BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) – The increased number of deployed soldiers in Brussels is becoming difficult to maintain, the head of a military personnel union said on Monday (April 11), due mainly to a lack of means and equipment.
The reinforcement comes less than a month after 32 people, excluding three suicide bombers, were killed in two explosions at Brussels Airport and a blast inside a metro carriage in central Brussels on March 22.
“The number of military personnel (deployed in Brussels) will have increased by 300 today within Belgian forces. So a total of 1,800 soldiers have been deployed following the threat of the attacks. This is a government demand that is becoming increasingly difficult for Belgian forces to honor because the means are really limited,” said Gilles Van Oosthuijze, the head of ‘SLFP Defense’, the defense forces’ personnel union.
“You have to know there has been a disinvestment in Belgian Defense forces for the past twenty years and the assessment today is alarming. We do not have enough well-equipped, well-trained soldiers who can be deployed in the streets, although we’re talking about less than two thousand people,” he added.
Van Oosthuijze, who declined to give his military rank for legal reasons, called on the Belgian government to take into account that the deployment is also taking a toll on the soldier’s personal lives.
“It is high time that politicians realize that today we have to massively reinvest in defense because the problems it causes are not only structural but also family-related for the military. There are soldiers who have been at work for 15 months, and during those 15 months they haven’t been able to see their families, because there is not enough personnel rotation because there is not enough equipment, not enough means – and therefore we cannot use all military personnel to defend the population here in Belgium,” he said.
Belgium began deploying some 300 troops to guard possible targets for attacks, including Jewish sites and diplomatic missions, following the January 2015 attacks at French satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo” and a Kosher supermarket in central Paris, that left 17 people dead.
Military presence in Brussels increased once again after a series of Islamist attacks hit the French capital in November.
Belgium has been at the heart of investigations into the attacks – which included suicide bombers targeting a France-Germany soccer match – after links to Brussels and the district of Molenbeek, in particular, were established.
Van Oosthuijze called for more synergy between the country’s different intelligence services, saying they could help prevent such attacks.
“All sources of information necessary to guarantee the security of the country are important. Whether they are military sources or civilian sources, it is important in this day and age to gather all this information. The military will mainly provide information that comes from abroad, civilians will provide information from inside. Today, to cope with terrorism, it is important to have both sources of information to counter as much as possible all this terrorism which now affects everybody – and that’s a big issue. I’m appealing – well we are appealing in our organisation – for a very important synergy between military and civilian intelligence services,” Van Oosthuijze said.
The trial of so-called Islamist group, the “Verviers cell”, will open on April 15 at the criminal court in Brussels. The cell was dismantled in January 2015 in a Belgian police raid in the southern town of Verviers, that left 2 militants dead.
Federal prosecutors then said the group was about to launch “terrorist attacks on a grand scale”.
With half a million Muslims, mostly of French-speaking North African descent, among its 11 million people, Belgium has seen similar discontent to that in France among young, unemployed children of immigrants in blighted, post-industrial towns like Verviers.