BRUSSELS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 30th April, 2020) As Belgium is struggling to curb the COVID-19 pandemic given the severe lack of protective masks and medical equipment, another issue that was sensitive long before the outbreak � the government's failure to tackle the problem of undocumented immigration � becomes even more acute amid the crisis and returns to Belgium's political agenda.
As of Wednesday, Belgium confirmed 47,859 COVID-9 cases and 7,501 related deaths. However, the actual number of infections might be much higher, as laboratory tests are mostly carried out on people with severe symptoms. The death rate of the country is one of the worst in Europe against the backdrop of the shortage of protective equipment mostly caused by the fact that the strategic stock of masks was destroyed in 2015, at the peak of the immigration wave.
Drieu Godefridi, a philosopher and founder of the von Hayek Institute of Brussels, explains in his article named "Coronavirus: Belgian Carnage" that the current lack of face masks in Belgium is a result of incompetence of the government, which incinerated significant stockpiles to "make room" for hosting refugees in 2015, claiming that those pieces of equipment were out of date and could not be used anymore.
Maggie De Block, who is the Belgian health minister and also in charge of asylum and migration issues in the present government, said that the stockpiles were destroyed in 2018. However, that was when the last pieces of equipment were incinerated. By saying that, she probably wanted to hide the fact that masks were destroyed in an attempt to deal with the illegal immigration issue and not because they were out of date.
If masks had really been destroyed in 2018, she could use as the excuse that the government had little time to replace the stocks, but media pinpointed her "little white lie" and De Block then shrugged to say that she had other things to do "with the terrorist attacks in Brussels and everything."
Mark Van Ranst, a professor at Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, told Sputnik that those masks could have been used, as even given their expired date, they could still be effective in terms of filtration of contaminated air.
"Even if they were out of date, they would have been of great use because the expiration date of a mask mainly concerns its elasticity and not its ability to filtrate contaminated air. They could not have been used in hospitals anymore, but they would have been very useful to the police or to anyone else who needs them today," he said.
However, once realized that no masks are available for the population amid the COVID-19 crisis, the Belgian government chose to lie, announcing that "wearing masks to protect yourself from the coronavirus makes little sense."
ILLEGAL MIGRANTS ARE STILL THERE
Various estimations show that there should be about 150,000 undocumented migrants employed informally or involved in trafficking and prostitution in the country of about 10 million inhabitants.
With the coronavirus crisis, this issue seems to be forgotten. The population, government and media only talk about confinement and "social distancing," and not about the hundreds of migrants camping in the Maximilian Park in Brussels or the Belgian coast, waiting for their transfer to the United Kingdom.
Over the last few years, non-governmental organizations and political parties, mainly the socialist and green parties in Belgium, clearly supported migrants against the police, which was trying to avoid the establishment of a camp like France's infamous Calais Jungle right in the center of Brussels city.
The spokesman for Plateforme citoyenne de soutien aux refugies (Citizen Platform for Refugee Support, or BXLRefugees), Mehdi Kassou, told Sputnik that the Federal government's failure to deal with the issue of illegal migrants led to the situation when many of them were deprived of accommodation after reception centers stopped receiving new residents amid COVID-19 crisis.
"There is no structural response from the government for undocumented migrants. It is the total absence of care with efforts to drive them away. This has hardly changed from the period before confinement, but we found that, for example, a large reception center for refugees in Brussels is now closed to all new asylum seekers. For several weeks, there has been a total refusal to process files or take charge of new arrivals. In Brussels, the social services of SAMU Social do a lot to house the hundreds of people who were expelled from the closed centers where they were kept pending their expulsion. Minister Maggie De Block declared that it was impossible to apply social distancing measures in these closed centers," Kassou explained.
Sputnik also talked to a family of four, which hosts from two to three young Africans or people from the middle East at a time in their small house in Ixelles-Brussels since 2017.
"At the moment, we have two young Somalis who want to cross the English Channel to the United Kingdom. One of the two has already tried three times but has each time was detected by the customs services and freed again in Belgium. He has come back to our place, not knowing what else to do. My husband is a civil servant and I am a secretary. We believe in helping people who suffer. This is our effort of solidarity. We are happy to see how rich we are in Europe and can share a little with these poor people who want a new life here. Here, in Brussels, they do sometimes odd jobs, helping to move apartments and get some money that way, but it is difficult for them," Francoise Devos, a member of this family, said.
Voices calling for regularization of illegal are increasingly heard from the left in Belgium and France. The main argument here is that amid the crisis, they work for the good of the host country, even if their employment is informal.
"There is a fine platform in France which asks for the regularization of some 100,000 undocumented migrants who are working at the moment on different small but very important jobs, so it would be the least to speed up their regularization: underpaid pickers, exploited cleaners, in times of contagion they are helping liberate France from the coronavirus," Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a former member of the European Parliament for the Green party, told the French National Television this week.
According to a member of the European Parliament for Flemish Vlaams Belang party, Tom Vandendriessche, the Belgian government's actions are rather chaotic, which has led to the scandal with the lack of protective masks and a high number of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes across the country.
"The decisions of the Belgian federal government regarding the present coronacrisis are at best erratic. There is the scandal around face masks, but also the incredible number of deaths in the nursing homes. The federal government decided, seeing the crisis developing, that old-age persons in the nursing homes would not be taken to hospital emergency wards. If they are old, let them die in nursing homes, there is no place for them in hospitals. It is simply disgusting and could have been avoided," Vandendriessche said.
Vandendriessche continued by saying that the current situation with illegal migrants in Belgium was another proof of the government's "wrong policies."
"As for the illegal migrants, who are now roaming our streets again, most of them are being let out from closed migrant centers due to the 'lack of confinement space.' This is another proof, if need be, of the wrong policies that can only lead to the creation of other Calais Jungles at the Belgian coast, such as the one the police tries to fight in Zeebrugge, or simply in Brussels, with the help of the socialist and Green ministers of the regional Brussels government," he stated.
Vandendriessche added that it was necessary to make countries to return their own citizens amid the crisis, while NGOs should stop collaborating with the human traffickers in Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Turkey and other countries to ease the migrant burden on Europe.
"We have no money anymore for this. We will have to rebuild our economies after the COVID-19 crisis. As for the supremely ineffective European Union, the European Commission must come up with a stop to all migration now. A full stop," he concluded.
