Perfidious Belgium

Spectator, The, Jul 13, 2002 by Belien, Paul

The two men travelled to the Massoud-- held territories of northern Afghanistan under the assumed identities of Belgian journalists of Moroccan origin, carrying passports that came from a stock of blank ones which had been stolen from the Belgian consulate in Strasbourg and the Belgian embassy in The Hague in 1999. Posing as Belgian journalists, the two men requested and obtained an interview with the `Lion of the Panjshir'. At their meeting with Massoud on 9 September, they detonated the explosives which they carried on their persons, killing the general and his spokesman.

After the 11 September attacks, the United States pressured Belgium to join the West in the fight against terrorism. The fact that many Muslim terrorists, such as the Algerian Ahmed Ressam who had been arrested by the FBI in 1999 when he planned to bomb Los Angeles Airport, were found to carry Belgian passports disturbed the Americans. During the 1990s, thousands of Belgian passports had either been sold by corrupt Belgian officials to the Mafia or been stolen from town halls, consulates and embassies. The New York Times of 10 February 2002 spoke of a staggering 19,050 blank Belgian passports 'lost' by the Belgian authorities since 1990, compared with only 50 blank US passports.

The Americans also criticised Belgium for its so-called `Quick Citizenship Bill'. Introduced in May 2000, shortly after Belgium regularised the presence on Belgian territory of 52,000 illegal immigrants, the Bill grants hassle-free Belgian citizenship virtually on demand to every individual who has lived in the country for three (in some cases only two) years. Each month there are some 5,000 requests for citizenship. Among those granted citizenship are criminals and extremists. These include 260 individuals who became Belgian citizens by paying half a million Belgian francs ($12,500) to Abraham Melikov, a godfather of the Georgian Mafia in Belgium. Melikov, despite ten years of criminal activities in the country, had no difficulty in becoming a Belgian citizen himself, bribing a public servant working for the Naturalisation Commission.

The inquiry of the Belgian parliamentary commission into the Surete de l'Etat revealed that it had allowed the Belgian Muslim community - numbering over 350,000 members, including more than 200,000 Moroccans, almost 100,000 Turks and 13,000 Algerians - to become heavily infiltrated by fundamentalist extremists. Thirty of Belgium's 300 mosques, the report says, are run by fundamentalist clerics. Candidates for the jihad are being recruited among Muslims in schools, prisons, hospitals and sports centres. The report warns that the fundamentalist Muslims are creating a religious state within the Belgian state. The biggest mosque in Belgium, the Great Mosque of Brussels, built in the Cinquantenaire Park with Saudi money on a piece of land donated by the late King Baudouin to Saudi King Faisal in 1967, operates its own `Islamic police', supervising certain Brussels neighbourhoods with a large concentration of Muslims. It even organises paramilitary training. The report refers to sermons at the Great Mosque calling Brussels `the capital of the infidels', rejoicing in the attacks of 11 September, openly supporting Osama bin Laden, and admonishing the faithful to prepare for the jihad.