Eight people died in a 2001 train crash simply because the signalmen—one Walloon, one Flemish—couldn’t communicate.
With a tiny population of 10 million—about that of Paris—there are a surprisingly high number of scandals and unsolved mysteries in Belgium, home of Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot, a character the country desperately needs in real life. Bizarre crimes pop up with alarming regularity—whether you’re talking about the Protestant minister who, along with his daughter, chopped up their family3; the father who pimped out his twelve-year-old to the local mechanic, lumberjack, antiques dealer, and family doctor; or the unsolved murder in Brussels of astrophysicist Gerald Bull, who was building a supergun for Iraq. Not long ago, the government ordered dairy products laced with dioxin to be stocked on store shelves, even after the EU had ordered them off; the foreign minister was accused of selling passports to known East European mobsters; a half dozen ministers—including a former head of NATO—were convicted in an international stinker involving bribery and arms that some believe may be linked to the never-solved 1991 murder of politician Andre Cools, who was reportedly about to name names. A high-ranking Belgian official stepped down after attending a reunion of the Nazi SS, and far-right anti-immigration group Vlaams Blok (Flemish Block) became Northern Belgium’s most popular party, peddling a list of “Seventy Points” that smacked of racial cleansing. The revelation that many Belgian soccer games in the 2006 season were rigged—a Chinese mobster “bought” agents, coaches, and players—was simply par for the course.
The scandal that most disgusted and disturbed Belgians, and still makes them shudder today, is the multilayered crime of Marc Dutroux—a crime that most believe still hasn’t fully been solved and that some, including Dutroux and accomplices, say leads right to the top.
BELGIAN DARKNESS
A father of three, electrician Marc Dutroux was reportedly a teenage prostitute who supplied cocaine at sex parties, dealt in stolen cars, and may have trafficked sex slaves from Eastern Europe. That’s the nicer part of the résumé of this predator, first tried for rape in 1983. He ditched that charge, but in 1989 was found guilty of kidnapping and raping five young girls. Slapped with a thirteen-year sentence, he was out after three years. Dutroux constructed a dungeon of tunnels, cages, and cells in the basement of his house, where six young girls, all of whom he tortured and raped, were held for months during 1995 and 1996. Four of the six died. He killed two, but another two died, probably in early 1996, while Dutroux was in prison for several months for car theft. Those girls, both eight years old, starved to death in the well-hidden dungeon; even though police had searched the house twice, looking for clues of the missing children, they hadn’t found the girls hidden under the floors where they walked. (Dutroux later killed the friend whom he’d asked to watch over the prisoners.) After eluding police for months—and briefly escaping from prison—he was finally tried, nearly eight years after his arrest, and found guilty, in June 2004, of child rape and murder. Dutroux now faces life imprisonment, but he maintains that he was abducting the children for a pedophilia ring. In 1999, a series of witnesses gave statements about being procured for such a ring—saying that torture, murder, and snuff movies were part of the package.4 Some even stated it was part of a satanic cult. Whatever was happening, Dutroux and a codefendant, businessman Jean-Michel Nihoul, maintain that the ring involved the highest levels of Belgian society.
Little België (or Belgique, as the Walloons call it) has more problems than sickening crime. Racism and separatism are also simmering behind-the-scenes issues—and they sometimes boil up in port city Antwerp, Belgium’s second largest metropolis, the world’s biggest diamonds trade center, and a major distribution center for rave-drug ecstasy. About 20,000 Jews, many Hassidic and working with diamonds, make Antwerp their home, and the majority live in the old Jewish quarter. Right next door is the Arab quarter, home to many of the city’s 30,000 Moroccans and Turks—a location that makes for ongoing tension. A wave of anti-Semitic acts hit Antwerp recently, but Arabs say they are victimized too, sometimes at the hands of right-wing nationalists.
Arabs in Flanders have a high unemployment rate—20 percent overall, more than 30 percent among the young. The issue fires up anti-immigration groups, but Arabs say the problem is that the Flemish won’t give them jobs.
They point to November 2002, when a Moroccan schoolteacher was killed by a Flemish dockworker. Furious Arabs rioted in the streets, knocking out store windows and overturning cars—and more violence ensued as police battled rioters. Saying that police targeted Arabs, a newly formed group called the Arab European League organized teams with video cameras to patrol the streets and videotape any perceived aggression. The patrol teams themselves were considered aggressive, and the government shut them down. Nevertheless, the incident gave more attention to the head of the Arab European League, Dyab Abou Jahjah, who is quickly becoming a spokesman for disaffected Arabs living in Europe—and speaking out about their rights to preserve their culture in Europe, from dress to sharia law. The Belgian prime minister views Jahjah and his Arab European League as “a threat to society,”5 and Jahjah’s group was recently slapped with charges of running a private militia.
Dyab Abou Jahjah, noisily demanding Arab rights
THE MALCOLM X OF BELGIUM?
Whatever you think about Lebanese-born Dyab Abou Jahjah—a former Hezbollah member who the Belgian government would like to send packing—you have to admit that the handsome, well-spoken activist raises interesting questions. Among them: Should immigrants be forced to adopt the culture of the countries they move to? And, more pointedly, where does freedom of speech cross the line and become unacceptably offensive? Jahjah points out that European society “is fundamentally monocultural,” and says that if Arabs don’t forgo their culture they are “economically and politically excluded” from European life. He’s working to change that—demanding that Arab-Muslim cultures be given their own schools and be allowed to wear headscarves (banned in French schools) and practice their laws (which may include killing homosexuals and adulterers and chopping off the hands of thieves). Those ideas aren’t well received here, but the Arab European League’s reaction to Danish cartoons mocking Allah was even more extreme. Spearing the rhetoric about freedom of expression, the AEL posted a number of outrageous cartoons on its site—including one of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank, and another of Jews fudging numbers in the Holocaust count. The point of the cartoons, Jahjah later stated, was to sarcastically “confront Europe with its own hypocrisy.” The cartoons look like they will result in yet another lawsuit for the AEL—this one in the Netherlands, where the AEL has set up a branch.
Volatile Antwerp is also the epicenter for radical separatists who want to nab Brussels and secede from Belgium. Spearheading that movement is popular anti-immigrant party Vlaams Blok (Flemish Block), which has links to the Nazi party and views Belgium as an “artificial” country. Party spokespeople have questioned the Holocaust (and even the authenticity of Anne Frank’s diary), and the party’s program calls for blocking future mosques, forcibly repatriating immigrants, and booting the king—for starters. The most popular party in Flanders in 2004, it overtook Antwerp’s city council but was isolated in Flemish parliament when all other parties shunned it and wouldn’t form a coalition. Then, in November 2004, high courts ruled that it was racist, effectively shutting it down. Not to worry; the group simply formed under a new name—Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest).
Antwerp is but one city that illustrates the behind-the-scenes strife shaking up the whole country. Belgium is a chocolate-coated jalepeño: pretty on the outside, exploding from within. Walloons and Flemish are at each other’s throats, Arabs and Jews don’t get along, Vlaams Blok wants to secede—and kick out the Arabs—and the government is trying to block Vlaams Blok’s attempts to tap separatist rage.
Yet with her prominent role as backdrop for the European Union and NATO, Belgium is an undeniable international power. She is formin
g a separate military alliance with Germany, France, and Luxembourg, and occasionally rivals the Netherlands as a rising voice in international justice, both moves that the Bush administration has tried to shut down.
WAR CRIMES LAW
When Belgium resident Martine Beckers answered the phone in 1993, her sister—living in Rwanda—told her that she was about to be killed by a gang of machete-wielding Hutu. Unsure what to do, Beckers called the Belgian police, thus planting the seed for what would become Belgium’s most infamous law: the 1993 Belgian War Crimes Law, which directed Belgian courts to try cases of international genocide and attacks on civilians. Neither the police nor the law could prevent the death of Beckers’s sister, but the law opened the door for trials of Rwandans, including two nuns who were tried in Belgium in 2001, and found guilty of inciting murder. Cases snowballed and the scope widened. Suits were filed against Israel’s prime minister Ariel Sharon, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. In 2002, a suit was filed against former president George H.W. Bush, Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, and Dick Cheney for their roles in the deaths of civilians during the 1991 Gulf War. Then, in 2003, a new case was filed against President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, General Tommy Franks, and British prime minister Tony Blair for their involvement in Iraq. In June 2003, Rumsfeld threatened to move NATO out of Belgium if the law wasn’t amended; in July, he froze the U.S. financial contribution to building a new NATO headquarters in Brussels that carries a $350 million price tag.6 The law was hastily amended, and now it can be used only if a Belgian citizen is a victim or suspect of a war crime. Charges were also dropped against the U.S., UK, and Israeli officials.7
History Review
Nudged up against France, Germany, and the Netherlands, today’s Belgium has tolerated all the neighbors barging in to run the place or their warriors traipsing across it like it was the back door to France. Made wealthy in the Middle Ages by textiles—woolen fabrics, delicate lace, and fine tapestries put Brussels, Ghent, and Antwerp on the trade map—the area was ruled by the French House of Burgundy in the fourteenth century. The region became an opulent arts center, and the countryside was dotted with castles, where people partook in the enduring feast known as the Burgundian lunch. The Austrian Empire pulled the area into her geographic weave in the 1400s, which led to it being later yanked into the Spanish Netherlands—a move that came complete with the Spanish Inquisition; thousands were killed for perceived heresy. (See “The Netherlands,” page 178.)
Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1525–1569): Perhaps the first European to paint landscapes that weren’t merely biblical backdrops, Brueghel—the star of sixteenth-century Flemish art—turned his paintbrush to vibrant village life, capturing it in bawdy detail that was nearly scandalous (see The Peasant Dance), especially considering that the Spanish Inquisition was hanging around. Whatever corner of his paintings a viewer takes in, another vignette unfolds, telling us more of life in that day than whole history books.
The Spaniards reintroduced Catholicism, and the Church assumed great importance. Napoleon invaded in 1792, and sold off church property—about half of the land—and just outside Brussels he met his demise in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo. The European leaders who redrew the Napoleonic Empire at the 1815 Congress of Vienna hoped to prevent future invasions. For security, they lumped the Catholic region of contemporary Belgium and Luxembourg together with the Protestant Netherlands. Nobody much liked the arrangement, particularly the French-speaking Catholics in the south, who were given a backseat to the Protestant Dutch speakers in the north.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, a revolution was stirring in textiles. Long a cottage industry, new machinery triggered a costly change; factories could now make fabrics much more cheaply. The British, supplied with cheap resources from the colonies, made the bottom line drop even further. Peasants lost much of their textile income, and bad weather hurt their crops. Their unhappiness was a factor in the region’s independence movement.
Calls to shake loose from the Netherlands hit a high note one night in 1830. After taking in the opera La Muette de Portici, about a revolt in Naples, the audience was stirred to action. The uprising that began at the opera spilled onto the streets, where the hungry and unemployed were incited to loot the houses of noblemen, symbols of the Dutch king’s hold on the south. The new country of Belgium officially broke ties with the Netherlands a few weeks later and borrowed a German prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coberg-Gotha, to head the new state under the name King Leopold I. His son, King Leopold II, who became monarch in 1865, made Belgium wealthy when he opened up the Congo and led the late nineteenth-century “Scramble for Africa,” when European countries divvied up the Dark Continent for themselves.
KING LEOPOLD II (1835–1909) AND THE BELGIAN CONGO
Long of face and even longer of snowy white beard, Leopold was a dreamer even before he climbed upon the throne at age twenty-nine, taking over a thirty-five-year-old country that was already fraying.8 Walloons and Flemish were quarrelling even back then, and secular liberals and Catholics were sniping. To escape from the problems at hand, Leopold invented health ailments as reason to travel to exotic locales from Egypt to China. Independently wealthy, especially after investing in the Suez Canal, he wanted to expand Belgium’s boundaries. Advisers cautioned against such silly notions, but Leopold had his own money to find a colony where Belgium could plant her flag. Alas, all the ones he wanted to buy—the Philippines, Angola, New Zealand—weren’t for sale. Hearing stories about the Dark Continent’s Congo River, he decided to develop it. In 1876, he sent a mission there, claiming the Belgians would save the Africans from slavery. The masses loved the idea, but Leopold did just the opposite. His men ravaged the land and turned the locals into the most cruelly treated of slaves. Leveling their villages for rubber plantations, the Belgians demanded that the Congo people harvest the plants. Those who resisted were killed; those who didn’t keep up with the workload had their hands chopped off. Millions of Congolese people died before English maritime journalist Edmund Dene Morel unraveled what was going on in 1900. He discovered that the ships returning from the Congo were loaded with far more riches than claimed—and those that went out carried weaponry. This wasn’t free trade, as the king claimed, this was slavery, and Morel went on to make a huge stink about it. The British government finally sent its consul to report on the situation, but by then—almost three decades after the Belgians first set foot in the Congo—most of the original population had been wiped out. The Belgians finally looked into it. The government’s report, published in 1905, was so damning that Leopold donated much of his land to the state in exchange for the government keeping the report under wraps. The matter was hushed up until the 1980s, when a Belgian ambassador discovered the report and the ugly truth finally slithered out, shocking the Belgian people as much as anyone else.9
The Belgian king had a royal fit in 2003, when the BBC wanted to air the documentary White King, Red Rubber, Black Death about the genocide in the Congo. The program was indeed broadcast—but was heavily edited.
During the First World War, Belgium declared neutrality, but the Germans ignored that as they marched into France. Belgium became a permanent front, where troops dug into trenches for four years. During World War II, Germans again invaded Belgium to enter France. Again, Belgium played a crucial role geographically. She was the setting for the horrific Battle of the Bulge, Germany’s last major move to reclaim lost territory in December 1944. Aiming to take Antwerp, Germans surrounded the thinly protected line of Allies in the snow-thick forests of Belgium and Luxembourg. Some of WWII’s most desperate fighting ensued—and at times it looked like the Allies couldn’t hold out. Ultimately, the Allies held their ground, but the battle marked the most brutal for American troops, who suffered about 75,000 casualties. (See “Luxembourg,” page 273.)
Nazi-occupied from 1940, Belgium had her fair share of collaborators, many executed after the war.
What Every American Should Know About Europe Page 15