2023-12-23 14:44:21
The army has just closed its Ypres barracks – real name district 1ste wachtmeester (first petty officer) Lemahieu – parts of which will be taken over by the War Heritage Institute (WHI, the Defense parastatal dedicated to the conservation of historic heritage -military and in memory), and others sold, however in the meantime becoming a temporary asylum center of Fedasil, announced Defense.
This neighborhood, condemned since 2015 as part of the “Strategic vision” for defense at the time, housed the Competence Center for Support Equipment and Products (CCMP), a sub-unit of the Directorate General of Material Resources (DG-MR) created in 2011, it definitively closed its doors on Friday, Defense said on its website.
The CCMP standard, inherited from the defunct 20th ordinance battalion created in the 1950s within the Belgian Forces in Germany (FBA) in Lüdenscheid (west of the FRG) and which was the last logistics battalion of the FBA, was handed over on the 18th December at the Royal Army Museum (MRA, one of the components of the WHI).
The site was responsible for tasks such as storage, distribution of clothing and transport of equipment for Defense. Some of them were relocated to other sites, others outsourced or even stopped in “the framework of a gradual extinction scenario“, further indicates the Defense.
According to the ministry, parts of the district will be taken over by the War Heritage Institute (WHI), which will inherit seven large warehouses and intends to install its collection of military vehicles currently kept in Brasschaat, north of Antwerp.
Before being sold, the remainder will be entrusted to Fedasil to set up a temporary asylum center, in collaboration with the Red Cross. “At its peak, 650 people were employed in the Ypres barracks. In 2019, there were only 130 left“, indicated the “patron” you CCMP, le Major Ben Van Hecke.
“We managed to transfer around fifty staff members to a unit of their choice“, he added. According to the mayor of Ypres, Emmily Talpe (Open Vld), the city, with a long military past, has “ambitious plans to transform the site into a zone for small and medium-sized businesses and a residential area. As this is a long-term project, the asylum center will have temporary occupancy in accordance with agreements with the Secretary of State” to Asylum and Migration, Nicole de Moor (CD&V), she added.
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