Marchers Protest Pedophile Scandal
Capping an extraordinary week of public demonstrations, about 300,000 people marched through the streets of the Belgian capital Sunday to protest the authorities’ handling of a highly charged pedophile scandal and to draw attention to the unknown fate of at least a dozen missing children.
“I want to thank everyone here for paying homage to our little princess,” Carine Russo, mother of an 8-year-old girl who was allegedly raped and slain by a convicted pedophile, told the solemn assembly. “I ask only one thing, that all children in the world are treated like little princes and princesses and never know … hell on Earth.”
Authorities said the orderly and sometimes teary crowd, carrying white flowers and balloons as symbols of innocence and purity, was among the largest in Belgian history.
It surpassed the size of protests during the tense Cold War years of the early 1980s, when peace activists across Europe took to the streets to oppose the deployment of U.S. missile on their continent.
This time, however, most of the marchers were first-time protesters moved by their hearts, not by their politics - mothers, fathers, teenagers and young children horrified by an unfolding case of murder and child pornography that has gripped the country since August.
Even veterans of other demonstrations - including the legendary social upheavals of 1968 - said none carried the moral grounding and genuine grass-roots concern that presided at Sunday’s event like the guiding hand of a watchful parent.
“To be here gives you a strange feeling in your heart,” said Hafida Zouid, a Brussels mother who made the four-hour march with her 4-year-old daughter. “What happened to those children has given us all goose bumps. This is the only way we know how to express our feelings.”
Four girls were murdered, two others rescued alive, and several children are still missing in connection with a child pornography ring allegedly headed by convicted child rapist Marc Dutroux, who police say committed his most recent crimes after being released from prison early because of good behavior.
The Dutroux case has haunted the consciences of ordinary Belgians since it was disclosed that two of the victims starved to death in an underground dungeon, nine months after disappearing near their homes and despite repeated public appeals by their parents for an aggressive campaign to find them.
But the inward questioning has been increasingly overshadowed by intense rage toward the country’s political and judicial systems, which have come under scrutiny because of allegations of incompetence, corruption and complicity in the pedophile case.
Recently, there have been reports in the Belgian media that investigators are pursuing evidence that might link senior political figures to Dutroux.