Tue, Nov 17, 2015 page7

• PARIS ATTACKS: Molenbeek a ‘breeding ground for violence,’ mayor says

  • Reuters, BRUSSELS
  • • 
    • 
    • 

  “A breeding ground for violence” the mayor of Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Belgium, called her borough on Sunday, speaking of unemployment and overcrowding among Arab immigrant families, of youthful despair finding refuge in radical Islam.

  However, as the Brussels district on the wrong side of the city’s post-industrial canal becomes a focus for police pursuing those behind Friday’s mass attacks in Paris, Belgian authorities are asking what makes the narrow, terraced streets of Sint-Jans-Molenbeek different from a thousand similar neighborhoods across Europe.

  Three themes emerge as the district is again in a spotlight of militant violence, home not just to militants among Belgium’s own half a million Muslims but, it seems, for French radicals seeking a convenient, discreet base to lie low, plan and arm before striking their homeland across the border.

  Security services face difficulties due to Belgium’s local devolution and tensions between the country’s French and Dutch-speaking halves; the country has long been open to fundamentalist preachers; and it has a thriving black market in automatic rifles of the kind used in Paris.

  “With 500 euros to 1,000 euros [US$537 to US$1,075] you can get a military weapon in half an hour,” said Bilal Benyaich, senior fellow at Brussels think-tank the Itinera Institute, who has studied the spread of radical Islam in Belgium.

  “That makes Brussels more like a big US city in mostly gun-free Europe,” he said.

  ARRESTS

  Two of the attackers, who killed at least 129 people 270km away in Paris on Friday night, were Frenchmen residing in Belgium. Belgian police raided Sint-Jans-Molenbeek addresses and seven people have been arrested in Belgium over the Paris attacks.

  “Almost every time, there is a link to Molenbeek,” said 39-year-old Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, whose year-old coalition is battling radical recruiters who have tempted more than 350 Belgians to fight in Syria — relative to Belgium’s 11 million population, easily the biggest contingent from Europe.

  CRACKDOWN

  However, “preventive measures” of the past few months were not enough, Michel said, describing the district as a “gigantic problem” and saying: “There has to be more of a crackdown.”

  Belgian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Security and Home Affairs Jan Jambon, vowed to “cleanse” the district personally.

  Conservatives blamed lax oversight on left-wing predecessors, nationally and in the district town hall and dueled over whether Dutch-speaking Flanders or mainly French-speaking Brussels and the south did more to curb the radicals.

  Such differences, which have translated into a profusion of layers of government and policing in an effort to appease centrifugal forces that long threatened to break Belgium apart, have created problems for intelligence and security services.

  PROFUSION

  Jambon has complained himself of a profusion of police forces across state and language lines, including six in Brussels alone, a city of just 1.8 million.

  “Belgium is a federal state and that’s always an advantage for terrorists,” said Edwin Bakker, professor at the Centre for Terrorism and Counterterrorism at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

  “Having several layers of government hampers the flow of information between investigators,” he said.

  Contrasting Belgium with its centralized Dutch neighbor, he added: “It’s much more difficult for groups to disappear from the radar just by moving 10km.”

  Given the difficulty of gathering intelligence in places like Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, a borough of 90,000 where some neighborhoods were up to 80 percent Muslim, any gaps in the information chain were problematic, Bakker said: “In parts of Brussels there are areas on which the police have little grip, very segregated areas that don’t feel they’re a part of the Belgian state.”

  COMPLICATED

  “In such a case it’s very difficult to get feedback from the community. That means while the neighbors may have seen something going on, they’re not passing it to the police. Then it becomes very tough for intelligence agencies as only relying on them and not local police is not sufficient,” he said.

  Political complication is also blamed for slowing the passing of new laws, for example to rein in the preaching of hate in mosques or recruitment for and travel to the Syrian war.

  INFLUENCE

  While some of the district’s old factories — it once enjoyed the industrious nickname “Petit Manchester” — have made it a smart address for bohemian loft living, areas tumbling out from the ship canal, offering halal butchers, street stalls and backstreet mosques are some of the poorest in northwest Europe.

  The 25 percent jobless rate, rising to 37 percent among the young, is significantly higher than other parts of Brussels, also home to a thriving, cosmopolitan middle-class drawn by the EU institutions on the other side of the city.

  Belgian officials are also increasingly concerned about the influence of radical versions of Islam. They remain a minority taste; the Muslim Executive of Belgium, an umbrella group, spoke of its support for democratic values and condemned “barbarism.”

  However, Sint-Jans-Molenbeek — which notably in 2012 saw street protests against enforcement of Belgian law on Muslim face veils — has been among areas where fundamentalist preachers have flourished.

  FUNDAMENTALIST

  Center-right opposition member of the federal parliament George Dallemagne traces some problems back to the 1970s when resource-poor, heavily industrial Belgium sought favor with Saudi Arabia by providing mosques for Gulf-trained preachers.

  These brought with them fundamentalist teachings then alien to most of Belgium’s Moroccan immigrants.

  Sint-Jans-Molenbeek is not unique in Belgium. The highest profile radical group taken on by the state has been sharia4belgium, a social media-savvy organization whose leader and dozens of members were convicted early this year in the Flemish city of Antwerp of recruiting dozens to fight in Syria.

  However, as Michel said, a Sint-Jans-Molenbeek connection keeps coming up in cases of militant attacks in Europe going back at least to the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, where one of those jailed for planning them was a Moroccan from the borough.

  Over little more than a year, it has figured repeatedly. In August last year, a Frenchman of Algerian origin was living there when he gunned down four people at Brussels’ Jewish Museum. In January, when Belgian police killed two men in the eastern town of Verviers, foiling what they said was a plot to kidnap and behead a policeman on camera, many leads go back to Sint-Jans-Molenbeek.

  French police investigating after the shootings in January at Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery suspect one of the killers acquired guns via Sint-Jans-Molenbeek. So too, prosecutors say, did the Spanish-based Moroccan overpowered on a Brussels to Paris train in August. He had an AK-47 and nearly 300 bullets.

  “Molenbeek is a pitstop for radicals and criminals of all sorts,” said Benyaich.

  “It’s a place where you can disappear,” he said.
• Most Popular

  • 1

    Chinese carrier group entered Japanese waters

  • 2

    Magnitude 6.4 earthquake hits Hualien County

  • 3

    Think tank hosts war games in Taipei

  • 4

    Taiwan in Time: Snapshots of early Japanese-era Taipei

  • 5

    Students rescued from Cambodia