Article proposé par Jeanne Cordelier le 26 Juin, 1997 ©
Sous prétexte de manque d'espace l'article a été refusé par Libération, Le Monde et La Croix. Puisqu'ici l'espace le permet, voici l'article. Il est suivi d'un article de Rachel Johnson, Financial Times, 2000.
À propos de suicides, sur lesquels il serait déplacé de s'émouvoir.
Il y a le sperme chaud et puis celui froid de l'écran. Il y a le sexe glabre que l'on force, celui qu'on mange des yeux et bien sûr ce n'est pas pareil. On ne doit pas mettre un amateur de chair fraîche par écran interposé dans le même sac que Dutroux. Ils n'ont rien en commun si ce n'est les jeunes corps dont ils font leur pâture. Jeunes corps souvent venus d'ailleurs, d'un lointain où quotidien rime avec calamité, école avec vice, puisqu'elle a la rue pour théâtre. En ces temps où le travail ne se trouve pas sous le sabot d'un cheval, s'il y en a qui ne risque pas de chômer, ce sont bien les pourvoyeurs d'enfants une denrée semble-t-il devenue comme les autres, et sur laquelle peut-être bientôt on verra tamponner la date limite de consommation. Affligeant! Cela dit, je regrette que les prévenus interpellés dans le cadre de l'opération "Ado 71" soient pour la plupart issus de la communauté homosexuelle, parmi laquelle je compte des amis à travers le monde. Il m'aurait plu, puisque le temps de faire la lessive est venu, qu'on la fasse aussi en famille, chez ceux
Monsieur Toutlemonde. Mais qu'il soit d'un bord ou de l'autre, de la jaquette ou pas, à celui qui touche à l'enfant, des yeux ou du reste, je tends la corde, ou le stylet, il n'aura qu'à choisir.
Jeanne Cordelier
OFF CENTRE: Everyone wishes this case would go away: EXCUSE MY FRENCH: The Dutroux paedophilia scandal has received little attention in the Belgium press. Rachel Johnson explains why
Financial Times ; 09-Sep-2000 12:00:00 am ; 795 words By RACHEL JOHNSON
When I first arrived in Belgium, I quickly learnt not to mention two subjects. If I did, I could be guaranteed to receive a little moueand a short lecture about how it rains in England, too, no? And how there are many paedophiles in the UK also, yes? So, despite the fact that it tipped down for the first six months of my stay, I was made to feel it was not done to refer to the deluge, much as it is assumed that a guest in a draughty stately home will never complain about the plumbing. In fact, since we survived that baptism of precipitation, I have decided that the Belgians are right. The weather over here is better than it is in the UK, if you count - as I have learnt to do - any day it doesn't actually rain a lot as a lovely day. The veil, though, that is drawn over the paedophilia scandal that broke in 1996, when Marc Dutroux was arrested for the kidnapping, imprisonment and murder of children, is a much more impenetrable one. I could understand why no one mentioned the weather. But I couldn't understand why, in a country where 300,000 people took to the streets in the White Marches of 1996, where two government ministers resigned following the temporary escape of Dutroux from police custody in 1998, and - above all - where Dutroux still had not been tried for offences dating back to 1995, the story seemed to have died. This spring, a Belgian MEP, Olivier Dupuis of the Radical party, tried to rally journalists to report on the "serious miscarriages and delays" that had marked the progress of the inquiry into the Dutroux charges and the evidence of organised paedophile rings in Europe. He sent a fat dossier to all members of the foreign press. This included the testimony of two officers, Aime Billeand Patriek de Baets, who between them had 67 years of loyal service to the Gendarmerie under their belts. After the two officers had interviewed a witness called XI, they were removed from the case. XI had testified, on no fewer than 17 occasions, that she had been inducted into a circle of orgies at which she had seen young children tortured and murdered. All this was documented in a recent book, Les dossiers X, subtitled "What Belgium Must Not Know about the Dutroux Affair". It has been a national bestseller. But only one Belgian newspaper, to my knowledge, has given this book the time of day, even though Barry James, of the International Herald Tribune, wrote on its publication that its thesis - that there has been an outrageous cover-up by the authorities over the scope of the scandal - stood up to scrutiny. When I went to see Dupuis in his parliamentary office on the seventh floor of the Caprice des Dieux, the glass and marble folly that is the Brussels HQ, he was updating the Radical party website - to which I would direct anyone who is baffled by the failure of the Belgian authorities to reach "closure" on any aspect of the paedophilia scandals. It's at www.radicalparty.org. I asked him first how many of Brussels' 8,000 foreign press had responded to his dossier. "Someone in Italy, someone in Croatia, and Barry James at the Tribune," he answered. "But so far as I know there haven't been any articles." Rather than name and shame the journalists who - starting with myself - have neglected to cover this appalling story, I will try to explain why. The Belgian press has, with rare exceptions, been instrumental in suggesting that the entire paedophile problem lies with Marc Dutroux. And as Dutroux is in jail . . . what more is there to say? A retired prosecutor, Judge Guy Poncelet, has given an interview saying that disturbing evidence linking Dutroux with industrialists and past and serving politicians and even more important VIPs has been suppressed. Given the lack of information about the actual crime - we know that girls were kidnapped and girls' bodies were found - the story has become fixed on the judicial process, police mishandling, and so on, which is all difficult to explain, says ex-policeman Alan Hope, who is researching a book on Dutroux. Not only is the story getting on for five years old, but it is one everyone wishes would go away. The francophone newspapers have mostly decided to throw in the towel on the Dutroux case (evidence, some say, of the "revisionist" current now gripping Belgium, intended to restore confidence in the state after a chain of crimes including random supermarket shootings and the murder of Socialist leader Andre Cools). So there are no Belgian news stories for the foreign press to feed off and everyone is reluctant to use newer sources such as The X Files book or the Dupuis mailshot, which make claims far too libellous to repeat in a country where you can still go to prison for insulting the royal family. So when and if Dutroux is tried next year, don't hold your breath. The ground has been prepared for the trial of an ordinary, common-or-garden sex offender, a loner, miserable childhood, you name it - but not the lynchpin of a VIP paedophile ring. Exactly the sort of paedophile, as Belgians will no doubt point out after a British summer marked by outrage over Sarah Payne's murder and the subsequent paedophile witch-hunt, that you get in England.
Copyright © The Financial Times Limited