A year after the attack
at Brussels International Airport where 16 people died in two bomb attacks, the city’s physical scars may have healed, but the pain is still apparent.
BRUSSELS — Brussels International Airport, where 16 people died in two bomb attacks on March 22, 2016, looks shiny new. The Maelbeek subway station, where another 16 died from a backpack bomb, processes commuters much as it always has. And tourism is recovering, despite President 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 second-highest 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 on Wednesday, as an assailant drove into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, stabbed a police officer and was then shot and killed by police.
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 The 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 center 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 Molenbeekbashing 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 Quran 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 nonprofit 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.