Belgium: Police Screens 500000 Migrants
01 July 1996
The belgian "Rijkswacht" (gendarmerie) has secretly and illegally screened up to half a million Turkish migrants in the last two years Justice Minister de Clerk revealed in June. The exercise, codenamed "Operation Rebel", was designed to target heroin smugglers. It now appears to have involved everybody in the country who is of Turkish descent.
Operation Rebel was launched in 1994 by Corps Commander De Ridder of the Centraal Bureau van Opsporingen (COB- Central Investigation Bureau) of the Rijkswacht. Starting from the premise that over 80 percent of the heroin that entered Belgium passed through Turkish Mafia gangs, the decision was made to effectively check up on every person of turkish descent in Belgium. The operation was only recently discovered by Justice Minister, de Clerk, who ordered it stopped.
The system used was highly methodical. The COB first went through the population register and identified everybody who conceivably might be turkish. After that they went to the aliens registration service to obtain the addresses of any turkish people who may have entered the country illegally. They then went through the judicial databank to pull out anybody who might have a criminal record. The search finally went through all other available databanks, including details of juvenile bank accounts.
This method is far from original, deriving as it did from the German police who had earlier used similar techniques to trace "Rote Armee Fraktion" suspects. However the German police did take the precaution of getting judicial approval. The Belgian police, on the other hand, told nobody either from the judiciary or the Ministry of Justice. The extent of this operation was finally revealed when the COB went to the national magistrate a year after the project was started in order to gain access to some state databanks.
The exposing of Operation Rebel has led to an outcry across the political spectrum. Senator Fred Erdman of the Socialist Party stated "when I first read about Operation Rebel I thought that I was living in the world of George Orwell's 1984". The Christian democratic Senator Vandenberghe observed that the convention of the Council of Europe strictly prohibited the use of ethnic origin as the basis for any investigation and the Green party senator Eddie Boutmans pointed out that whilst condemning the specific enquiry the Belgian government was at the same time creating a legal framework for pro-active investigation like "Operation Rebel".
When challenged in the Senate Justice Minister de Clerck claimed that only 95,000 people were genuinely enquired into. All other details were gathered merely for sociological and "socio-demographic" research. He also claimed that the enquiry was launched before the 1995 privacy law - which would have outlawed such methods - had come into operation. He finally stated that he had never been informed about such operations, he would never had permitted such an operation if he had been informed about it, and that anyway responsibility for the operation lay with the National Magistrate.
The minister for internal affairs, Johan Vande Lanotte, has since called for an enquiry supported in both houses of the belgian Parliament. However it has since emerged that responsibility for the Rijkwacht is divided between the Ministry for Home Affairs and the Ministry of Justice, which will complicate any enquiry. In the meantime the control commission for the police services, otherwise known as the "P" committee, has launched an investigation into all police methods of information gathering.
De Morgen, 24.6.96; 1.7.96; 4.7.96; Official Report of the Belgian Senate, 3.7.96.