Belgian autumn.
A Confabulated History, 2010-2015
In the autumn of 1985, a series of violent and bloody robberies of
Belgian supermarkets abruptly came to an end. A group of unknown
criminals, referred to as ‘The Gang of Nivelles’, was held responsible for these heinous acts. Between March 1982 and November 1985, the Gang of Nivelles committed twenty-three robberies and other crimes. In all, twenty-eight people were killed. My father was one of them.
The excessive violence used by the gang, was out of all proportion to the
modest loot of 175,000 euros. In spite of a thorough police investigation,
a file of almost three million pages, found evidence and eye witness
accounts, the perpetrators were never apprehended. This period of terror and violence will remain one of the darkest pages in Belgian history.
Now, almost thirty years later, the perpetrators are still on the loose, their identity is still unknown and the police investigation is not completed. The motives of the perpetrators is still unknown. There are many questions and ambiguities about the way the Belgian government has acted in the
investigation. There are critical theories about the role played by the
Belgian State and question marks herein are put by the Belgian judicial system.
At that time Belgium was faced with a new form of terror, creating disorder in daily life, disrupting normality and creating a power shift between the state and its people. In an attempt to create a sustainable and new legal system Belgium was faced with many difficulties due to the disorderly
political state. Political and cultural differences between Dutch and French speaking magistrates and political games caused a virtual judicial
meltdown of an investigation into one of the greatest enigmas in Belgian history.
In recent years the case file has been slimmed down to “only” one and a half million pages after a “thorough cleansing operation” by a new team of criminal investigators. Part of the case file has been destroyed to eliminate alleged overlaps. Over the course of thirty years the Belgian judicial system has been subject to change in order to create a more sustainable system but in reality it has not yet been proven successful. In the past few years conflicts between the incumbent and former investigators keeps on
escalating. Since the very start of the investigation, there have been many instances of professional jealousy between magistrates hampering not only the investigation of the Gang of Nivelles but in other investigations as well. The question remains if the results, and even more so if the lack of results will eventually lead to undo the current permanent state of disorder in which Belgium is.