For 100 days, between March and June of this year, the world watched an event billed by the press as Belgium’s “Trial of the Century”.

After a delay of eight years, four of Europe’s most notorious criminals went on trial for the most reprehensible crimes - kidnapping, torturing and murdering children.

The focus of attention was a middle age Belgian electrician, Marc Dutroux. Dutroux readily admitted kidnapping and torturing several children. A jury found him guilty of murdering some of them.

But the trial was merely one aspect of Belgium’s long-running pedophile scandal. Dutroux has long admitted also kidnapping children for procurement to pedophile and prostitution rings that included some of Belgian’s leading social, business and political figures. One of Dutroux’s accomplices, Michel Nihoul, a businessman who funded electoral campaigns, bought children from Dutroux and procured them to prominent Belgians for their perverse entertainment. The public has known this for a long time. The media dwelled on the evidence for the past eight years. The pedophiles hoped that the trial would put an end to the matter. It has not.

Since Dutroux’s arrest in August 1996, many Belgians were implicated with him and Nihoul in the organized kidnapping, procurement, torture and murder of children. Prosecutors and judges were suspected of complicity in the dealings of Dutroux and Nihoul. Top politicians and government leaders were exposed as homosexuals and pedophiles. Policemen, including the country’s national police chief, were suspected of complicity and forced to resign. Several cabinet ministers also were forced to resign and eventually the government collapsed. Even the Belgian royal family, and the king in particular, were alleged to have been involved in the perverse murders of children procured by Dutroux and Nihoul.

It is believed that Dutroux and Nihoul were responsible for - or involved in - the disappearances and murders of 100 or more children throughout Europe and related business transactions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Their clientele pressured the police and prosecutors in Belgium to keep all but a few cases out of court.

Thus, Dutroux, his ex-wife, Nihoul and a French companion were tried only for the kidnapping and torture of six girls and the murder of four of them. (They were tried and convicted also on numerous other related charges.)

The six young girls were probably destined, after Dutroux tired of them, for procurement to Nihoul’s clientele, who would have murdered them in bloody group orgies of sex and torture.

Nihoul’s clientele pressured the police, prosecutors, judges and defense lawyers to whitewash the case - to present Dutroux and his three accomplices as a small gang of pedophiles who acted alone, without business motives or connections.

Indeed, top Belgian officials seem to have been protecting Dutroux and Nihoul all along. Dutroux was caught kidnapping children before - in the 1980s. But for crimes punishable by death in most countries, he spent only three years in jail. Officials responsible for Dutroux’s early release from jail were suspected of having inks to pedophile rings supplied by Dutroux and Nihoul.

This time, Dutroux was sentenced to life in prison. But he could be out on parole in ten years or less. He has yet to appeal. He can also expect help from the police and high government officials in escaping jail and the country.

Dutroux’s ex-wife got 30 years. The French companion got 25 to 30 years.

Nihoul was not tried for his most hideous crime, the procurement of children to pedophiles for torture and murder. The court was not presented evidence that tied Nihoul directly to the particular crimes Dutroux and the two other accomplices were tried for. Thus, one of the monsters of Belgium’s pedophile scandal got off with five to ten years for dealing in fraud and trafficking in drugs and people. Had Leopold, Loeb and Hauptman committed their crimes in Belgium - and procured their victims to prominent Belgian pedophiles - they would have gone free in half a dozen years or less!

The Asian Connection

The trial and the press focused mostly on just six victims of Dutroux and Nihoul - young girls from the south of Belgium.

Who were the other victims of Dutroux and Nihoul and what was their fate?

Following Dutroux’s third and last arrest, in August 1996, starving children were rescued from a dungeon in the basement of his house and dead children were unearthed from the garden.

Shortly afterward, there appeared a report in the Belgian press that the police in Dutroux’s hometown, Charleroi, had confiscated two videocassettes of ritualized tortures and murders of two-dozen young children. The police were to study the videocassettes in an attempt to identify the children and their killers. Whether Dutroux and Nihoul were tied to the cassettes, the murdered children or the killers has not been discussed in the media.

The tortured and butchered children on the videocassettes were Asians and Slavs. The Slavs were thought to have been Poles, sold by mothers who had become prostitutes in Western Europe.

The identities of the brutally murdered Asian children have not been publicly revealed. It was assumed that they were children from China or Southeast Asia, kidnapped off of European streets. Most Asians assumed that the children were Filipinos, sold by mothers who, like the Polish women, had become prostitutes in Western Europe in the mid-l990s.

There are women throughout Southeast Asia who abandoned their children, the issue of marriages to Asians, in Belgium and the Netherlands. Infidelity, boyfriends and prostitution interfered with parenthood. In many cases, the mothers met their second - European - husbands through prostitution in Asia and did not have the sense or knowledge necessary to ensure the safety of their children once they were abroad.

Some women, who did not procure or abandon their children outright, return to Europe years later to search for the children. Few are ever recovered. Children left in the care of acquaintances disappear, sometimes along with the acquaintances.

Policemen and school officials, especially in Belgium, are often uncooperative. Sometimes, they appear to have been complicit in the kidnapping and procurement of children for murder or prostitution. Pedophiles in the police and schools are protected by government and “non-governmental organizations”. Local foreign embassies also cover for them and try them to dissuade relatives from searching for the children.

The children could have been spared a horrifying ordeal if their mothers had left them at home with relatives before going abroad. It is not always possible for families, even in the most repressive police states or military dictatorships, to prevent irresponsible mothers from absconding with their children to neighboring countries. Crossing borders overland is easy. Some effort can be made to prevent the international traffic in children by air. But the fate of children in such precarious circumstances is often left to corrupt, lazy and ignorant petty civil servants assigned to welfare, immigration and foreign service jobs who are sometimes complicit in the international traffic in women and children.

Enlightening legislators and policemen and enacting and enforcing laws can save children from traffickers. But, ultimately one must appeal to the higher moral senses and values of the family, friends, neighbors and community. Such sense of morality and responsibility is lacking in Asia and traffickers and procurers exploit this weakness to the fullest extent.

Thus, kings, presidents, monks, priests and civic leaders at all levels must constantly remind children, parents, teachers, policemen, and government officials of their moral duties and responsibilities to their families and the community.

Belgium is a lamentable example of a European society devoid of good leaders. Unfortunately, only a handful of Asian leaders have expressed sincere concern for the fate of women and children in the hands of traffickers.

It remains for the press to dig out the horrible facts and expose the perpetrators of the massacre of Asian children on videocassettes held by the police in Charleroi and identify the children and their killers. It would be a positive step in protecting children at risk of such fate.

Jacques Smythe

Vientiane, Laos

jsmythe2003@hotmail.com