Saturday April 3, several hundred demonstrators defied hundreds of gendarmes and policemen, a helicopter, water-cannons, pepperspray and tear-gas enlisted by Interior Minister Van den Bossche (SP - Femish Socialist Party) and Brussels Mayor De Donnea (PRL - French-speaking Liberal Party). The demonstrators had responded to the appeal of the Anti-Imperialist League to protest against the NATO war in Yugoslavia and the fiftieth anniversary of NATO. After a press conference, a number of well-known personalities linked arms and stepped into the street to demonstrate. In the Holy Family Church, nearby the departure point, 80 demonstrators gathered to call for peace. About 200 others did the same in the Flemish University of Brussels.

The gendarmerie brutally applied the demonstration ban decreed by Brussels and Woluwe Saint-Lambert Mayors. The mayor of Brussels considers the Council of State ruling against the ban as nothing more than a scrap of paper. The most elementary democratic reflex would have forced him authorise the demonstration.

Ban on Assembly

Several well-known personalities were brutally arrested. Among them were the Flemish TV actors Dirk Tuypens and Kris Cuypens, the philosopher Marc Vandepitte, Michel Collon, author and journalist with the PTB (Workers’ Party of Belgium) weekly Solidaire, Pol De Vos, president of the Anti-Imperialist League and De Morgen journalist J.P.Bogaert. Although already on the ground Michel Collon was truncheoned on the head and between the legs. In the police van he was hit again, a total of 21 times, « out of sight of the cameras » as the policemen told him. He was taken to the local hospital, where doctors diagnosed concussion and several broken ribs. The journalist from De Morgen had his camera smashed by gendarmes, who also forced journalists to hand over their films.

More than a hundred demonstrators and passers-by leaving the Roodebeek metro station were brutally carted off, many by plain-clothes policemen who had hidden in nearby cafés and who used pepperspray. Several people were hurt. A bus from Liège was surrounded by gendarmes, who forced the doors and arrested all the passengers.

While NATO claims to be defending « democracy » by bombing the so-called dictator Milosevic, anyone raising his voice against war is confronted with a downright state of siege. There is more democracy in Belgrade than in Brussels at the present moment. NATO means not only death and destruction abroad, but also police violence and the end of democratic rights at home.

The Anti-Imperialist League demands the immediate release of all those arrested and the withdrawal of the assembly ban, declared illegal by the Council of State.
We have the right to oppose this criminal war and to demand the dismantling of the NATO aggression pact.
The Anti-Imperialist League will go on setting up anti-war committees without respite throughout Belgium.

Dr Pol De Vos, President, Anti-Imperialist League

Thérèse Michels, Anti-War Committees