What used to be the Cafe of Dark Memories has been transformed into a cheerful workspace, with bright blue and yellow walls, a large blackboard still showing the latest grammar lesson, and posters in the oval windows—which have not changed—commemorating different Activities invite children and parents. It is difficult to connect this local club on Béguines street in the Molenbeek district of Brussels with the bar that brothers Brahim and Salah Abdeslam ran right there. That was before he embarked on a deadly jihadist career that led to the former blowing himself up in the November 2015 Paris attacks that claimed 130 lives. The second, after repenting at the last moment and fleeing, was arrested shortly before a new suicide attack by the extremist cell to which he belonged on March 22, 2016 in Brussels, which killed 32 people.
The Collectif des Béguines, which opened its doors two years later and has just given itself a makeover, was set up with the aim of reclaiming this nightmare place for the neighborhood. Between these walls, where elementary school children are now reviewing their lessons with their parents, the Abdeslam brothers and many others who sat on the bench in Paris and have been in the Brussels mega-trial since this month spent hours watching videos of it Islamic State (IS) .
Between coffee and the occasional joint – some had a history of drug dealing – the Abdeslam brothers and others like their neighbor Mohamed Abrini – the ‘man in the hat’, the third terrorist in the Brussels airport attack who is also on trial . like Salah Abdeslam – who watched on an endless loop, from the brutal beheading of American journalist James Foley to the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot. But as Emmanuel Carrère recalls in the book in which he condensed his chronicles of the Paris trial, V-13, “his favorite video because they know the protagonist”, was another: the one starring Abdelhamid Abaaoud, another childhood friend of Molenbeek, who hauls several bodies across the Syrian desert in his jeep. Abaaoud, believed to be behind the 13-N attacks in Paris, was shot dead by French police on the outskirts of Paris a few days later.
Erasing the place’s jihadist image was not easy, admits Meriem Bouhajra, a Moroccan who moved to Molenbeek from the Costa Brava with two of her three children when the attacks took place and now teaches courses at the association. “It’s like damn, for the people in the neighborhood it was a shock to know that the terrorists were here, they were afraid to get in,” explains this coordinator of Action and Dialogue, a group that works for intergenerational and cultural empowerment Dialog.
Like the rest of this area of Brussels (they’re referred to as communes), which often lives with their backs to the European capital, residents of Béguines Street have spent years trying to break the stigma of being a jihadist nursery and turn the page, which weighs heavily. Measured by its population, Belgium is one of the European countries from which more young people have gone to the Islamic State or at least tried to: more than 600. Almost a hundred of them came from Molenbeek.
The start of the trial for the Brussels attacks has put renewed focus on this community of nearly 98,000 people, angering many residents who feel responsible for a terrorist attack they stress they were also victims of. “They were looking for a perpetrator and found him in Molenbeek, we didn’t deserve that,” regrets Lola, an Albanian who is also very active in clubs and has lived in the neighborhood for 21 years.
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“People in Molenbeek suffered a lot from the bad image that was given to them. It’s sad and exhausting to always be stigmatized,” agrees Noura Amer, coordinator of Molenbeek Women’s House, another association working for the emancipation and integration of women in this community with a majority of migrants, especially Moroccans. “By focusing on events like the attacks, an entire community is being associated with this terror, which is unfortunate,” stresses Amer, for whom Molenbeek “is a municipality like the others”, but with “socio-economic problems, which it is what you must try: See how you can help people to improve their economic situation and the level of their schools”.
José Luis Peñafuerte was making a documentary about the radicalization of Molenbeek for several months, just as the attacks in Brussels were taking place. He saw the before, during and after of this quasi-city, which is the second poorest municipality in Belgium, one of the most densely populated and above-average rates of school failure and unemployment, especially among young people, which condemned many to marginalization and drug trafficking. Problems that are not solely responsible for this, but which, experts agree, represent a breeding ground for the radicalization of young people, which in extreme cases leads to jihadism. Or, in other less extreme but worrying cases, it leads to anger that erupts on occasions like the World Cup in Qatar when Morocco beat Belgium and violent riots broke out.
failed integration
“Although jihadism is more controlled, there is an unresolved problem, that of the radicalism in the spirit of many young people due to identity problems, failed integration, economic crisis, drugs…” analyzes the Spaniard-Belgian documentary filmmaker. “The problem is above all the lack of prospects coupled with an undefined identity in a community where social and religious pressure is very strong.”
But Belgium is not isolated. “The jihadi phenomenon in Europe is part of a context of precariousness, territorial separation, discrimination and existential angst of a generation in search of points of reference,” warned in this newspaper in 2021 French experts Hakim el Karoui and Benjamin Hodayé, who studied the cases of 1,460 Jihadists from France, Great Britain, Germany and Belgium in their book Jihad militants. Portrait of a generation drawn to Islamist extremism. In addition, according to Peñafuerte, Belgium has “a major problem with social advancement”.
How do you get out of the vicious circle of exclusion, school failure, social precarization and radicalization? “Education, education, education,” replies Peñafuerte. A mantra also used by the clubs trying to fill the gaps in Molenbeek.
The workers at the women’s shelter run by Amer try every day. Mothers of jihadists also attend their courses in French, sewing or sexist violence; So do the associations that work in the old Abdeslam café, where it is not just about school support, but that it is encouraged by the parents, because the problems of uprooting, school failure and violence all too often have their origins at home. They trust that by working in the neighborhood, hand-in-hand with the families the radicalized come from, they can at least give those families “some tools” to identify the “signs of violence, anger, and even radicalization.” ‘ seen in young people. says Bouhajra. Although, as has been observed both in Belgium and in France and other countries with radicalization problems, a recipe for success has not yet been found.
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