Changing Brussels neighborhood tries to depart stigma of terrorism behind

With kids’s drawings and colourful posters now adorning the partitions and home windows, it was simple to overlook the infamous previous of the crimson brick constructing, whose historical past nonetheless haunts a working-class Brussels neighborhood.
On a current morning, in a former bar transformed right into a group heart, Assetou Elabo was arranging tables for college kids who would quickly be part of her for homework tutoring.

A number of years earlier, the bar’s proprietor had let drug trafficking proliferate on the location. With patrons, he would watch movies from the Islamic State. And within the basement of the bar, Les Béguines, he would chat on-line with a good friend who had joined the terrorist group in Syria.

Then in November 2015, he detonated his explosive vest as a part of a collection of assaults in and round Paris.
For many, the bar epitomized all that had gone incorrect in Molenbeek, the neighborhood of almost 100,000 those that was residence to seven of the 20 terrorists who killed 130 folks in France that November and 32 extra in Brussels 4 months later.
But if the bar symbolized what Molenbeek had been, the group heart reveals what the neighborhood is making an attempt to change into.
Since being opened by native residents in 2018, the middle has been devoted to serving to kids, college students on the lookout for jobs and folks with disabilities. Although the neighborhood stays predominantly Muslim, it’s extra numerous than often portrayed, with newcomers altering its composition lately.
A portrait alongside a canal within the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels on Dec. 7, 2021. (The New York Times)
“What we do here is the opposite of what the Abdeslam brothers did,” Elabo, a social employee, mentioned of the bar’s proprietor, Brahim, and his brother Salah, who helped handle it.
After the Paris assaults, Molenbeek was subjected to intense world scrutiny. Television crews from around the globe broadcast for days from the neighborhood’s central sq. or close to the bar, making residents really feel like they have been residing on a film set.
Some journalists would cease passersby and ask to be launched to a jihadi. Opinion shapers and policymakers exhorted average Muslims to do extra to fight extremism.
Six years later, many in Molenbeek have taken up the problem. And removed from the general public consideration, they’ve tried to rebuild their group, though it nonetheless faces the identical endemic issues — from poverty to unemployment to crime — that contributed to the radicalization of some residents.
“We were ashamed after the attacks, but now I proudly say that I’m from Molenbeek,” mentioned Dr. Sara Debulpaep, 47, a pediatrician who has lived right here for almost three many years.

Since the assaults, the federal government has awarded quite a few grants meant to enhance life right here and broaden alternatives for the neighborhood’s younger folks.
Bachir Mrabet, a youth employee at Foyer, one of many foremost group facilities in Molenbeek, mentioned he had begun information literacy workshops after the assaults, in addition to theater workshops to let off tensions. He additionally now organizes youth conferences twice a month as a substitute of as soon as each two months earlier than the bombings. “We’re much more vigilant,” he mentioned.
People stroll within the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels on Dec. 7, 2021. (The New York Times)
But assets are nonetheless tight, and residents nonetheless really feel stigmatized, mentioned Ali El Abbouti, one other youth employee at Foyer who manages his personal group heart.
“We’ve been asked to do even more, to solve all the problems, but with so little resources,” El Abbouti mentioned. “And we were already doing so much.” He desires to create locations the place younger individuals are inspired to precise themselves; current tasks have included a podcast in Arabic concerning the origins of Molenbeek’s first generations of Moroccan immigrants.
Volunteers say younger folks want extra guiding examples from older and profitable native residents. “They want mentors, they don’t have that around them,” mentioned Meryam Fellah, a 27-year-old chemistry pupil who offers teaching on the group heart that after housed the bar.
Molenbeek’s main adjustments are usually not coming solely from longtime residents, but in addition from a few of the identical exterior forces which are reshaping a lot of Brussels.
While residents of Moroccan origins stay a majority in Molenbeek, lately extra Eastern Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans and Roma folks have arrived.
The neighbors of Debulpaep, the pediatrician, embrace Albanians, Congolese, Guineans, Italians, Poles and Palestinians. Residents say Molenbeek’s variety is what makes it distinctive.
Affluent new residents from the Dutch-speaking Flanders area of Belgium have moved into costly housing alongside a gentrifying strip of artists’ studios and natural retailers.
In Molenbeek, one can now go to an exhibition on Belgian grownup film theaters in one in every of Brussels’ trendiest museums. Art tasks, underground live shows and cafes are gaining floor.
But integrating these patrons and the shoppers of the kebab eating places and conventional Islamic marriage ceremony retailers that dot the neighborhood’s foremost road stays a problem, residents say.
“There’s very little mixing,” El Abbouti mentioned on a current afternoon as he walked previous a gated residential advanced.

And Molenbeek stays one of many poorest and most densely populated areas in Belgium. At 21%, the unemployment charge is thrice the nation’s common.
While the terrorist menace has been downgraded, hashish trafficking has exploded, and so have violent clashes amongst gangs, mentioned Ysebaert, the native police chief. “Our problems are very similar to those of large European cities.”