Why is Belgium an Incubator for Terrorists?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

The horrific suicide attacks on the airport and subway system in Brussels March 22 was a case of terrorism coming home to roost.

The Belgium capital’s neighbourhood of Molenbeek is where these, and previous atrocities, such as the ones in Paris last autumn, were planned.y

Why is Belgium such an incubator for Islamism? Why have such a highly disproportionate number of its people -- at least 470 according to recent statements by Interior Minister Jan Jambon -- joined the forces of the Islamic State in the Middle East? 

That’s double the number per capita of France and four times that of Britain, according to a report released in January by the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence at King’s College, London.

Home to around 100,000 people, 40 per cent of whom are Muslims, Molenbeek has in recent years become home to the continent’s most disenfranchised and dangerous citizens and a symbol of European jihadism. 

The area has had links to al-Qaeda and extremism from the early 1990’s when Bassam Ayachi, a Salafist and French citizen, founded the Belgian Islamic Center. 

Belgian extremists with links to Molenbeek were connected to various attacks, including the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the 2014 shooting at the Jewish Museum of Belgium, the January 2015 attacks in Paris that targeted the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket, and last November’s horrific mass murders in Paris. 

The main waves of immigrants to Belgium from Muslim countries began in the early 1960s when migration agreements were signed with Morocco and Turkey and then at the end of the 1960s with Algeria and Tunisia. Today, some six per cent of Belgium’s population of 11.2 million are Muslims. 

They feel discriminated against because of their Arabic family names or Islamic religious beliefs and are far more likely than other Belgians to live in serious poverty. 

Belgium is, as a colleague of mine once described it, a “cardboard country,” with serious divisions by regions and languages. Dutch-speaking Flanders and francophone Wallonia are almost separate states, and the country has no sense of national identity. No wonder it can’t integrate newcomers.

Numerous layers of regional and municipal governments and multiple official languages hamper the flow of information amongst investigators. Brussels alone has nineteen different municipal districts, each with its own public authorities competing for funds, and uncoordinated police forces.

That’s why Salah Abdeslam, a leading figure in the Paris attacks, could live undetected in the Belgian capital for months, while Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged Paris ringleader, could move back and forth between Belgium and Syria undetected.

Last November, in the wake of the attacks in Paris, the British newspaper the Independent interviewed Brice De Ruyver, a Belgian security adviser. “Officially we have no no-go areas in Brussels, but in reality we have them, and they are in Molenbeek,” he admitted.

The cultural code of silence in heavily immigrant districts such as Molenbeek, as well as widespread distrust of already weak government authorities, has unfortunately made Belgium a major hub of terrorist cells on the continent.