Belgium in a state of denial

The horrific terrorist attacks on the Brussels airport and the Metro on 22 March 2016 – Belgium’s 9/11 – have given rise to comments ranging from unsubstantiated Belgium bashing to blinding oneself to serious flaws in our judiciary and security system. The truth as always is in the middle. There is no obvious reason to conclude from the attacks that Belgium is a failed state, nor are there serious grounds to suggest that Belgium did what it needed do to counter home-grown terrorism and jihadism. Fortunately, Belgium remains a well-functioning state, governed by the rule of law and anchored in strong democratic institutions. Belgium is an open and welcoming society, upholding its own traditions and easily assimilating other cultures. But, when analysing the recent bloody events in Brussels, we should not be shy to admit the deficiencies in the State of Belgium. It is only by understanding the current situation that we can take counter measures to solve the existing problems. We owe this to our children and grandchildren. I do not wish to dwell on the reasons why so many young people (men and women) left Belgium to fight for ISIS in Syria and Iraq. This needs further examination by sociologists and educators. One of the serious shortcomings in our State is the fragmentation of the political power. Belgium is an example of bad “subsidiarity” (a terrible word) with too many and often conflicting layers of decision making. Too many governments (six!), too many parliaments (six!) , too many bureaucrats, an institutional imbroglio which only a few constitutional experts are able to explain. What about Brussels? Brussels has frequently had a bad press. Already in the 1860s, Baudelaire, who fled here from the French censors, called the Belgian capital “a ghost town, a mummy of a town, it smells of death, the Middle Ages, and tombs”. To a growing number of Europeans, “Brussels” is a byword for bureaucratic bullying by the so-called Eurocrats. Donald Trump recently called Brussels a “hellhole.” Perhaps he was thinking (is he able to think?) of Molenbeek, or Schaarbeek or Forest. Densely populated by immigrants, mostly from North Africa, these districts have become a symbol of seething European jihadism. Last year’s mass murders in Paris and in Brussels on 22 March 2016 were plotted here. There is no denial. Brussels is chaotic, a political mess of nineteen different municipal districts, each with its own public authorities competing for funds, with six (!) uncoordinated police forces prone to conspicuous failures, and different political parties, linked to different language groups, operating their own more or less corrupt systems of patronage. The judiciary system in Belgium is in urgent need of repair. It is antiquated in its basic logistics with old fashioned and ineffective court buildings. The Brussels Palace of Justice for instance is bigger than the St. Peter Basilica in Rome and has been in scaffoldings for renovation for more than 25 years. Some see the Palace of Justice as a landmark of Brussels, but in my view it epitomizes blatantly the state of the judiciary in Belgium. The system is dysfunctional in its legal procedures, originating in the 19th century and before, unsuitable for the paperless age and excessively time consuming. Nevertheless, the system is not broken because our judges, prosecutors and lawyers are true Belgians, all siblings of the surrealist painter Réné Margritte; they are masters of improvisation and inventiveness. They know how to function with the barest minimum of resources, to think fast, to adapt, and to improvise when getting a job done. The French call this aptitude the System D or the Swiss Army Knife approach. A good American friend of mine, legally involved in defending a criminal case against the Church of Scientology, told me that it took a Prosecutor 19 years to build a “criminal” cast against the Church. The Prosecutor’s pleadings were a real farce. He was never able to convince the judge who in his judgement on 11 March threw out all charges (he concluded: “the entire proceedings are declared inadmissible and irremediable breach of the right to a fair trial”) that could have seen the Church banned as a “criminal enterprise”. 19 years of investigations, seven-week trial in Brussels Justice Palace, while growing terrorism was already the order of the day, what a waste of time and a waste of taxpayers’ money. Fortunately at the end of the day common legal sense prevailed, which, again, shows that the Belgian system is functioning despite all its systemic failures. The Belgian security system is equally not beyond suspicion. I am not talking about our police forces which have demonstrated time and again that they can be effective and decisive. They have shown this in Verviers last year and recently they showed cool braveness in raiding one terrorist safe house after the other, including the arrest of one of the Paris attackers. The Belgian police forces have been dramatically reformed and modernised following the infamous Dutroux scandal more than 20 years ago. Contrastingly, Belgium’s equivalent of FBI in the US or MI6 in UK, the “Staatsveiligheid/Sûreté de l’Etat” was in the past a “laughable organisation” with little or no means, underequipped and underserved. Until very recently, its agents werebusy spying on forlorn Scientologists rather than would-be terrorists and/or hard-core criminals. The poor state of our security services is surprising when it is a well-known fact that Brussels, the hub of Europe, is housing one of the biggest industrial and political spy nests of the world (look at the staff numbers of some embassies in Brussels), is the centre of illegal weapon traffic (Kalashnikovs can be bought within a day!), is the centre of forgery of passports, ID’s and driving licenses, is the biggest breeding ground of jihadism and terrorism in Europe. This is too much for Brussels, even too much for a small country like Belgium. The terrorist attacks of 22 March 2016 should be a wake-up call for Belgium. It should learn from what happened. I am glad that the Belgian Parliament has decided to set up an investigative commission to look at what happened that day and why it happened. Governments, any government, must provide basic security to its citizens. The 22 March attacks remind my (older) generation of what happened in the eighties with the Brabant Killers, also known as the Nivelles Gang (Bende van Nijvel, Les Tueurs du Brabant). They were responsible for a series of violent attacks in Belgium between 1982 and 1985, in which 28 innocent people died and 40 were injured. It became Belgium’s most notorious unsolved crime spree. During the same period, a Belgian terrorist organisation called CCC (Communist Combattant Cells) engaged in bombing within Belgium, leading to many casualties and devastation. The leader of the CCC was caught in 1985. Belgium has experience with terrorism or terrorist actions. These previous experiences were apparently not instructive enough to adopt more vigilant policies protecting its citizens from the real threats in Belgium. Today, it is as if nothing or little has been learned from the past. We are now faced with a much greater threat of a gigantic proportion that if not properly addressed at all levels of our society could have nightmarish consequences for our free societies. Our values and freedoms are at stake. Belgium’s proud history of war and peace – we are known as the “battlefield of Europe” – should guide and inspire us in standing up to terror and crime. Piet Steel 2 April 2016