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The community of Molenbeek has a large, Moroccan community. Crime, poverty and fundmantalism are some of the less positive sides of this dynamic neigborhood.
Molenbeek’s community | Teun Voeten
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Molenbeek
broke my heart
A former resident
reflects on his struggles with Brussels’ most notorious
neighborhood.
By TEUN VOETEN
11/21/15, 6:30 AM CET
Last
Saturday in Paris, at the Boulevard Voltaire near the Bataclan club,
I found myself staring at a pool of blood. I wondered what was
happening with the world, and refocused my camera on the aftermath of
the terror. When it became clear the attacks were planned in
Molenbeek, I was not surprised. The real surprise? That Belgium
expressed shock at the connection.
* * *
I called Molenbeek
my home for nine years. In 2005, it was the city’s last affordable
neighborhood — in large part because of its bad reputation. My
apartment, just across the canal from the city center, is close to
the home where two suspects in the Paris attacks were based, and
around the corner from where the shooter from the foiled Thalys
attack in August had been staying.
I was part of a new
wave of young urban professionals, mostly white and college-educated
— what the Belgians called bobo, (“bourgeois bohémiens”) —
who settled in the area out of pragmatism. We had good intentions.
Our contractor’s name was Hassan. He was Moroccan, and we thought
that was very cool. We imagined that our kids would one day play
happily with his on the street. We hoped for less garbage on the
streets, less petty crime. We were confident our block would slowly
improve, and that our lofts would increase in value. (We even dared
to hope for a hip art gallery or a trendy bar.) We felt like pioneers
of the Far West, like we were living in the trenches of the fight for
a multicultural society.
Slowly, we woke up
to reality. Hassan turned out to be a crook and disappeared with
€95,000, the entire budget the tenants had pooled together for our
building’s renovation. The neighborhood was hardly multicultural.
Rather, with roughly 80 percent of the population of Moroccan origin,
it was tragically conformist and homogenous. There may be a vibrant
alternative culture in Casablanca and Marrakech, but certainly not in
Molenbeek.
Over nine years, I
witnessed as the neighborhood become increasingly intolerant. Alcohol
became unavailable in most shops and supermarkets; I heard stories of
fanatics at the Comte des Flandres metro station who pressured women
to wear the veil; Islamic bookshops proliferated, and it became
impossible to buy a decent newspaper. With an unemployment rate of 30
percent, the streets were eerily empty until late in the morning.
Nowhere was there a bar or café where white, black and brown people
would mingle. Instead, I witnessed petty crime, aggression, and
frustrated youths who spat at our girlfriends and called them “filthy
whores.” If you made a remark, you were inevitably scolded and
called a racist. There used to be Jewish shops on Chaussée de Gand,
but these were terrorized by gangs of young kids and most closed
their doors around 2008. Openly gay people were routinely
intimidated, and also packed up their bags.
I finally left
Molenbeek in 2014. It was not out of fear. The tipping point, I
remember, was an encounter with a Salafist, who tried to convert me
on my street. It boiled down to this: I could no longer stand to live
in this despondent, destitute, fatalistic neighborhood.
* * *
The community of
Molenbeek has a large, Moroccan community. Crime, poverty and
fundmantalism are some of the less positive sides of this dynamic
neigborhood.
How did Molenbeek
become Europe’s jihadi base? Essentially, it has to do with
Belgium’s messy governance and the culture of denial that pervades
the debate about Islam in the country. Molenbeek is a vibrant
community, with narrow streets and a busy street life. There is a
teahouse on every corner, a quiet mosque on every block, where people
can congregate undisturbed. There are cheap apartments galore, no
questions asked. Just like the guerrilla can hide in the jungle,
jihadis feel safe in the disorganized Kashba of Molenbeek. The
highway and the city’s busiest international railroad station is a
stone’s throw away. It’s the perfect logistical base.
It is nearly
impossible to explain to an outsider, but Belgium is a country of six
governments, Brussels a city with 19 mayors. These many
administrative posts are not filled with competent people. Security
services are fragmented and tend to compete with one another. The
lack of a strong, central authority may be one of the many quirks of
this sometimes charmingly dysfunctional country, but just as it
resulted in many botched trials — notably of the Brabant Killers,
or “Nijvel Gang” who committed a series of violent raids between
1982 and 1985, and the Dutroux scandal in 1995, to name just two —
it also creates the perfect breeding ground for potential terrorists.
But the most
important factor is Belgium’s culture of denial. The country’s
political debate has been dominated by a complacent progressive elite
who firmly believes society can be designed and planned. Observers
who point to unpleasant truths such as the high incidence of crime
among Moroccan youth and violent tendencies in radical Islam are
accused of being propagandists of the extreme-right, and are
subsequently ignored and ostracized.
BELGIUM-POLITICS-MOLENBEEK
Philippe Moureaux,
former mayor of Molenbeek | OLIVIER VIN/AFP/Getty
The debate is
paralyzed by a paternalistic discourse in which radical Muslim youths
are seen, above all, as victims of social and economic exclusion.
They in turn internalize this frame of reference, of course, because
it arouses sympathy and frees them from taking responsibility for
their actions. The former Socialist mayor Philippe Moureax, who
governed Molenbeek from 1992 to 2012 as his private fiefdom,
perfected this culture of denial and is to a large extent responsible
for the current state of affairs in the neighborhood.
Two journalists had
already reported on the presence of radical Islamists in Molenbeek
and the danger they posed — and both became victims of character
assassination. In 2006, Hind Fraihi, a young Flemish woman of
Morrocan descent published “Undercover in Little Morocco: Behind
the Closed Doors of Radical Islam.” Her community called her a
traitor; progressive media called her a “spy” and a “girl with
personal problems.”
In 2008, Arthur van
Amerongen was tarred and feathered for “Brussels Eurabia,” and
called a “Batavian Fascist” by a francophone newspaper. When he
and I went back to Molenbeek in March and I subsequently described it
as an “ethnic and religious enclave and a parochial, closed
community” in an interview with Brussel Deze Week, that too
provoked the wrath of progressive Belgium and an ensuing media storm.
I always thought as
myself as a defender of human rights and human dignity, beyond left-
or right-wing categories. Now suddenly I was painted as a right-wing
firebrand. For some people I became an “untouchable” and I even
lost a few friends, who refused to talk to me.
There are immense
problems in Molenbeek, problems of a truly global scale that
transcend the municipal and national levels. Still, there is hope.
After my interview appeared, Molenbeek mayor Françoise Schepmans
invited me to her cabinet and we had an open discussion. I was asked
to defend my point of view at the local cultural center De
Vaartkapoen — a rather hostile audience of 60 people, many whom
felt I had offended their community, were polite and interested to
engage in debate. Last week, as I showed foreign TV crews around my
old neighborhood, I was greeted in the most cordial way at the
grocery, the bakery and the snackbar I used to go to.
Most people in
Molenbeek are decent people who want the best for their families. But
we should not close our eyes to the fact that it is also home to a
very deep, and very dangerous, undercurrent of radical Islamism.
Teun Voeten is a
cultural anthropologist and war photographer. He has published books
on the undergound homeless of New York, the war in Sierra Leone and
the drug violence in Mexico.
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