“Just switch the power off!” said the Justice Minister
SOCIETY. DRUGS. It was a drug-fuelled rave. Was she raving mad?
“Just switch the power off!” said Zuhal Demir, Flemish Minister of Justice, known for her jack-boot style of law enforcement.
“Er, not a good idea,” replied the Governor of Limburg, Jos Lantmeeters. “There are 10,000 people in there.”
Meanwhile, Demir rounds on the Federal Justice Minister: “And where’s Mrs Verlinden, then?”
Mrs Verlinden, I take it, was sipping tea at home as she observed Mr Lantmeeters applying competence, skill and diplomacy in resolving the incident, without incident. Mrs Demir should take a day off. Luckily, today was such a day.
On Friday, 28 April 2023, it was party time in Sint-Truiden, Belgium, the largest city in Belgium that is in the middle of nowhere – its nearest main road connection to a motorway is 15 km away. In Belgium, that’s the middle of nowhere.
Its motorway connections are not ideal, and it’s perhaps precisely that that makes it an ideal spot for an unauthorised rave. What’s a rave?
A rave is all things to all men. But the common denominators are: young people, dancing, loud music, a somewhat anarchistic bent, drugs, cans of beer and a rollicking good knees-up. But even the middle of nowhere has neighbours in Belgium. It was only a question of time before the police joined the festivities.
It was no night club but an abandoned military airfield that was the selected venue. They “broke in”, through a Nissen-hut-style entry into the domain (not exactly crawling under the fence), through which, at its peak, no fewer than 10,000 people streamed. It’s described in the papers as illegaal in good Dutch. That means, in good English, illegal, which means not in accordance with the law. So, I assume the law was broken, and the nine arrests attest to that fact (some Dutch), along with 27 withheld driving licences, 20 ordinances for the use of drugs in road traffic, 16 drugs offences and 47 fixed penalty notices for possession. It took 12+ hours to clear everyone out. The clean-up’s begun; apparently things are worse outside than inside the venue.
Drugs are a scourge and a fact of life. It’s common knowledge that a rave without drugs ain’t a rave. But this rave was no secret. Enough knew about it to attract 10,000 people to it. It took a day and a half to galvanise law and order into bringing it to a stop. Maybe police are slow on the uptake, up there in the middle of nowhere.
But I believe a feather in the cap has been earned by police services in Sint-Truiden. One can say that those who got nicked were unlucky. A hundred and nineteen out of 10,000 sounds like a numbers game: chances are you’ll not come to any grief. And no one did in the event come to much grief – a few needed a bit of outpatient care but this was no tragedy. The provincial Governor coordinated the break-up with tact and care.
The regional Minister of Justice was calling on him to switch the power off. Can you imagine being anywhere, a football match, a rock concert, a shopping street, even engaged in entirely lawful activity, in a crowd of 10,000, when someone pulls the switch? In any case, they’d brought their own generators. But that’s by far not the point. It took 12 hours to clear the area with the lights on. One can only imagine what might have developed with them off. And it ain’t nookie.
I commend the Governor for his handling of the matter. But the Minister of Justice needs a good talking to. Her approach is combative, belligerent, strong-arm: as if she has something to prove. If it’s to the rave-goers, she’ll not stop them, she’ll just put them in hospital. That’s not the purpose of Dame Justice. And, if it’s to her constituents, then they vote for her to lead a crusade against others in their society, while they stay safe at home and twitch net curtains for 36 hours, doing nothing. That’s an even more dangerous signal to society than is an illegal rave.
Illegal, unlawful, forbidden, proscribed, unauthorised, without a permit, unsupervised. They’re all words that mean the same thing. But they evoke different emotions. And some sell newspapers better than others, probably because they’re easier to spell.
For my part, I don’t quite get the fixed penalty notices for drugs possession. That’s no inroad against drugs: it’s a tax (it carries no rap sheet with it). If you’re serious about dealing with the drugs issue, tax isn’t the way to do it. That’s simply profiteering.
Meanwhile, 65 km up the road, at the Belgian town of Mol-Postel, 30 barrels of chemical waste have been discovered dumped in a wooded area, a skip and a jump from the Dutch border. They think they’re from a drugs laboratory. And suspicion is tending, again, towards the Dutch. It’s all Holland’s fault. Belgium is innocent of all charges.
Drugs lords. They behead their enemies (in Amsterdam) and throw grenades at customs officers’ homes (in Antwerp). They rule the roost (in Colombia, El Salvador and Mexico). But that’s not here. Not yet.
If you feel there is something that needs to be done, you can launch invective at drugs problems, and not solve them, even if it makes you feel important. You can launch SWAT teams against them and cause a flurry, an inconvenience. You can stamp them out, and get people hurt, maybe even your own, but at least you might raise some revenue. You can legalise them, but you need to know how (you could lose votes). One way or the other, you need to decide what to do. Because it won’t do itself.
Part of it is addressing a question that no one wants to answer: What impels otherwise perfectly law-abiding citizens, who will rail against practices at Amazon, Shell Oil and P&O Ferries, to purchase illegal substances from criminal gangs who wreak terror and sow fear, and thereby to sustain a market that, ultimately, finances guns, wars and political take-overs of whole nations? They know they do. And they still buy the stuff.
Break demand and you’ll break the drugs networks. Or legalise the market and take the revenue.