our midst,” Astrid Eide Hoem, a survivor who has since become head of the Labour Party’s youth league (AUF), which organised the camp, said in a speech at Thursday’s ceremony. 

“They live on the internet, they live around the dinner table, they live in many people that many (other) people listen to,” she continued.

“It is now, once and for all, that we must say that we do not accept racism, that we do not accept hatred.”

The Norwegian intelligence service (PST) also warned this week that “the far-right ideas that inspired the attack are still a driving force for right-wing extremists at home and abroad.” 

Breivik’s actions had inspired several violent attacks over the past decade, the PST said, including those targeting mosques in New Zealand’s Christchurch.

– Open wounds –

In 2012, Breivik, who is now 42, was sentenced to 21 years in prison. His sentence can be extended indefinitely and he will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars. 

For many of the survivors, the psychological trauma remains an open wound. 

A third were still suffering last year from major disorders, including post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression and headaches, a recent paper by the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies found. 

“When you’ve been through something like this, you don’t go back to being the person you were,” Eide Hoem told AFP in an interview.

“I have trouble sleeping, I’m afraid, and I think I’ll have to live with this all my life,” she added. 

A group of NGOs filed a class-action lawsuit against the French state on Thursday over alleged racial profiling by the police, an issue that has poisoned relations between the police and minority youths.

In January, six NGOs, including Human Rights Watch and the French branch of Amnesty International, had warned they would take legal action if the government did not take steps to end what they called discriminatory identity checks within four months.

On Thursday, they said they were moving ahead with their complaint to the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, after receiving no response from the authorities.

The NGOs said they were inspired to act by a landmark class-action lawsuit filed by blacks and latinos against the city of New York in 2008. 

After a nine-week trial, a federal judge in 2013 ordered New York police to halt racial profiling and “stop-and-frisk” searches, leading to a drastic drop in cases of alleged discrimination.

Issa Coulibaly, president of the Pazapas Belleville NGO, one of the six behind the French lawsuit, said constantly being asked to show ID had a profound impact on minority youths.

“It’s something that comes up very often in the personal stories of young men particularly,” he said, noting that it created “a feeling of exclusion, and the impression of not being completely French because they are being treated differently.”

– Mounting cases of brutality –

Black and Arab-origin French youths have long complained of being singled out by the police for identity checks on the street and on public transport. 

Several cases of young men in predominantly immigrant neighbourhoods being injured or killed in police custody or during arrests have also shone a light on what activists call a pattern of systemic racism in law enforcement.

Footage of white officers beating up an unarmed black music producer in his Paris studio in November 2020 galvanised protests by French Black Lives Matter activists.

In another case that sparked particular outrage, black youth worker Theo Luhaka suffered severe rectal injuries in 2017 after being beaten with a police baton during an ID check.

A study carried out in 2009 by the Open Society Justice Initiative, also one of the NGOs behind the lawsuit, and France’s state research body CNRS showed that black people in Paris were six times more likely to be stopped for their ID than whites.

People with features seen as “Arab” were eight times more likely to be asked to show their papers.

The NGOs are seeking a change in France’s criminal code to explicitly forbid discrimination during ID checks.

They are also demanding that every person who is searched is given a receipt they can produce to avoid being asked repeatedly for their papers.

The 450-page lawsuit is based on testimony from dozens of alleged victims of racial profiling in nine French cities. 

President Emmanuel Macron has acknowledged problems, telling the Brut video media site in December that “when you have a skin colour that is not white, you are stopped much more. You are identified as a problem factor. And that cannot be justified.”

But he later appeared to row back on the remarks after an outcry from police unions, saying in April that there is “no systemic racism” in the force.

The Council of State could ask the government what actions it intends to take to address discriminatory practices or itself recommend corrective action.

In 2016, France’s highest court already rapped the state for “discriminatory” checks and ordered it to pay damages to three people.

Police unions have suggested ending random ID checks altogether.

Five members of a pro-democracy Hong Kong union that published children’s books about sheep trying to hold back wolves from their village have been arrested for sedition, police announced Thursday.

The arrests are the latest illustration of how China is rapidly remoulding the international business hub in its own authoritarian image following huge and often violent protests two years ago.

A sweeping national security law was imposed on Hong Kong last year to stamp out dissent and authorities have launched a campaign to purge those deemed unpatriotic or disloyal to China.

Senior Superintendent Steve Li, from the city’s new national security police unit, displayed the three offending titles at an afternoon press conference.

Published by the General Union of Hong Kong Speech Therapists, the books try to explain Hong Kong’s democracy movement to children.

Democracy supporters are portrayed as sheep living in a village surrounded by wolves.

The first book, titled “Guardians of Sheep Village” explains the 2019 pro-democracy protests that swept through Hong Kong.

“Janitors of Sheep Village”, the second book, sees cleaners in the village go on strike to force out wolves who leave litter everywhere.

The book’s introduction explains it is a reference to Hong Kong medical workers striking last year in a bid to force the government to close the border with mainland China at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

The final book in the trilogy — “The 12 Braves of Sheep Village” — is about a group of sheep who flee their village by boat because of the wolves. 

It is a direct reference to 12 Hong Kongers who made a failed bid to escape by speedboat last year to Taiwan but were detained by the Chinese coastguard and jailed.

– ‘Poison our children’ –

Flicking through the pages of the books, Li said the content was deemed seditious because it was aimed at “stirring up hatred” towards the government and judiciary and “inciting violence”.

“These stories beautify violent acts, paint fugitives as heroes and justify the strike by the medical staff. It is trying to poison our children,” he said.

He said police decided to act because the union was planning upcoming public reading events and called on both parents and any shops that might stock the book to throw them away.

Two men and three women from the union had been arrested while HK$160,000 ($20,600) in funds had been frozen under the new national security law.

Sedition is a colonial-era law that until last year had not been used since Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China.

It carries up to two years in jail for a first offence.

Police and prosecutors are now regularly using it alongside the national security law to clamp down on political speech and views. Those arrested for such crimes are denied bail.

Over the last year, most of the city’s best known democracy figures have been jailed, prosecuted or have fled overseas.

Under a “One country, two systems” deal, Beijing promised Hong Kong could keep key freedoms and autonomy after its 1997 handover.

As a result it flourished as the only free speech bastion within China, becoming a regional media and publishing hub.

But China has ramped up its control over Hong Kong and brought in mainland style censorship controls after 2019’s huge protests.

The security law has resulted in certain  books being removed from schools and libraries, an overhaul of school textbooks to be more “patriotic”, new censorship rules for all films and the closure last month of the outspoken Apple Daily newspaper. 

Chancellor Angela Merkel stressed the need to “speed up” the fight against climate change, as the death toll from devastating floods in Germany reached 177 on Thursday.

Merkel, who is retiring after September elections, said that Germany and other countries had “not done enough” to meet the goal set out in the Paris climate accord of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“We shouldn’t pretend that we haven’t done anything, but it’s true that not enough has been done to reach the aim of staying well under two degrees and as close to 1.5 degrees as possible,” Merkel told reporters.

“That is not just true of Germany, but of many countries across the world, which is why we need to increase the tempo.”

Merkel had already called for faster climate action last Sunday as she visited flood victims in Rhineland-Palatinate state.

One of the regions worst hit by last week’s devastating floods, Rhineland-Palatinate said Thursday that its death toll had reached 128, taking the total count to 177 in Germany and 209 across Europe. 

Merkel’s cabinet approved a huge emergency aid package Wednesday for flood-stricken regions, unlocking some 400 million euros ($470 million) in immediate relief.

“We have also made clear that this sum will be increased if it proves not to be enough,” Merkel said Thursday. 

She added that society faced a “profound transformation” as European governments looked to reach carbon neutrality in the coming decades.

Merkel, who will leave office after 16 years following the September 26 poll, defended her record on the environment.

She pointed to new emissions reductions targets agreed by her government earlier this year, which mean Germany now aims to reach carbon neutrality by 2045, five years earlier than the previous target.

The move came after Germany’s highest court demanded the government revise its targets, which it said were not ambitious enough.

Prosecutors in Madagascar said Thursday they had foiled an attempt to assassinate President Andry Rajoelina and made several arrests.

“Several foreign and Madagascar nationals were arrested on Tuesday, July 20, as part of an investigation into an attack on state security,” prosecutor Berthine Razafiarivony said in a statement released overnight.

There was “a plan to eliminate and neutralise various Madagascan figures, including the head of state,” Razafiarivony said.

“At this stage of the investigation, which is ongoing, the prosecutor-general’s office assures we will shed light in on this case,” she added.

Two French nationals are among those who were arrested on Tuesday, diplomatic sources told AFP.

The two are reputedly retired military officers, according to the Taratra, a local news agency operation to the communications ministry.

During the country’s Independence Day celebrations on June 26, the gendarmerie announced they had foiled an assassination attempt on their boss, General Richard Ravalomanana, who is also Rajoelina’s right-hand man.

Rajoelina, 47, first seized power in March 2009 from Marc Ravalomanana with the backing of the military.

He won the last vote in December 2018, beating his main rival and predecessor Ravalomanana in an election beset by allegations of fraud.

Stretching across 587,000 square kilometres (nearly 227,000 square miles), Madagascar is the world’s fourth largest island, bigger than Spain or Thailand in size.

The country is world-renowned for its unique wildlife and vanilla but has a long history of coups and unrest since gaining independence from France in 1960.

– ‘DJ’ Rajoelina –

Rajoelina made his mark in events management and media before bursting on to the political scene in 2007. He earned the nickname of “Disc Jockey,” a reference to the parties he used to host in the capital Antananarivo.

After becoming the city’s mayor, he used his own Viva broadcasting channel to help generate a national following, putting himself forward as the leading opponent to Ravalomanana.

In 2009, he came to power as leader of the “High Transitional Authority” and pushed through a constitutional change that, among other things, lowered the minimum age for presidential candidates from 40 to 35, thus making him eligible to bid for the top job.

Under international pressure, Rajoelina did not contest the 2013 election and instead backed his victorious former finance minister, Hery Rajaonarimampianina.

The two quickly fell out, however. In 2016, Rajoelina vowed to win back office at the ballot box, achieving his goal in December 2018 after hotly-contested elections in which he hosted lavish rallies with performance artists and fireworks.

Rajoelina has portrayed himself as a champion of the poor and sees business as the key to easing poverty, although critics say his plans are often wild or lack substance.

Madagascar is heavily dependent on foreign aid, and nine out of 10 people live on less than $2 a day. The country has virtually been under a lockdown since the Covid-19 pandemic hit last year and its southern region is in the grips of a famine.

In April 2020, the president was the front man for the launch of a locally-made herbal drink called Covid-Organics that he claimed would prevent and cure coronavirus.

The drink was massively promoted in Madagascar and sent to other African countries in a sales pitch, despite warnings by the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) about proclaimed cures that have no scientific validation.

Piles of cars were strewn across a central Chinese city Thursday as shocked residents picked through the debris of a historic deluge that claimed at least 33 lives, with rescue efforts ongoing and hundreds seeking to find their relatives.

An unprecedented downpour dumped a year’s rain in just three days on the city of Zhengzhou, weather officials said, instantly overwhelming drains and sending torrents of muddy water through streets, road tunnels and the subway system.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the area were also affected by the floods, with farmland inundated and road and rail links severed.

In worst-hit Zhengzhou, grim images of horror inside the subway system were relayed in real-time over social media, showing water rising during Tuesday’s rush hour from the ankles of passengers to their necks.

At least a dozen people died before rescuers were able to cut survivors free from carriages.

Questions were swirling Thursday over how prepared authorities were for the disaster. Angry Weibo users questioned why the metro was not closed earlier, with one thread racking up more than 160 million views Thursday.

“Why was it that water levels on the street were almost waist-high, but the subway was still allowing commuters in?” asked one.

In a sign of mounting pressure, the transport ministry put out a statement ordering rail operators to “absorb the lessons of recent incidents”, warning them to close stations quickly when faced with severe weather.

As the water retreated — with piles of cars a monument to its deadly power — residents prepared for the next wave of bad weather Thursday, moving vehicles to higher ground and trying to plot journeys out from the stricken city, where communications and power were still patchy.

With many streets still flooded, trucks pumped muddy water from underground tunnels as meteorologists issued “red” rain alerts, warning of the threat of fresh landslides and flooding in surrounding areas.

Residents queued to receive emergency water and instant noodles, as blackouts added to the challenges.

“I am waiting for the power to be restored, but it may take several more days I think,” Chen, the owner of a local restaurant, told AFP.

– ‘Lost everything’ –

In Mihe township in Gongyi city — one of the worst-affected areas — residents surveyed the wreckage left behind as the rain stopped Thursday. 

“I’ve lost everything, it’s all been washed away. I had nothing to eat (while my house was flooded),” said a local resident, a middle-aged woman surnamed Song.

The human cost looked set to rise as rescuers scoured through debris. 

An open-source spreadsheet, started by a student from Henan, was circulating on social media and listed hundreds of missing or stranded people across the province.

One woman whose relatives were listed on the spreadsheet told AFP that communications and power in the village near Gongyi county were both down, making it difficult to get information.

“Most houses in my hometown have been flooded by mudslides,” she said.

The state-run Global Times newspaper shared a video of rescuers pulling a three-month-old baby from a collapsed building in Zhengzhou.

The newspaper said the baby’s mother was still missing.

– Topography, typhoon, climate –

Questions turned to how China’s bulging cities could be better prepared for freak weather events, which experts say are happening with increased frequency and intensity due to climate change.

Anyang city, north of Zhengzhou, issued a red alert Thursday for heavy downpours after some areas received over 100 millimetres of rain, ordering schools to close and most workers to stay at home.

The changing climate is also making these kinds of extreme weather events more common as the world continues to heat up.

Henan province is striated by rivers, dams and reservoirs, many constructed decades ago to manage the flow of floodwater and irrigate the agricultural region. 

But endless city sprawl is putting pressure on drainage.  

State media rebuked suggestions that dams played a part in subverting the normal flow of water.

Indian tax authorities on Thursday raided a prominent newspaper and a TV channel that have been critical of the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, triggering accusations of intimidation.

There was no official comment from authorities on the raids against Hindi-language daily Dainik Bhaskar and the Bharat Samachar channel but local media quoted unnamed tax officials as saying they had “conclusive evidence of fraud”.

Boasting a readership of millions, Bhaskar has carried a series of reports on the devastation caused by the pandemic in April and May and criticised the government’s management of the crisis.  

The daily said on its website Thursday in response to the raids that in the last six months it had sought to “put the real situation in front of the country”.

“Be it the matter of (throwing) dead bodies in the Ganges or… hiding deaths due to corona, Bhaskar showed fearless journalism,” it said.

At the height of the Covid-19 outbreak, families in India’s north and east gave up the bodies of their loved ones to the river or buried them in shallow graves on its banks, likely unable to afford the cost of funeral pyres.

Last month, the daily’s editor Om Gaur wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying the bodies in the Ganges were symbolic of the “failures and deceptions” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration.

Brijesh Mishra, editor in chief of Bharat Samachar, said the raids were harassment.

“We are not afraid of these raids… we stand by the truth and the 240 million people of Uttar Pradesh,” he was quoted as saying in Hindi on their website.

Modi’s government has long been accused of attempting to stifle critical reporting in the world’s biggest democracy, something it denies.

On Reporters Without Borders’ 2021 press freedom index, India ranks 142nd out of 180 countries.

Ashok Gehlot, chief minister of the northern state of Rajasthan, said the raids were a brazen attempt to suppress the media. 

“Modi government cannot tolerate even an iota of its criticism,” Gehlot, who is from the opposition Congress party, wrote on Twitter. 

New Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal tweeted that the raids were “an attempt to scare the media”. 

India has officially reported 31 million coronavirus infections and over 400,000 deaths so far, but experts say the actual figures could be much higher.

Norway’s prime minister on Thursday called for the country to stand up against the hatred that killed 77 people on July 22, 2011, ten years after the attacks by right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik.

“We must not let hate stand unopposed,” Erna Solberg said in a speech at a memorial ceremony near the government headquarters in Oslo.

This was the place where Breivik set off a bomb that killed eight people before going on a shooting spree at a summer camp for left-wing youths on the island of Utoya, killing another 69 — most of them teenagers. 

Speaking to survivors and relatives of the victims, Solberg stressed that much had been done in the last 10 years to improve security and combat radicalisation and extremism.

“The most important preparedness, we have to build within each of us,” she said, adding it would serve as “a fortified bulwark against intolerance and hate speech, for empathy and tolerance.”

The Scandinavian nation had been mostly spared from extremist violence until the attacks on July 22, 2011.

After the morning memorial ceremony at the government headquarters, church masses and another ceremony on Utoya in the afternoon will mark the anniversary. At noon (1000 GMT), church bells nationwide will ring.

Shortly after the attacks, the then-Labour Party prime minister and current NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg promised to respond with “more democracy” and “more humanity”.

– ‘Driving force’ –

But 10 years on, many of the survivors of Utoya feel that Norway still has not truly faced up to the ideology that drove Breivik. 

“The deadly racism and right-wing extremism are still alive and well in our midst,” Astrid Eide Hoem, a survivor who has since become head of the Labour Party’s youth league (AUF), which organised the camp, said in a speech during Thursday morning’s ceremony. 

“They live on the internet, they live around the dinner table, they live in many people that many (other) people listen to,” she continued.

“It is now, once and for all, that we must say that we do not accept racism, that we do not accept hatred.”

The Norwegian intelligence service (PST) also warned this week, that “the far-right ideas that inspired the attack are still a driving force for right-wing extremists at home and abroad.” 

Breivik’s actions had inspired several violent attacks over the past decade, the PST said, including those targeting mosques in New Zealand’s Christchurch and Oslo.

On Tuesday, vandals scrawled “Breivik was right” on a memorial for Benjamin Hermansen, who was killed by neo-Nazis in 2001 in what was billed as Norway’s “first racist crime”.

In 2012, Breivik, who is now 42, was sentenced to 21 years in prison. His sentence can be extended indefinitely and the extremist will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars. 

A year earlier, Breivik had disguised himself as a police officer and planted the car bomb that shattered the government headquarters in Oslo and killed eight people.

He then made his way to Utoya, where he hunted down his 69 other victims, most of them teenagers.

For many of the survivors, the psychological trauma remains an open wound. 

A third were still suffering last year from major disorders, including post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression and headaches, a recent paper by the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies found. 

“When you’ve been through something like this, you don’t go back to being the person you were,” Eide Hoem told AFP in an interview.

“I have trouble sleeping, I’m afraid, and I think I’ll have to live with this all my life,” she added. 

Elin L’Estrange, another survivor, told AFP: “If someone today tells me that they want me dead, I take it very seriously.”