Chasm widens between powerful and powerless

THE words are inscribed on the posters that call Belgians to demonstrate on Sunday

THE words are inscribed on the posters that call Belgians to demonstrate on Sunday. Hundreds of thousands are expected to converge on the capital.

Losing faith in the ability of the system to vindicate rights, all that is left is a faith in individuals. That is the meaning of Belgium's unparalleled rage against the dismissal of the instructing judge, Jean Marc Connerotte, from the paedophile dossier in Neufchateau.

"For the sake of a plate of spaghetti?" is the horrified refrain of the public. Connerotte attended a fund raising dinner to help pay the legal costs of some of the families of missing or dead children.

It is not just a public perception that Connerotte is an honourable and determined judge, but that, despite his assurances to the contrary, the system is fatally flawed. On the verge of tears after his removal, Connerotte appealed to the public not to lose faith.

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Too late. What has been clearest here is the chasm that has opened up between those in this country with power and those without.

On TV and radio there is a dialogue of the deaf between the quiet dignity and simple logic of the working class families of victims and the professors of law who try to explain that the rule of law must prevail. Justice and the law at loggerheads irony of ironies that the new zeal to see the law take its course should target Connerotte, of all people, first.

Connerotte (49), a Neufchateau local, was a late vocation to the law. He qualified as a teacher of literature and contemplated a return to the classroom during a previous brush with authority in 1994 when he was removed from another inquiry, the investigation of the murder of the Socialist politician from Liege, Andre Cools. That was only days after he had pressed charges, subsequently dropped, against one of those who - is now in the dock.

This being Belgium, conspiracy theories abound, fed by the vaguest of connections between the Dutroux and Cools cases, by a retired policeman's tales of being ordered to close dossiers on paedophile cases, by reports of the mysterious wealth and 12 homes of a Liege judge, and by reports that the prosecutor working with Connerotte, Michel Bourlet, has unearthed a 25 year paedophile ring involving politicians, magistrates and businessmen.

Bourlet, like the judge, has become a national hero for the speed with which he moved to arrest Marc Dutroux when the latter was implicated in August in a recent abduction. Without doubt, his determination saved the lives of two girls whose location Dutroux revealed a couple of days later.

Bourlet was at the spaghetti dinner, too, but his role of prosecutor in the complex Belgian legal system does not require the same degree of impartiality as Connerotte's.

Had it not done so, instead of spraying official buildings with water "to clean up the justice system", firemen might well have been burning them down.

And so the now familiar families of the dead and missing have called their "silent and dignified" march for Sunday.

Jean Denis and Louisa Lejeune, whose daughter Julie died in Dutroux's dungeon, have turned their living room into a campaign headquarters. They are just back from a visit to the US national centre for missing children in Washington. They want to establish one here.

At the forefront of the fight as well is the diminutive Nabela Benaissa, the 18 year old sister of missing Loubna, who speaks for her family because her Moroccan parents' French is not up to it.

Patrick Smyth

Patrick Smyth

Patrick Smyth is former Europe editor of The Irish Times