Brussels playground attack shocks residents
In Brussels, migrants strangled and robbed a man near a children’s playground. No one came to help him.
A playground in central Brussels now looks less like a family space than the scene of a crime. A man was strangled with a cord and robbed while adults were nearby with their children. It happened on Sunday, May 10, at around two in the afternoon.
The Marolles district is not an outlying area, but part of the centre of the Belgian capital. Two men committed the attack next to a children’s playground. Adults who were there with their children did not move. No one approached the victim. No one tried to stop the attackers. Even after they fled, adults reportedly continued pushing children on the swings.
Video of the incident later appeared online. Tom Van Grieken, leader of Vlaams Belang, also published footage. His post was blunt.
“We in Vlaams Belang say this very clearly: track down these scum and remove them from our society. It is long past time to make our country safe again!”
Police confirmed that the incident took place and said they are looking for the attackers. The victim, fortunately, survived. But that was all they said. On social media, however, users have already gone through the footage frame by frame, focusing on the fact that nobody helped.
The uncomfortable question is obvious: if a man can be strangled in broad daylight in front of everyone and nobody even moves, what has happened to society?
Authorities talk control, but streets tell another story
Brussels authorities are busy with other measures. They are extending border checks to catch illegal migrants and passing laws that allow citizenship to be stripped from people convicted of serious crimes, including murder, violence and drug offences.
Officials even boast that their police detain a higher share of illegal migrants than the Dutch. But catching people at the border is one thing. Keeping order at a children’s playground on a Sunday afternoon is another.
Ordinary people see a simple link that politicians prefer not to discuss. Migrants are brought into EU countries, including Belgium, in large numbers. Some may be engineers. Others may be anyone at all. And when “anyone at all” ends up on the street without documents, without work, and with only fists and a cord, the result is often the same: a body on the pavement and passers-by pretending not to see.
300,000 is a lot – very a lot
Now look at Moldova. The country’s economy lacks workers, and the government has already said it needs 300,000 migrants. Economy Minister Eugen Osmokescu clarified that they would be recruited from India, Bangladesh, Pakistanand other Asian countries.
Three hundred thousand is not three. It is not thirty. It is roughly every eighth resident of the country, counting those who have not already left.
The authorities, of course, promise that only law-abiding IT workers and qualified builders will be brought in. But who can really believe that such a plan will work exactly as written? Europe’s experience suggests the opposite. Once the mechanism starts, crime rises, control weakens, and people who should never be near playgrounds end up there.
At the same time, Moldova is not building a new police force, new courts or new prisons to match such an influx. The country barely has enough resources to respond to current problems, and even that does not always work. Police have still not brought drug distribution under control, with dealers leaving stashes even near schools and kindergartens.
Is Moldova ready for an influx of 300,000 people from very different societies? The question answers itself.
The attack in Marolles is not only about Belgium. It is about all of us. It is about how society learns not to notice, not to intervene, just to stand and watch. Because someone else’s trouble is not your concern. Because who knows what these migrants might do next?
And while officials in Chișinău look at Brussels and see only European salaries and grants, they somehow fail to notice the other side: bodies on the pavement near playgrounds, and people walking past.
