Stigma remains on anniversary of Brussels bombings

Belgium continues to operate at second-highest terror level one year after attack

Brussels International Airport, where 16 people died in two bomb attacks on March 22, 2016, looks shiny new. The Maelbeek subway station, where another16 died from a backpack bomb, processes commuters much as it always has. And tourism is recovering, despite Donald Trump calling the Belgian capital a “hellhole” to be avoided at all costs.

One year after the attacks, the city’s physical scars may have healed, but the pain is apparent beneath the surface. Still, the city’s residents and authorities are determined to find a way to forge ahead, without changing the character of one of the world’s most international cities.

“Confronted by doubts and fears, you have shown courage and a magnificent will to reconstruct,” King Philippe told a remembrance service.

It comes under difficult circumstances. Surveillance is up almost everywhere. The city and Belgium as a whole continue to live at the secondhighest terror level, meaning there is a serious threat of an attack.

The fear of an attack is widely shared across Europe, underlined at Britain’s parliament Wednesday as an attacker stabbed an officer and was then shot by police, and witnesses said a vehicle struck several people on the nearby bridge.

Even if locals in Brussels are mostly oblivious to heavily armed paratroopers patrolling the city’s landmarks, visitors still stop in their tracks when they notice the camouflage dress and the machine-guns.

At the airport, authorities “have taken a lot of additional security measures that go well beyond the European regulations,” Arnaud Feist, Brussels Airport CEO, said in an interview with Associated Press.

Normality is still far off on the anniversary of the attacks, which also wounded more than 300 people.

The social fabric is still especially frayed in the rundown Molenbeek municipality in the centre of the city, where several of the extremists who were involved in the Brussels attack or the November 2015 Paris attacks had lived or grown up. The area, which has a large immigrant community, was portrayed as jihadi central and Europe’s hotbed of fundamentalism, and is still far from recovering from the stigma.

“It’s a fact that there really was Molenbeek-bashing after the Paris attacks,” said the district’s mayor, Francoise Schepmans. The facts about rampant crime on some streets and unfettered religious extremism in some mosques and a Qur’an school were laid bare. The mayor, with help from national authorities, has started a long cleanup operation.

She has closed some mosques for incendiary language and found that 102 non-profit organizations had links to illegal activities, some to religious radicalism.

“The work is going to take years before Molenbeek gets a positive image again,” she said.

Overall, it makes it tough for a city to bounce back, especially one that relies on its tourism industry.

Before the attacks, said Patrick Bontinck, CEO of the Visit Brussels tourist office, “tourism was growing approximately 10 per cent each year since five years. We were in a really good situation.”

Hotels and restaurants were hit hard, and despite help from the authorities, some were pushed into bankruptcy.

“It took us about six months to get the traffic back as we normally had,” airport CEO Feist said.

For Bontinck, it is important not to lose the global feel of the city. The International Organization for Migration says 62 per cent of the population of Brussels is foreign-born, second only to Dubai. After the Paris attacks with its Brussels connection, Trump described the city as “like living in a hellhole right now” because of its lack of integration. Bontinck still bristles. “We are the second-most cosmopolitan city in the world and we want to keep our value of sharing, people of all nationalities living together,” he said. “Maybe Mr. Trump doesn’t like this, but this is our value and we want to continue to share this with all of the world.”

“Confronted by doubts and fears, you have shown courage and a magnificent will to reconstruct.” KING PHILIPPE OF BELGIUM