From Weekend 1
couples, the anguish was written most deeply in Carine's face as she aged from an attractive young mother, burning with hope that her child was still alive, into an old woman with angry eyes.
In one of the most poignant moments, the interviewer asked her and her husband what came into their minds when they thought of Melissa. With her chin in the hand that held a cigarette, she just lowered her eyes into their puffy sockets. Gino Russo, Melissa's father, just looked away. Mercifully the programme editor decided not to let the camera linger.
Among the 12 people arrested since the investigation started is a senior police officer, suspected of being an accomplice in Dutroux's stolen car trade. There has so far been no evidence of police involvement in the paedophile ring.
However, throughout the investigation the Belgian police has emerged as a secretive force, operating under its own laws. There are even whispers of subversive activity and attempts to wreck the fragile political alliance between the Flemings and Walloons.
Professor Lode Van Outreve, an expert in the police system, believes part of the rivalry between separate police forces is a result of plans to reform the system. "The government has been threatening to reform the police force, but has not been clear about what it would do." So each arm is trying to prove that it should be the one to survive any reform.
Add to this rivalry and division of language between Dutch speaking Flanders police and French speaking Wallonia and you have a problem. Will Belgium struggle through this crisis? Professor Van Outreve believes it will, "but it will indeed be a struggle".
Opinion polls have shown an appalling lack of trust in those appointed to uphold the law. Recently, one of the members of the Dutroux commission, Sergei Moreaux, accused sections of the police of investigating the private lives of commission members in order to blackmail them. The Belgian press called Moreaux's allegations "a step closer to chaos".
The day before he made his statement documents were released on a series of shootings in the early 1980s by a group known as the Gang of Nivelles. The documents named 19 police officials, including one right wing activist now working for the security arm of the EU.
Nivelles, a town south of Brussels, was where the gang attacked supermarkets and restaurants, apparently at random. They escaped in high speed cars alter shooting bystanders. They were equipped with police issue anti terrorist weapons, supposedly stolen from a warehouse. The documents, obtained by lawyers for the victims families, seem, to show that the killings were a right wing plot to destabilise the government.
Then there was the recent testimony of Tinny Mast to the Dutroux commission. Her two children Kim and Ken disappeared in January 1994. The police treated her husband as the prime suspect, and brutally interrogated him, refusing to believe that the children had been kidnapped.
Kim was found dead two weeks later and Ken was never found. In a barely believable statement, Tinny told the commission that during the funeral of her 11 year old, daughter she heard the investigating police inspector saying that Kim was nothing but a little whore in a white coffin".
CLAIRE Meerseman has seen some positive effects of the scandal. As a psychologist working with a child abuse prevention centre in Charleroi, she has seen an increase in the number of cases being reported.
"Children now say `I want to talk about what happened to me'," she says. A third of the cases she deals with involve sexual abuse. "Some people only just discovered that paeodophilia and sexual abuse existed. We knew it because we work with it."
There is no Flemish word for "backlash", she says, but that is what has been happening, and it is not only directed at the authorities, but also at the gay community. The lines between homosexuality and paeodophilia are becoming blurred in some people's mind's.
"It is a period of fear and people have lost trust in justice," she says. Dutroux's neighbours were also the focus for a lot of the anger, with people asking why they hadn't noticed what was going on.
As a psychologist she was moved by the white march with its lack of politics. "It was just a human march. It was a new human movement, beyond politics."
According to one Dutch man living in Belgium for more than 17 years, such public demonstrations normally take months to organise. Negotiations are held on which politicians and which flags will lead the march. "There is no collective in Belgium," he says "but there was that day."
He talks scathingly about a culture steeped in corruption. They even have a word for the system of political favours that oils the wheels of everyday life: dienstbetoom. It was accepted for years, he says, that the only way to get a telephone line or even a pension was to know the right people.
"Even the local postman is nominated politically. If he doesn't have the right party card he won't get the job. But now there's a certain tension here. It's all become too much. It's too shattering for ordinary people to see how rotten the system is. The corruption scandals are to be expected, he says.
"Everyone in his desk or somewhere in his files has something on someone else." But the real explosion, of direct evidence linking those in power to Dutroux, has yet to happen.
The Dutroux affair has also revived memories of the Rosa Balleten (Pink Ballot), an elite sex ring from the early 1980s, so called because the prostitutes were given work permits (pink ballots) as exotic dancers. Top police, judges and politicians were rumoured to be involved. There were also suggestions of paeodophilia and reports that two children had been murdered. Some people believe the vice ring was used to blackmail powerful people. At least two people believed to be involved were killed in attacks by the Gang of Nivelles. No one was arrested and the affair slipped from view, until Dutroux and Nihoul appeared.
However, despite the conspiracy theories life goes on. There is no rioting in the streets. Police stations have not been burned down. All the suspects in the Dutroux case wear bullet proof vests as they are taken in and out of court. But there have been no snipers waiting in the crowds. Yet.
Green senator Eddy Boutmans says the public is waiting for the report by the commission of inquiry. If the separate inquiries into Di Rupo and Grafe are seen to be thorough, then, he believes people will accept their decisions.
On the question of whether the events will lead to a swing to the far right, Senator Boutmans believes there are several possibilities.
"We are unlikely to have an election before 1999, unless the government has to resign. The parties will do everything to avoid that and win time in what is a very tumultuous period."
If the public does get the opportunity to voice its disillusion with authority, then it could see a backlash against "traditional conservative parties who do not want to change the style of making politics", he says.
SENATOR Boutmans believes Belgium's problems are the result of 20 years of bad politics. "I call it the Belgian illness - politicians see themselves as lobbyists for private interests. The state works on behalf of interest groups, rather than in the public interest."
What is certain is that politicians' private lives will be fair game for a media that has traditionally turned a blind eye.
He believes Belgians will wait for the commission's findings, and while there is the problem of authority investigating itself, the commission is seen as doing good work.
"Everyone knows they will detect very fundamental flaws on behalf of the judiciary. But they're under terrible pressure to establish clear liability." The commission is expected to report in January.
"Its conclusion will not be easy and is politically very risky." If it names names then those in power could be toppled. If it doesn't then the public will cry conspiracy. "This is normally not the sort of country where enormous riots happen, but that possibility cannot be excluded. I hope it will transform Belgian society. The sickness of this country is very deep."
Claudia Friedrich works with the rent boys of Brussels streets' and railway stations. Her organisation, called the Mouvement de Nid, does not try to force them out of prostitution but will help them try if they want to.
"Most of the boys we work with started very young, around the age of eight or nine, not as part of paeodophile rings but in a more private way. One member of the family, a father or an uncle, might use the child for prostitution."
She said both men and women prostitutes were shocked by the Dutroux affair. "Many of the boys were shocked because it's their own story." Two of the male prostitutes she works with are themselves convicted paeodophiles, repeating their own pattern of abuse.
For a country that believed paeodophilia happened somewhere else, Dutroux has marked the end of complacency. "I don't know where that will lead," Claudia says. "For the moment people don't know where to turn to justice is corrupt, the police are corrupt. Everyone is corrupt. Belgians have a big problem. They don't believe anybody any more."