After the Brussels North Station and the Maximiliaan Park, a squat in the Paleizenstraat is now the symbol of the miserable conditions in which asylum seekers and undocumented migrants have to survive without any prospect. “I’ve been racking my brains over this putrid strategy for over a year now.”
When volunteers bring food on Sunday evening, a fight breaks out in the squat in Paleizenstraat: there is pulling, pushing and yelling. Hundreds of men, weakened and hungry, try to get a bowl of vegetables and rice, but there is not enough for everyone.
The atmosphere is grim in the former headquarters of the tax authorities, where a thousand people seeking asylum or who are homeless have been camping since October. They share two showers and three toilets. “It’s terrible here,” says Robert, a 23-year-old man from Sierra Leone, who sleeps on the floor without a mattress. “People are under the influence, hungry or arguing with each other.” He points to blood on the walls and urine on the floor. People have been stabbed several times, he says, and a Tunisian died at the end of December, possibly from an overdose of drugs.
There are two security guards in front of the door. “We only go in if there is an emergency. Even the police don’t dare to enter here anymore.” The Red Cross, which provides medical care, also stays out for safety reasons. Diseases such as diphtheria and scabies are rampant among the residents.
How did it come this far? And, perhaps more importantly, how is it possible that this is not the first time that asylum seekers and undocumented migrants have had to survive in miserable conditions? Ever since the asylum crisis in 2015, they have been camping in the Brussels North Station or in the Maximilian Park.
“Those camps were the result of the asylum quotas at the time,” says Benoit Dhondt, a lawyer specializing in asylum law. “But at the time I had the impression that this accumulation of people in miserable circumstances also had to serve to maintain a certain discourse. The raggedness caused people to lose their humanity and the problem became very visible. That made it seem much bigger than it actually was.”
right of favour?
According to the cabinet of Nicole de Moor (CD&V), State Secretary for Asylum and Migration, the majority of the squatters in Paleizenstraat have not submitted an application for asylum, which means that they are not entitled to reception, but whether that is correct is open to question. After all, the Red Cross claims that at least three-quarters of residents have indeed submitted an application.
Moreover, experts and NGOs have been warning for over a year about this misery, caused by a chronic shortage of shelters. In fact, Fedasil has been convicted thousands of times for not offering single men seeking asylum the shelter they are entitled to. “I call it organized anarchy. The rights of these people are being blatantly violated: a basic right is presented as a favor, a gesture from the government,” says Dhondt.
And even though De Moor announced last week that Fedasil has been able to identify a hundred asylum seekers from the squat and that 81 people have now been moved to reception centres, the question marks remain. What about those hundreds that are still there? And how does she want to avoid us having the exact same problem within a few months, but in a different location?
Sylvie Micholt, until recently a lawyer specializing in migration law and a former CD&V star who handed in her party card out of aversion to the current asylum policy, says: “I think we can talk about a rotten strategy. But why, I’ve been breaking my head over that for over a year. I suspect they are afraid to play into the hands of the extreme right.”
Suction effect
This may also be due to the hope that this will temper the so-called suction effect, which politicians such as Sammy Mahdi (CD&V) and Conner Rouseau (Vooruit) have already warned about. “It goes without saying that the State Secretary will continue to look for solutions for the asylum seekers,” De Moor’s cabinet responds. That takes a while and it has to be checked who is entitled to what.
But Dhondt is sceptical. “I don’t know if it’s the primary explanation, but it seems that the government secretly counts on the hopelessness and unpredictability in which people find themselves when they apply for asylum, deter others from doing the same. Or that these people will eventually disappear to another country or illegally.”
The question is whether that is realistic. Over the past two years, the number of requests for protection has increased, according to figures from the Commissioner General for Refugees and Stateless Persons (CGRS). Micholt: “The majority of those people come from war countries. And where war rages, people will leave their possessions behind and flee.”
Dhondt also notes that this dissuasion does not work: “For years, Europe has been making a lot of effort to make things as difficult as possible for those people: the escape routes here are more dangerous than ever, the conditions in which people live are sometimes unbearable. They also know that in those countries of origin: they know that refugee family members sometimes disappear for years and are unreachable. But it doesn’t solve anything. What my clients always tell me is that they wouldn’t have left if they didn’t have to.”