Antwerp mayor Bart De Wever (N-VA) is trying to write history with his ‘war on drugs’ in the streets of his city. But actually he uses old-fashioned remedies that have long proven to be ineffective. It is urgently time for new insights.
“Sooner or later someone dies in Antwerp by mistake. As long as it concerns violence between criminals, many people say: let them shoot each other. But when an innocent victim falls, the world comes to a standstill.” Mayor Bart De Wever made this prediction in mid-December in an interview with There. Last Monday at half past six she came out. An eleven-year-old girl accidentally fell victim to the battle between the Antwerp drug cartels. “I am furious,” said De Wever following the death of the child. “Scrape all the people together at the police. Send in the army if necessary. This has to stop.”
With that call, De Wever is right and wrong. He is right when he upholds the principle that the war on drugs is a war you cannot win, but you must fight. As mayor you cannot accept that your city is the playground of crime clans. You can’t dismiss the fact that there were 45 attacks in the drug world in the past six months or tolerate that the port is a hotspot for SOS (not the nickname for socialists in this case, but for cocaine).
But the mayor of Antwerp is also wrong. It makes no sense to secure the harbor with tanks or to have three paratroopers on every street corner full battle dress to put.
Even his own Antwerp police does not believe in such a show of force. The agents already have the ultimate showpieces – the Bearcats – but they usually stay aside. After all, they do not appear to be super handy to use in a manhunt or shooting on the slates.
Why then does De Wever call for the National Security Council to meet and for the army to stand by? Because he may be distraught. De Wever does not start his war on drugs when he gets the key to the Clean Floor of the Antwerp city hall. He starts his personal war earlier, early 2012, at the New Year’s reception of the Antwerp N-VA. There he says: ”Due to the lack of an actual deportation of criminal illegal immigrants and impunity, the police are mopping up here with the tap open. I advocate a war on drugs.” A few months later, a walk through the Korte Zavelstraat in the Seefhoek follows, where the local traders are fed up with the drug violence. It is the starting shot of De Wever’s electoral campaign.
In those days, the N-VA member positioned himself as the antipode of ‘softie’ Patrick Janssens (sp.a). He is the man of law and order who will sweep the streets clean and put the drug criminals in jail. The Wevers campaign strategy pays off: he wins that year with 38 percent of the vote, Janssens gets 29 percent. The city is his.
own impotence
Once he is mayor, the fight once morest drug dealers and the nuisance caused by drug trafficking will become one of the priorities of his policy. With a lot of repression and controls he tries to expel drug dealers from the quartiers chauds of Antwerp. The local police have arrested more than seven thousand drug dealers in recent years and crime rates are falling year following year. Those figures are also the reason why De Wever likes to call his drug policy a success. At the same time, they are only a small part of the story.
Because during his ten-year war, violence increases hand over hand in the Antwerp streets and more and more drugs enter the port of Antwerp. Last year, 110 tons of coke were seized, which is twenty times as much as in 2013. This increase can be explained by the success of the Sky ECC investigation, but also by a greater supply of drugs from South America.
De Wever almost begged the federal government for help last week. He almost begged for more people from the federal judicial police and for further implementation of the Stroomplan XXL. In the same breath he warned of more deaths.
After all, he realizes that – despite all local and federal efforts – he cannot get a grip on the global drug trade, which penetrates every corner of his city. He faces his own impotence. And he also knows that time is ticking more and more mercilessly for him. The final balance of his war on drugs will define his legacy as mayor. He brought that on himself.
During another walk through the Seefhoek in 2024, how will he explain that he has not been able to fully realize his most important (and more than a decade old) campaign promise? Will he then dare to admit that he has grossly underestimated the layeredness and elusiveness of the problem?
As chairman of N-VA, he cannot keep pushing the debt upwards either. De Wever has been leading the country’s largest party for ten years. He was allowed to choose the last two Flemish Prime Ministers. Between 2014 and 2018, N-VA was also in the federal government and, together with Jan Jambon, supplied the Minister of the Interior.
Total fiasco
Perhaps De Wever should consult the sources for his war on drugs once more. Because he doesn’t write history with his war. He repeats them and copies them. The war on drugs started not ten years ago in the streets of Antwerp. She started in the 1970s on the streets of New York, Chicago and other American cities. It was President Richard Nixon who first used the term ‘war on drugs’ in 1971 in a speech in the US Congress. He then proclaimed drug abuse “the number one public enemy”.
Nixon also started that war, just like De Wever, incidentally, to rebel once morest the left. The newspapers in the US were then full of reports regarding Vietnam veterans who came back from Saigon swallowing and spitting and would cause (even more) political unrest (The Washington Post talked regarding ‘GI’s deep into Drugs’ and Newsweek over ‘A New GI for Pot and Peace’).
Since then, an estimated $1 trillion went to that war in the United States, millions of petty dealers went to jail for years, and tens of thousands of addicts died. In South America, countries like Mexico and Colombia turned into narco-states – just think of the recent arrest of Ovidio Guzmán, the son of drug kingpin El Chapo, who killed 29 people.
More and more experts agree that the war on drugs has turned into a total fiasco. (For a clear summary of fifty years of war history: check out The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail by Jay Z.) In fact, that realization was already commonplace when De Wever started his war on drugs in 2012, there in the Korte Zavelstraat.
If he really wants to win the fight once morest drugs in his city, he will no longer just stick to the well-known recipes from the twentieth century, but also take into account the latest insights in drug policy.
Repression is impossible without prevention, Dutch professor Pieter Tops, for example, rightly points out elsewhere in the paper. Research by Ghent University shows that at least 62 percent of the resources of the drug policy in our country go to repression, only 34 percent to assistance and a meager 3 percent to prevention. However, even Nixon, the first leader of ‘the war on drugs’, already knew in 1971 that prevention is also important. He pointed out, in that famous speech where he first talked regarding the drug war in the US, but that part of his message was completely lost.
If De Wever were to plead for that ‘soft’ approach, he would really write history with it. And it might bring more peace and tranquility to the streets of Antwerp than just more robocops, armored vehicles and tanks.
