With no end in sight to the unprecedented crackdown in the Belgian capital, its social, political and economic costs are rising

Dusk is gathering but the pale wintry sunshine keeps temperatures above zero for a final hour. Annelise Augustyns is on her way to a playground near the Gare du Midi with her two children, aged three and five. All three are wrapped against the wind scything across the bleak concrete plaza outside the station.

It is the third day of lockdown in the Belgian capital and the Augustyns have spent three days confined to their small apartment. The 35-year-old government worker’s office in the centre of the city has been shut. So too, on Monday, were the children’s schools.



“You have to live after all, despite all this tension. The kids are going crazy and no one knows how long this is going to last,” Augustyns said.

On Monday night the Belgian government promised to ease the unprecedented crackdown put in place by the Belgian government as security services hunt a network of local Islamist militants linked to the Paris attacks and suspected of planning a similar operation in Brussels. However, Charles Michel, the prime minister, stressed that the threat remained “serious and imminent”.

Armoured vehicles and soldiers remained deployed throughout the historic centre of the de facto capital of Europe, and at major stations. Most shops, cafes and banks, most government offices, all museums and cinemas were “exceptionally” closed, according to the hastily typed notices pinned to their windows. About 300,000 children did not attend classes or creches, and universities were shut. The metro and its feeder lines were suspended.

Most remain anxious, but some are beginning to doubt the need for such stringent measures. “It seems pretty drastic … But there you go. We’ve got to keep safe, I suppose. So I’ll take the kids to the swings, have a coffee with a friend, then go back home and stay there,” said Augustyns.

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Hans Kengen, a startup founder living in the suburb of Woluwe, watched his wife cycle to work on Monday morning at the European commission – which remains open, albeit with a reinforced security regime – and was relieved when she called to tell him she had arrived safely at her office.

“I’ve lived in India and South Africa so am pretty used to security issues. But I never expected to see the violence of war in Europe. We’re just not used to it. And I know it’s not going to go away soon. We are going to have to get our heads around that,” Kengen said.

Like many others, he had discussed the threat, and its causes, with his children, aged 12 and 15. “You can’t hide it from them. They are clearly affected. I’ve tried to reassure them,” he said.

There is little respite from the constant reminders of danger. TV networks have altered programming. Newspapers are almost entirely taken up with reports on “the situation”. Some offer advice on what to do in the event of a terrorist attack and the subject is discussed in cafés, trains and taxis.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A police operation in Molenbeek, Brussels. Photograph: Olivier Hoslet/EPA

“I’m not too worried but I just find myself thinking about what I would do if I found myself in that situation. Or what my mum might do. She’s 65 and arthritic and isn’t going to run anywhere very fast,” said Martine Lorent, a shopkeeper working near the Midi station.

The failure to find 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam, a suspected participant in the Paris attacks known to have returned to Belgium after the killings, has added to the tension. Abdeslam, from the Brussels district of Molenbeek, was the principal target of a series of raids involving thousands of policemen and soldiers on Sunday night and Monday morning.

“The operation is still ongoing, and will be pursued further,” said Jan Jambon, the minister of interior, on Monday morning. Jambon described other European nations as being “in the same boat”.

This is not entirely true. Though precautions have been taken in other European countries in recent years, few are of a similar scale and severity as those in Belgium. The country is seen by some overseas as a weak link in the European counter-terrorist effort.

What is clear is that the economic, social and political cost of the lockdown is rising.

“The lockdown of Brussels and its region, paralysing the city and steadily an entire country, in an atmosphere of deep anxiety, will be extremely difficult for the authorities to maintain indefinitely,” Béatrice Delvaux, a columnist at Le Soir, said in an editorial.

Kengen, the businessman, agreed. “We don’t know what is going to happen. We manage things from day to day but we’re all still a bit stunned. But how long is this going to last? There’s going to be a moment when you have to loosen things up,” he said. “This isn’t Gaza after all.”

Michel, the prime minister, said that he hoped schools would open from Wednesday, subject to security assessments of individual establishments, while some of the metro might run.



Belgian experts point out that the country has not felt specifically targeted before by Islamist militants, despite a number of ongoing trials of extremists and local plots. Nor have there been prolonged threats from other kinds of terrorists, as in many other European nations.

“I can’t remember anything like this ever, not in my lifetime,” said Gitte Hendrikx, a 22-year-old artist from a small rural community in northern Belgium.

In the early 1980s, Belgium suffered from a wave of violence perpetrated by an extreme leftwing terrorist outfit and a gang of brutal criminals, but Rik Coolsaet, a terrorism expert at Ghent University, said it had been decades since “there was this atmosphere of fear, with no one knowing what might happen where or when or to whom”.

However, Coolsaet pointed out that the situation has shown another side of the Belgian character. When on Sunday evening authorities requested local inhabitants and journalists to refrain from mentioning ongoing raids on social media or news websites, thousands tweeted or posted images of cats instead.

“Brussels is the city of René Magritte after all. And so this kind of surrealism is also part of our reaction. I don’t think you’d see the same in France or the US,” said Coolsaet.

In a slightly unexpected moment of levity on Monday, Belgian federal police thanked the public, and their cats, for their discretion, tweeting a picture of a police bowl filled with cat biscuits.

There is growing concern about consequences for communal relations in Brussels and beyond. About 5% of Belgium’s 11 million inhabitants describe themselves as Muslim.



Malika Hamidi, an activist who lives in the city’s Forêt district, said there was palpable distrust. “It’s not just between the Belgians who’ve always lived here and the Muslim immigrant community. It’s among the Muslims themselves. People are very anxious. But we must not give way to this fear,” Hamidi said.

Her 13-year-old daughter was worried, but her younger child, aged eight, was “really traumatised”, Hamidi said. “She has been seeing pictures of war on the television for most of her life. But it was far away. She has been asking me for a long time when it will reach us. Now she thinks it has arrived in the centre of Brussels.”