Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne escaped the worst. He escaped a kidnapping attempt hatched by the drug world. 4 suspects were arrested in the Netherlands. The violence of drug trafficking is no longer confined to the middle or to certain neighborhoods. It invites itself into the public space and even into politics.
VDB
Yes, that takes us back to the end of the 80s, with the kidnapping of Paul Vanden Boeynants, former Prime Minister. At the time it was Patrick Haemers and his gang who was behind the coup. A crime linked to the bank hold-up, robbery and therefore kidnapping.
Unlike 1989, the kidnapping did not work. It is necessary to underline the effectiveness of the reaction of the judicial and police world in this case, first they obtained the good information, then they quickly processed it and mounted an operation which led to arrests in the Netherlands. A stolen car with a weapon and a can of gasoline were found near the home of Vincent Vanquickenborne. The gasoline can was apparently used to burn the car to erase the traces of the kidnapping.
Why ?
The question that everyone is asking is: why remove the Minister of Justice?
What is almost certain is that we are far from a ransom like that of VDB. We are also a long way from an ideological type of kidnapping like those carried out by the Red Army fraction in Germany at the end of the 1970s.
But then: why? The VRT interviewed a crime specialist in the Nederlands. Jan Meeus believes that the most rational answer is that the sponsors probably wanted to exchange the minister for someone. An exchange for prisoners perhaps, since Belgium has made hundreds of arrests in the community in recent months, following the dismantling of the Sky ECC communication network.
It’s only a hypothesis. Be that as it may, Jan Meeus registers this attempt in an escalation of violence that we have already seen in the Netherlands. There, the Marengo trial (a huge procedure that targets the cocaine mafia) led to attempted kidnappings in the legal world. There were also several murders of key witnesses, including journalist Peter de Vries, who moved the Netherlands last year.
For this specialist in organized crime, the cartels import their violence from Latin America where it has largely enabled the cartels to impose themselves against States which have proved too weak to put an end to it.
Narco-Etat
Belgium is therefore a candidate to become a “narco-state”. This is the observation made 10 days ago by Johan Delmulle, the Brussels public prosecutor. reminds the evening : The danger hangs over us that Belgium receives the name of narco-state. The World newspaper also mentioned it. This would mean a state eaten away by corruption and which no longer has “the monopoly of legitimate violence” to use the famous definition of the state by sociologist Max Weber.
This attempt to kidnap the Minister of Justice of a rule of law is an open challenge to this “monopoly of legitimate state violence”.
That says a lot about the hubris and power of these groups. Let us recall a figure: the cocaine seizures of the year in the port of Antwerp (approximately 90 t) are worth 4.5 billion euros on the market. According to specialists, this represents around 10% of everything that passes through the port, i.e. nearly 45 billion euros per year.
We are talking about sums that could pay a good part of the pensions (54 billion), all of education in this country, (30 billion). It is above all 10 to 20 times more than the federal police budget (2.5 billion). The fight against organized crime is above all a fight for the rule of law, let’s not forget that.