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Man hits Brussels woman with car for wearing a headscarf

18:13 16/06/2021

A young Muslim woman filed a complaint with police in Brussels after being dismissed, she said, by the police in Ninove following a disturbing incident. Late last week, the 19-year-old was verbally harassed by a man, who then went on to hit her with his car because he was upset that she was wearing a headscarf.

Nisrine works in a department store in the town in East Flanders, about 20 kilometres east of Brussels, straight down the Chaussée de Ninove. She was in the parking area, she told Le Soir, when a man in a car rolled down his window and yelled obscenities at her, telling her to take off the headscarf and go back to her own country.

She ignored the man, which made him more angry, and he proceeded to spit in her face. She got up and walked away, and he followed her, knocking her down with his car. Her arm and leg are bruised from the incident.

She went to the police in Ninove the following morning with her father. According to Nisrine, they did not want to take her statement, insisting that she needed a medical certificate. “They also told me that we had to come back with someone who spoke Dutch because my father was speaking French,” she said. “But I was answering all their questions Dutch.”

The pair gave up and reported the incident to police in Laeken, where the woman lives. The police filed a complaint citing racism and attempted murder, and the Brussels prosecutor turned it over to the prosecutor in East Flanders.

A ‘misunderstanding,’ says mayor

Several Brussels politicians responded to the article in Le Soir, shocked that such an incident was not taken seriously by local police. “When certain kinds of speech are trivialised, this is what we get,” said MP Ridouane Chahid (PS). “Certain people’s words and attitude incite others to commit these kinds of offences.”

Ninove is well known as a stronghold of extreme-right party Vlaams Belang. The party won the last local election in the town of 39,000, but – like at all levels of government in Flanders and Brussels – it does not make up the ruling coalition.

The mayor of Ninove told VRT that the situation was a “misunderstanding”. The police in Ninove, said Tania De Jonge (Open VLD), operate by appointments. “The young woman and her father were told to make an appointment for another time,” she said, “and were advised to get a medical statement with regard to her injuries.”

De Jonge admits that the incident was too serious, however, for a report to be postponed to another time. “The assessment of the incident was handled incorrectly,” she said. “Any form of physical violence must be responded to immediately. Regardless of whether physical violence is perpetrated, racism must be taken seriously. In this case, the facts of the case were serious enough to warrant a report to be filed immediately.”

Photo ©Nicolas Maeterlinck/BELGA

 

Written by Lisa Bradshaw

Comments

Rietveld

This is common behaviour in Belgian traffic. A cyclist, I regularly get driven into and accosted, just for being part of traffic while not sitting in a car. I have been driven into at full homicidal speed, showered with expletives and often badly wounded. This is part of the Belgian hospitality culture, the country prides itself for. The answer is that the lady, was not accosted because of her head scarf, but because she was not fulfilling the expectations of national stereotype. If she would have sitting in a hooting car nothing would have happened to her.

Jun 21, 2021 22:04