They came with grand plans to rattle the seat of the European Union, angry about COVID restrictions. But the “European freedom convoy” arrived in Brussels Monday scattered and confused, with occasional bark, yet little bite.

For the moment, the convoy had run low on gas.

On the main roads into Brussels, police diverted vans, campers, buses and cars to a sanctioned protest area — a 10,000-spot parking lot barely within the city limits. The scene was still and sparse, a far cry from the paralyzed bridges and police clashes that have metastasized across the globe in recent weeks as a trucker protest in Canada spread through the U.S., Australia and Europe.

Within the city, protesters on foot popped up in several places as conflicting messages swirled around social media over where to head. At the original protest spot, the Parc du Cinquantenaire just east of the EU institutions, fewer than 100 people had assembled by midday, chatting in small clusters. Elsewhere, helmeted police in riot gear occasionally outnumbered the protesters. In total, the police said, “several hundred demonstrators” showed up.

Still, there were the occasional flare-ups. Some tear gas was deployed in areas where protesters were blocked, and police said they made about 30 arrests for disturbing the peace or for carrying a prohibited weapon. Rumors also circulated late in the day of possible Brussels gatherings on Tuesday, with some people pledging to take advantage of a planned police strike that has since been delayed.

But for the most part, the initial push was more of a nudge. Shortly after 4 p.m., the police lifted the traffic controls around the Belgian capital. Around the same time within the capital, people started dispersing. One protester was overheard suggesting a drink at one of the sidewalk terraces clustered around Place du Luxembourg, nestled in the heart of the EU district.

Taken together, it amounted to a low-key next chapter in the ongoing “freedom convoy” saga. The protests, which started in opposition to specific COVID restrictions, have since become a worldwide rallying cry for anti-vaccination groups, as well as more extremist organizations like white supremacists and far-right political parties.

After swarming Paris over the weekend, the European convoy set its sights on Brussels — a symbolic target as the EU has encouraged and coordinated some of the more omnipresent COVID structures now integrated into everything from travel to eating out.

By midday, however, it appeared the group was fragmenting as it rolled toward Brussels.

Some factions claimed they were heading instead to Strasbourg, the joint home of the European Parliament in France, to meet with sympathetic lawmakers. Others tossed around conflicting directions on social media, suggesting various places to head to within Brussels — Place du Luxembourg, in the heart of the EU, was one, Place Sainte-Catherine was another. At times, confusion seemed to prevail. Warnings of misinformation circulated.

At the authorized protest site on the city’s outskirts (formally “Parking C”), a few dozen vehicles started arriving first thing Monday morning. By the day’s end, the Brussels-Capital and Ixelles police said 130 vehicles had been counted, “mainly motorhomes, vans and cars from France and the Netherlands.”

One van came with “FREEDOM” written in all-caps in red tape across the back.

Another bus turned up with “STOP COVID PASS” emblazoned on its side, right next to the palm tree logo of BCS Tours.

One parked car had a small trailer behind it flying two high-visibility vests, the symbol of France’s Yellow Jacket protest movement. “Luttez pour vos libertés,” read a sign on the back — “fight for your freedom.”

Crystal, who didn’t give her last name, said she had driven more than 1,300 kilometers from the French Basque country to get to Brussels.

“I’ve come here against the vaccine pass, against the compulsory vaccine and everything that goes along with it,” she said. “For purchasing power, too, because everything is increasing: They’ve used that to make prices soar. And for our freedom, so that we’re all equal … and united.”

After arriving at a parking lot in Waterloo, just outside Brussels, Crystal said police in unmarked vehicles had intercepted her group and escorted the vehicles to the authorized location. The police, she added, took photos of the vehicles’ license plates.

Crystal didn’t put a timetable on the demonstration.

“We’ll see,” she said. “We also have jobs. But as long as it takes for us to be heard, at least. Until now, what is shown on French and Belgian television is all doctored, it is cut, it is edited. We never hear the real voice of the people.”

Targeting the EU
The convoy targeting the heart of the EU comes in response to decisions made by the 27-country bloc to try to create a coordinated response to the pandemic, such as introducing a Continent-wide digital COVID pass that displays an individual’s vaccination status. The so-called COVID certificate has become necessary in many countries to fly and board trains, not to mention eat in restaurants and attend larger events.

Brussels, said Marie Line, another rally-goer, is “symbolic of Europe. Personally, I chose to follow the movement of the freedom convoy because it was the first visible movement I found against the vaccine pass itself, and I wanted to follow and it brought us to Brussels.”

Indeed, the vaccine pass was the focus of a number of the scattered protests across the capital.

“On n’en veut pas du pass sanitaire!” people chanted in Place Sainte-Catherine: “We don’t want the vaccine pass!”

Brussels authorities last week had tried to get out ahead of the protesters, preemptively banning Monday’s demonstration after seeing the activists ensnarl other cities. Law enforcement also prohibited some vehicles from entering the city until Tuesday, according to local media reports.

But on social media and encrypted messaging services — where the majority of the planning for February 14’s convoy has taken place — online supporters urged people to ignore the official warnings to stay away from Brussels. Instead, they called on people to take to the streets to voice their anger about alleged government overreach via coronavirus restrictions like nationwide lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

After the crowds didn’t manifest, some protesters wondered out loud whether the contradictory messaging was part of a “psychological war” to divide the group. They held out hope that more people would join in the coming days, perhaps from the Netherlands. Most of the protesters in Brussels Monday appeared to be French speakers, with many of them coming from France, not Belgium.

In group chats, some convoy members banked on a possible police strike slated for Tuesday making it easier for them to coalesce. But the police union said Monday there would be no strike the following day, and that it would reassess its plans on Thursday.

Even if the Brussels rally doesn’t grow, the protests still represent the latest in an increasingly sophisticated pushback against the EU’s COVID-19 policies. It has galvanized a mixture of existing anti-vaccine groups, far-right politicians, more extremist movements and those who have become radicalized amid roughly two years of the ongoing pandemic.

The Brussels demonstration follows similar efforts in European national capitals, as well as across North America. Those protests were initially started by truckers protesting local vaccine mandates, but have expanded to include a similar mix of political groups angry at what they believe is the government illegally clamping down on people’s freedoms in response to the COVID-19 public health crisis.

Hanne Cokelaere and Ashleigh Furlong contributed reporting.

Source: https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-protest-freedom-convoy-brussels/

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“What am I looking for? I am looking for a life,” said Khater, 31, who fled the violence-ravaged Sudanese region of Darfur a year ago. Specifically, he is looking for a chance to reach Britain. He has been for months.

Sudanese migrants like Khater are increasingly visible in Brussels, around train stations, in public squares and parks, sometimes sleeping in the streets. Mehdi Kassou, an organizer for a volunteer group that provides shelter for about 500 migrants each night, estimates that about 45 percent of them are Sudanese.

Their presence reflects the latest phase in a migration crisis that has disrupted politics in one European country after another. It also leaves the center-right government of Belgium, which is set to hold elections next year, struggling to reconcile its legal and humanitarian obligations with its “tough but fair” rhetoric on migration, and a determination to avoid large-scale migrant camps in the capital.

Very few of the Sudanese people who have recently arrived in Brussels seem to be planning to stay: Sudan was not among the top 10 countries of origin for those applying for asylum in Belgium last month. Many, like Khater, hope to reach Britain, which is Sudan’s former colonial power and has a sizable Sudanese population.

And some are former residents of the “Jungle,” the camp near Calais, France’s main ferry port for travel to Britain, that became a symbol of the global migration crisis in 2015, home to migrants from the Middle East, Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

When the French government closed the camp in October 2016, evacuating thousands and offering to resettle them around the country, many made their way to Brussels, another international transit hub. Over the summer, tents and makeshift shelters appeared in Maximilian Park. Migrants who might once have headed for Calais continue to arrive in the city, hoping to journey onward.

Khater certainly does not want to stay in Belgium. “I am afraid here,” he said, “because I don’t have an education, I don’t have money, I don’t speak French.”

Most important, he added, “Belgium doesn’t understand the politics of Sudan; if I ask asylum here, Belgium may send me back to Italy immediately, or worse, even to Khartoum.”

European Union law requires migrants to apply for residency or asylum in the first country in the bloc they reach. In the past three years, tens of thousands of Sudanese have crossed the Mediterranean by boat, landing in Italy, Greece or Spain. Most applied for asylum, and only a few hundred have been deported, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Many Sudanese, however, seek to move on, in secret and without papers, to Britain. Often that involves camping for months near bus stops, truck stops, train stations or seaports.

So what do countries owe such transitory migrants? Belgium’s state secretary for asylum policy and migration, Theo Francken, has argued that the state cannot take responsibility for those who do not claim asylum.

His reasoning is that if Belgium allows a few hundred migrants to reside illegally on its territory, it could attract millions of others, potentially plundering Belgium’s generous social security system.

Seeing unauthorized migration rise in Brussels last summer, the Belgian government ordered a series of heavy-handed raids on informal camps and homeless shelters. Those raids — along with falling temperatures — have largely succeeded in breaking up camps in public parks and received wide popular support.

Even so, hundreds of Belgian families have reacted by inviting migrants into their homes. (Last month, the government proposed police raids on the houses of citizens suspected of sheltering unauthorized migrants.) Medical charities are providing food, clothes and assistance, and volunteers have set up shelters like the one where Khater sleeps, in a former office building. The total cost of sheltering one migrant is about 10 euros per night, organizers estimate.

There have been several demonstrations against the government policies, and about 3,000 people formed a human chain around migrants at the Gare du Nord last month to prevent a police raid.

The crackdown has also exposed Belgium to the possibility of rebuke on human rights grounds.

In September, the government invited Sudanese officials to help identify and expel people in the country illegally who did not want to apply for asylum. Ten Sudanese were subsequently sent to Khartoum, and accounts quickly surfaced that at least three had been abused upon their return.

The Belgian government ordered an investigation of the allegations. It concluded earlier this month that Brussels had not done enough to assess the risks faced by those deported, and it warned that migrants who had not applied for asylum still had the right to be protected from torture.

The report said it was impossible to establish whether the abuses had taken place.

At the Gare du Nord, Khater and several fellow travelers showed wounds and scars that they said had been inflicted by the Belgian police. One had a dislocated thumb, another a fresh cut across his jaw, yet another a stitched eyebrow. Several had open wounds. All said they knew Sudanese men who had recently been deported to Khartoum and then dropped out of contact.

“Why aren’t the police kind to us?” Khater asked. “I am running for my life. I did do nothing wrong. I don’t understand the politics here.”

Kassou, the shelter organizer, agreed that “certain officers in certain towns, not all police” could be “pretty violent with migrants.” “We very regularly have people who enter with wounds, even bites from police dogs,” he said.

Sarah Frederickx, a spokeswoman for the Belgian police, said that officers treated transitory migrants in “a very empathic and humane way.” That being said, she added, “it is possible that during certain operations, for instance when people fiercely resist police actions, officers use force, but in proportion.”

Many aspects of what is happening are familiar, according to Johan Leman, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the Catholic University of Leuven who is an expert on Belgian migration policy and has worked with migrants in Brussels for decades. “Irregular migration from Africa to Europe isn’t new,” he said. Tough return policies have existed in Europe since the 1980s, and the continent experienced a refugee crisis in the 1990s after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

“What is new,” he said, “and what I have never seen before in Europe to this extent, is, first of all, that ministers are pounding their chests, saying, ‘Look at me, how many people I have deported now.’ And secondly, that people are being deported back to a country of which we manifestly know that the government is violating human rights — I am thinking of Sudan here.”

Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for trial on charges of war crimes and genocide.

When police officers arrested several Sudanese migrants, including three minors, around the Gare du Nord last year, Francken, the state secretary for asylum policy, described the operation on Facebook as a “cleanup.” After a public outcry condemning the remark as xenophobic, he offered his apologies to the prime minister, who did not accept them.

Source: http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/national/how-the-eus-migrant-crisis-reached-the-streets-of-brussels-20180218

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The poll, published by the newspaper Bild, shows that 32% of the Free State of Bavaria wants to get away from the central power of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her European Union allies.

The Chairman of the Bayernpartei (Party of Bavaria) told RT UK that the state should be allowed to make its own decision independently from Berlin.

“We believe that Bavaria should be together and should decide its own economic situation, its own democratic situation, its own cultural situation.”

Weber explained that Bavaria doesn’t have the influence it deserves considering its size and the number of inhabitants.

“Now we are ruled by Berlin or Brussels. These people decide over the people of Bavaria and we have no influence in the so-called European Parliament. We have only 13 members for Bavaria. Greece, which has fewer inhabitants, has about 25.”

According to 2015 estimates, nearly 13 million people live in Bavaria compared to the 11 million who live in the whole of Greece.

Also speaking to RT UK, map maker Michael Hofman said: “Bavaria is a brand. And to me is a better brand compared than Germany. It tastes better, it smells better.”

Bavaria is well-known internationally thanks to the annual Oktoberfest held in Munich.

In January 2017 the German Supreme Court clamped down attempts to organise a “Bayexit” referendum, claiming that in Germany single states are not “masters of the Constitution.”

“Therefore there is no room under the constitution for individual states to attempt to secede. This violates the constitutional order.”

The Bayernpartei said the matter would not be settled by a court but by “the will of the Bavarians.”

Source: http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/837811/Merkel-Germany-Brussels-rule-Bavaria-exit-from-European-Union-Brexit-video

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