Forget What the Media is Telling You: Here’s How Belgium Really Reacted to the Brussels Attacks

By Elika Ansari at undergroundreporter.org

Brussels, Belgium — Last week’s terrorist attacks in Brussels shook the entire country, spurring authorities to respond instantly with heightened security and patrols, not only in Belgium, but also in other parts of Europe.

In Brussels, lockdowns immediately followed the bombings and people were advised to stay put for the next few days. But the civilians, who faced a similar lockdown after the Paris attacks in November, were not deterred. On Thursday 24th March, hundreds of people gathered at the Stock Exchange building in Place de la Bourse, one of the main squares in Brussels, where a makeshift memorial had been set up to commemorate victims.

Messages of love and peace, such as ‘Love not War’, ‘Peace and Harmony’, and ‘Muslim and Peaceful’, were chalked onto the walls and sidewalks around the area, while young people proudly held up signs offering ‘Free Hugs’ to strangers.

Chants like ‘Against war’, ‘Live together’, ‘We love Brussels’, and the occasional ‘Screw Daesh (ISIS)’, echoed throughout the square, while the shades of Belgian, Turkish, Moroccan, Tunisian, French, and Ivorian flags danced in the winds.  The message was one of unity and international solidarity, with an overarching acknowledgement that Brussels is only one of the few cities that has been recently hit by international terrorism.

But at a time like this, unity can be fragile, and fear mongering propaganda all too easy to succumb to. It is even easier to scapegoat immigrants and refugees and name them the culprit of the attacks, as we have seen politicians across the globe shamelessly do to push their own agendas.

Surely, it was not long until this uglier side of Belgium showed itself, tarnishing the messages of fraternity. On Sunday afternoon, a peace march was interrupted by a large group of far-right hooligans clad in black. Undeterred by the police at first, the group, which calls itself ‘Casuals United Belgium,’ stalked into the midst of the crowd, chanting nationalist and anti-immigrant slogans, making Nazi salutes, and even confronting Muslim women. Still, demonstrators remained strong, shouting back slogans like ‘We want a unified Belgium’ and ‘We are all children of immigrants.’

The far-right group was eventually dispersed by police water canons, but the crowd’s disenchantment with this late reaction rang loudly and was reminiscent of the Belgian authorities’ failure to act pre-emptively in face of last week’s attacks, despite possessing vital intelligence on some of the assailants and their whereabouts.

Other than this incident and the increased security patrols, the mood in Brussels and neighbouring cities seems to be back to normal. The streets are once again vibrant, the shops and bars are chiming with visitors, and people are going about their lives as usual.

But the increased security might be less reassuring for the undocumented refugees in Belgium, who have been susceptible to increasing ID checks, anti-Muslim rhetoric, and even forced deportations since the so-called refugee crisis began to take shape in Europe. As one unnamed refugee from Afghanistan living in Antwerp, a city in northern Belgium, told me, “Now big problem for refugees. I am scared. I cannot live like this without papers.”

This article (Forget What the Media is Telling You: Here’s How Belgium Really Reacted to the Brussels Attacks) is an opinion editorial (OP-ED). The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of Underground Reporter. This article is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Elika Ansari and UndergroundReporter.org. If you spot a typo, please email the error and the name of the article to [email protected]. Images credit: Elika Ansari