Diverse crowd, including victims and their families, take to streets to express defiance nearly one month on from the attacks
Thousands of people walked through central Brussels on Sunday in “a march against terror and hate”, almost one month after two coordinated attacks by suicide bombers struck the Belgian capital killing 32 people and injuring more than 300.
Also taking part in the march, which had been previously been postponed on security grounds, were some victims of the attacks and their families.
It was a crowd as diverse as Brussels, with politicians, city officials and metro drivers mingling among everyday Bruxellois. Among the families with strollers, retired people and dog-walkers were police and army soldiers weighed down by rifles, along with the odd waffle seller.
Despite some campaigners handing out flyers for a ragtag of unrelated causes, this was an apolitical gathering. People walked in silence, with few chants or songs to break over the hum of the nearby traffic. Some carried flowers – a single tulip or a bunch of daffodils tied with string. Others waved Belgian flags or peace banners.
“We wanted to show that we are not afraid and we love our city,” said Anaïs Maes, a 32-year old teacher, who was taking part in the march with her husband, toddler and friends. She felt the government had over-reacted to the threat by flooding the streets with army and police. “There is no way of protecting fully against terrorism, that is the definition of terrorism, it is unnecessary to have the security measures we have now because [the threat] is not going to stop.”
Philippe Lamberts, MEP for Brussels, said that Belgians had shown an “emotional but not hysterical” response to the attacks without demands for a police state.
Police estimated the turnout at 7,000. Organisers suggested the crowds numbered 10,000, though this fell short of the 15,000 they had hoped for.
From two separate starting points, the processions made their way to Brussels’ old stock exchange at Place de la Bourse, which has become a makeshift memorial for the victims. People added flowers to the now withering bunches and marked a minute’s silence.
But away from the peace placards, tempers flared after the country’s combative interior minister, Jan Jambon, told a newspaper in his native Flanders that a “significant part of the Muslim community was dancing on the occasion of the attacks”. Human rights groups and leftwing politicians accused Jambon, a Flemish nationalist, of stigmatising Muslims and sowing division.
Meanwhile questions linger about the Belgian government’s ability to respond to the terror threat following a bruising week for the country’s politicians.
First came a wildcat strike by air traffic controllers at Brussels airport, grounding planes just as transport authorities were trying to get back to normal after the attacks, which had devastated the main departure lounge. Then the transport minister, Jacqueline Galant, was forced to step down amid claims she had lied about reports criticising security lapses at Brussels airport.
Galant, a close ally of the Belgian prime minister, Charles Michel, quit on Friday morning, after opposition parties publicised documents that appeared to show she had misled parliament. For most commentators, Galant was an accident-prone minister, whose resignation was inevitable, but her departure was a complication for the four-party coalition government.
Since the attacks, the prime minister has been on the defensive about the performance of his government. “I don’t accept the idea that we are a ‘failed state,’” he told CNN this month, in the wake of stinging claims from international media. “There is a failure just like 9/11 was a failure for the US; just like London was a failure for the UK and Madrid was a failure for Spain.”
But some question whether Belgium’s notoriously complex political system makes it harder to devise effective counter-terrorism and anti-radicalism measures. Underneath the federal government is a complex web of parliaments, with three regional governments, as well as separate representatives for the country’s three linguistic groups, French, Dutch and German. But successive reforms of the constitution – five between 1970 and 2001 – have failed to resolve tensions over how to share power.
In 2010-11 Belgium went for 541 days without a government, breaking the world record previously set by Iraq. By comparison, the current government was formed in 2014, after a relatively speedy five months of negotiations.
Belgium’s poisonous divisions were again on display last month, when a war of words broke out over who was to blame for letting far-right demonstrators invade the Bourse memorial. Approximately 400 men in black chanting anti-immigrant slogans took part in the rally on Easter Sunday; some trashed the candles and flowers and others struck Nazi salutes.
After an outburst of finger-pointing among politicians, Belgium’s main francophone newspaper, Le Soir, called for fundamental change. “There is something wrong in our kingdom. Since the deadly attacks we display every day our intrinsic shortcomings, in the rejection of responsibilities, in the ‘it’s not me, it’s the other one’.”
Dave Sinardet, politics professor at the Free University of Brussels, warned there was no direct link between institutional tensions and a failure to prevent the attacks. “But politics is always a question of priorities and if you don’t have a functioning federal government it is harder to create a justice strategy,” he said.
“In recent years so much focus has gone to institutional issues, linguistic problems, and there have been very unstable governments.”
