Voice for a missing child

THE nightmare began on August 5th, 1992. "The memory of that day is burned into my memory in the most minute detail," Nabela Benaissa would write.

"The streets are empty. It is holiday time. A morning like any other. My recollection starts with the road to the Aldi supermarket, with my little sister Loubna skipping along she was always skipping. As we approached Aldi she asked me my age." Loubna, nine and tall for her age, said "I'll soon be as tall as you."

But Loubna did not live to out grow her sister. When they got home, the girls found they had forgotten the yogurt and Loubna ran back to the supermarket it was the last time her family saw her alive.

Loubna's body was found more than four years later, in March this year, in a rusting case weighed down by engine parts in the basement of a garage they passed every day. She had been kidnapped, abused, and then murdered. Patrick Derochette, a repeat sexual offender, has been charged with this crime. Derochette had previously been well known to the police the same police who virtually ignored the Benaissa family's pleas for help in finding their daughter, and who utterly mismanaged an eventual investigation into Loubna's disappearance.

By the time the child's body was found, the whole of Belgium knew the names of the two sisters. Nabela Benaissa, now 18 and, like many immigrant children, more fluent than her parents with the language of the only country she knows, had been speaking for her family in their grief and anger.

Her head covered in the traditional veil she adopted two years ago as an assertion of her Muslim identity, demure and extraordinarily self-possessed for one so young, she had become a familiar, much admired sight on the huge white marches and on TV virtually every night.

She was a voice of reason, single handedly calming a mutinous crowd ready to storm the Brussels Palais de Justice after the highest court in the land had confirmed the sacking of the one judge they trusted. And yet she is still a school student, currently refusing interviews because of her final exams, "stunned at my own audacity", she says.

Nab eta Benaissa has now produced a best selling book on her experience, in The Name Of My Sister with the help of journalist Marie Paule Eskenazi.

It is a fascinating and moving perspective not just on what the families of Belgium's disappeared children have gone through but, overlaying that, on the experience of an immigrant family whose trauma was made worse by the institutionalised racism that compounded the indifference of the authorities.

"Loubna, you have allowed me to discover a community which I feared," one of the mothers of the disappeared told the 20,000 strong gathering at Brussels's main mosque, before the child's body was flown to Morocco for burial because there was no room left in Belgium's Muslim graveyards.

And Nabela too, although she refuses to be seen as a spokeswoman for the Moroccan community, has become an enormously important, positive symbol of that community, breaking enduring stereotypes. She is an intelligent, articulate, beautiful, modern young woman who is proud of her religion and sees Islam as a liberating force for women who sees herself as Belgian and Bruxelloise and Moroccan who wears a veil but preaches moderation and has a teenager's sense of humour.

Sabah Gahouchi, who works for Inter culture, a group promoting integration, compares the effect of the suffering of the Benaissa family to that of the country's worst mining accident, in Marcinelle in 1956, which put the spotlight on the country's large Italian working class community.

Then, 262 died, many of them Italian. "Suddenly, Belgians realised how much immigrants had contributed to their country foreign or not, they were part of Belgium," she says.

Nine per cent of the 10 million strong population of this country is immigrant, the two largest groups being 140,000 Moroccans and 210,600 Italians.

The Benaissa family lives in the rundown Ixelles quarter which has a large immigrant population. Nabela is the eldest of eight children, five boys and three girls, Their father, Lahsser, who she adores, came to Belgium to rejoin the family in 1975. In 1992, only months before Loubna was kidnapped, he found work, cleaning in the rail yards at night.

From the start, it seemed, the police were barely interested in Loubna's disappearance. Her desperate father was forced to join a queue at the local police station as if, the parliamentary commission of inquiry would observe later, "to report a stolen wallet". It would be four days before serious police inquiries began and then only in the most half hearted way.

As a new investigating team was to find in October 1996 the trail of the investigation was littered with clues disregarded by all the many services ostensibly involved the evidence of a neighbour of the Derochette garage that she had heard a child's cries at the time of the disappearance the police's awareness of Derochette's record of child assault their failure even to check his alibi (the judicial police file on Derochette was never opened between 1990 and 1996). Perhaps the most galling mistake given the later discovers of Loubna's body 200 cards from home, was their fail ore to use dogs. The dog handlers were on holiday. Nabela Benaissa was to complain bitterly to the inquiry that it "was advisable not to be kidnapped during the holidays".

And the police ignored as unreliable the claim of a school friend of Loubna's that she had seen her friend, days after the disappearance, in the back of a car whose number plate she gave to the police. In the event, only one number of the plate would be found to be wrong.

POLICE laziness and inertia were compounded by rivalry between services, the discarding of forensic evidence, and the four separate magistrates who went off on their holidays without briefing their successors.

The Ixelles police, moreover, repeatedly advised the family not to get their own lawyer.

The committee of inquiry noted that the investigating magistrates' file on the disappearance, a paltry 100 pages, gave clear evidence of inaction. Indeed, the inquiry was officially closed in 1994 without Loubna's parents being informed, but in any case the file was opened only three times in 1993 and 1994.

If would only be in 1996, after the quite separate horrendous discoveries of the victims of Marc Dotroux, that the case would be reopened. By then, the family's plight had become widely known and the file was transferred to the care of a different force. Investigators went back over the neglected clues and quickly came to the conclusion that Derochette was their man.

Shock that a solution should be so easily found turned to rage when members of the family discovered the complacent way in which the judicial system had treated this man's previous serious offences.

In 1984, after he had raped an 11 year old boy and tried to beat him to death with a steel bar, Derochette was described by a psychologist in court as a psycho path with "perverse psychosexual tendencies . . . incapable of controlling his impulses". Despite having already been given two prior sentences for similar offences, that court sent Derochette to jail for just six weeks and then pronounced him "cured"

Day in, day out, Nabela Benaissa was to watch as the story of the original investigation was extracted almost painfully slowly by the committee of inquiry. She cites the dictum that the world is a dangerous place not because of those who do evil but because of those who look on and let things happen.

"That's exactly how I feel the guilt attaches to those who did nothing," she writes. "I had the impression of listening to mediocre students who have learnt their lessons by heart and have come to repeat it by rote."

Even today, no one takes responsibility. No one apologises. "It's always someone else's fault."

What was most horrifying, Nabila says, "was to imagine that, to find her alive, all that was needed was that each had taken seriously their responsibilities where they were.

She plays down the issue of racism although it is undoubtedly there. Hers has been a happy up bringing without the abuse on the streets that many young Moroccan men face. But she is bitter about the teacher from her school who, not once but twice, suggested she "admit it, you sent her (Loubna) back to Morocco to get married".

And she has complete contempt for the far right paper which complained when she was named Bruxelloise of the Year, attacking her nomination as inappropriate because of her veil.

"Who am I? An immigrant? I don't like this image. Stop looking at me in this way. I am a Bruxelloise. I am Belgian. Yet my identity card has me described as `Moroccan'. I feel Belgian. I was born here and know nowhere else even if I have Moroccan roots, parents and grandparents. I would like to have double nationality. I am a cultural half caste.

The veil, which she adopted at 16 to the surprise of her parents, is important to her one chapter in In The Name Of My Sister is entitled "My Veil, My Freedom". She argues from the Koran that the veil is not compulsory but an expression of the mutual solidarity of women. With her body covered, it is a woman's character that comes through, not her physical attributes.

AND what of the future? One senses a desire to close a chapter on her life but it will not be to retreat into herself. "I need to find an inner balance, to be at peace with myself. But I want to do something with my life, to be engaged absolutely in a struggle. It could be the defence of whales, or politics, or the fight for the integration of immigrants. I don't know yet, but I will do it with all my heart and ability."