'Surprise and astonishment' as Brussels shuts down to hunt its 'nest of jihadists'

Brussels has always had an ability to shutter itself. To quickly draw down the rolling iron grates that would protect living room windows from the view of outsiders on the street and to retreat inwards.

Being outward-looking was never its strong point despite the myriad of European and international institutions that made their homes there.

When I lived in Brussels covering the fledgling European Union in the 1990s, I often would walk home to the sound of those shutters closing one after the other with great clangs, leaving behind quiet, depopulated streets.

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But that was nothing compared to the empty feel this past week in the midst of a lockdown imposed by a government warning of a potential terrorist threat on the scale of those witnessed in Paris on Nov. 13. 

The beer taps stopped flowing, the Christmas chocolate boxes were packed away and schools stayed shut. I found myself wondering if the Manneken Pis, the famed statue of a small peeing boy, was in fact still doing his business.

In one part of town an escalator was left running at a metro station even though the whole system was shut for four full days. It added to the sensation that the city's inhabitants had disappeared with a great poof just seconds before, with the kettle still on.

As far as moods go, the great Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte would have had a field day. Troops bearing arms quickly replaced umbrella-wielding tour groups on the streets.

Now part of the metro has reopened, and Belgian authorities have reduced the threat level in Brussels from its highest level of four to three.

"I look at what's happening now with surprise and astonishment," columnist Beatrice Delvaux of Le Soir newspaper told me.

"Because I can't understand why a country such as Belgium has to shut down life in Brussels, in order to catch a thief that you don't catch. So it's very impressive and at the same time such a sign of weakness. Responsibility taken and weakness. It's a very rare combination."

In the current climate, journalists at Le Soir are no longer entering the newspaper's premises using the front door. Memories of what happened to their colleagues gunned down by Islamist militants at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo last January are still fresh.

On top of the fear there has come blame for Belgium and for Brussels in particular, accused of allowing a "nest of jihadists" to flourish and grow in an inner city neighbourhood called Molenbeek. At least three of the alleged Paris attackers had links to the quartier.

"I think it has been a wake-up call for the Belgians to realize just what a hotbed of jihadism they have in the suburbs of Brussels," John Sawers, the former head of Britain's MI6 intelligence service, said this week.

Molenbeek is one of those inner city neighbourhoods on the edge of gentrification as the Belgian fashion industry inches ever closer to the mom-and-pop immigrants' shops and cheap clothing stores.

In the meantime its profile remains generally poor, unemployed and immigrant based. Many of the residents are of Moroccan descent, the children and grandchildren of guest workers who first came to Belgium in the 1960s.

Salah Abdeslam, the suspected Paris attacker and the subject of a major manhunt, lived just across the square from the Molenbeek town hall and police station with his brother Brahim, who died after he detonated his suicide belt in the attacks.

The community has tried to fight back against the negative image, posting Molenbeek signs on storefronts and fences with a peace sign. But there's also a real fatigue, with journalists on the jihadist trail arriving and asking questions.

The one woman who did agree to speak with us on a street selling shoes and shisha pipes shared Abdeslam's last name and said she was being hounded by journalists phoning and ringing her doorbell, assuming she was related to the man on the run.

 'I'm a Muslim and I had nothing to do with it'

"I don't have to explain what happened because I had nothing to do with it," she said. I'm a Muslim and I had nothing to do with it.  I don't belong to their view. It has nothing to do with Islam."

She says Belgian Muslims have suffered discrimination and abuse in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

"My parents have been here 50 years. I was born in Brussels and my children were born here," she says.  "What do they mean when they tell me to integrate?"

Tiny Belgium with its population of just 11 million has produced more jihadists to fight in Iraq and Syria than any other European nation on a per-capita basis. Why then hasn't it managed to counter the pull or to shut down potential militants before they strike?

The accepted wisdom from abroad has been to point fingers at the breakdown of the Belgian federal state into a collection of fractious language groups, regions and levels of government. There are six police forces in Brussels alone, and information is jealously guarded between different agencies and intelligence bodies.

Delvaux agrees with the international criticism and adds, "With all our internal problems between Flemish and francophone, the federal state has weakened and [there] was not enough invested in the federal project. Flemish or French-speaking persons did not believe anymore so much in the federal dream or interest. So maybe we pay the price for that lack of investment in our federal organization."

In 2010, the country was without a government for more than a year, a final nail in the coffin of the old "Belgian compromise" that usually saved the day and allowed a power-sharing regime.

Delvaux also points to the failure of European nations to share intelligence even in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, which were also linked to Brussels, and the arms trade that has long thrived in Belgium, legally and illegally.

Analysts say the Belgian authorities have ignored the growing jihadist threat in the country for decades, long before the current political paralysis.

"This didn't start with the civil war in Syria, this didn't start with Sharia4Belgium," says Bilal Benyaich, an expert on extremism in Belgium. Sharia4Belgium was an Islamist network based in Antwerp that was disbanded and whose members were jailed last year for plotting terrorist acts.

A problem from the 1970s

He says the problem started with the arrival of Salafi preachers from Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, laying the groundwork for radicals who would travel to Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia to wage jihad.

Benyaich says the speed with which society's disaffected can become radicalized is what has really changed, and that without better community outreach to vulnerable communities from police forces in particular, Belgium will not be able to prevent Paris-style attacks.

That means more multicultural policing.

"If you have more people from an immigrant background in your forces, it can narrow the gap that exists today and leads to a lack of trust and information."

It's easy enough for the children of immigrants to feel disaffected and cut off from what little is left of the Belgian identity.

Generations of Belgian-born citizens can still be referred to as foreigners in some circles. When I lived in a neighbourhood with a similar profile to Molenbeek in the 1990s, police made regular swoops on bus stops checking people's ID cards. With my blond hair, I was not once asked to produce my own, even though I was the foreigner. 

Brussels has changed a lot in the intervening decades. At first, many of its residents resented the fat-cat eurocrats with their tax-free salaries. Cars with EU plates would regularly get egged.

But that body of outsiders has now come to be an important part of the city's identity, and a genuinely cosmopolitan face.

Some members of its own citizenry are still being left on the outside, though. Finding a way to include them, say experts, will be an important part of the battle against extremism.