Brussels Is Under High Security Alert, But Will Europe Address Muslims in “Marginalized Ghettos”?

Democracynow.org - Belgium’s capital city of Brussels is on its highest alert as residents remain on lockdown. People are being told to stay away from their windows, and schools remain closed as police and soldiers carry out raids in the search for suspects in the Paris attacks ten days ago that killed 130 people. Overnight raids resulted in 16 arrests. No guns or explosives were found, and Salah Abdeslam, the main suspect in the Paris attacks who drove to Brussels afterward, remains at large. Meanwhile, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel says Brussels will remain under the country’s highest level of security threat, meaning the threat of an attack is "serious and imminent." We speak with Belgian-born human rights activist Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch’s emergencies director, who has spent the last few months speaking to refugees coming to Europe mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. He also examines what he calls the "marginalized ghettos" in European cities where many migrants live, including the Brussels suburb called Molenbeek, where some of the Paris attackers lived. “Europe really should be focusing more on the marginalized Muslim communities at home and try to better meet their needs, make sure that young people are educated and have jobs available, because the reality is that the majority of these people who carried out the Paris attacks were French citizens — some of them resident in Molenbeek — who have been living in France all of their lives,” Bouckaert says. He also notes Belgium has been a center for the illegal weapons trade for decades.

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