Belgium’s foreign minister accuses coalition of ‘blackmail’ for blocking 13 Gaza students

Belgian foreign minister Maxime Prévot’s furious reaction to being blocked from evacuating 13 Gaza students might indicate he will continue to fight to get them out. Prévot briefed press in Brussels after two other parties in the ruling coalition, the rightwing N-VA and MR, had made offensive demands, he said. These included bartering Gaza evacuations for his party’s “concessions … regarding deportations [of asylum seekers] to Afghanistan and return hubs,” said Prévot, from the centrist LE party, according to the Belga news agency. Afghanistan is ruled by the dangerous Taliban regime, while return hubs are a new EU plan to send failed asylum seekers to holding centres in Africa. “Faced with this situation, where issues were being held hostage at the expense of people’s suffering, I chose to withdraw my proposal. Dignity is not for sale,” Prévot said. “I’ve never refused to discuss the issue of return hubs, but not under conditions of blackmail [on the 13 students],” he added. The 48-year-old Prévot is normally a mild-mannered compromise maker, who has never before attacked his coalition partners in such a strident way, meaning that the Gaza students' case could still blow up into a Belgian political crisis. "He's never before made declarations that could endanger the coalition. His words give an image of a coalition that cannot resolve an important conflict ... It's not a good image for the cohesion of the federal government," said Dave Sinardet, a politics professor at the VUB university in Brussels, on Friday. Prévot had agreed to disagree with the N-VA on the non-recognition of Palestinian statehood without making a fuss, for instance, said Sinardet. Meanwhile, several senior MPs from Prévot's LE, the centrist CD&V, and the leftwing Vooruit parties in the coalition had previously emailed the Gaza students, with earnest messages of support, seen by EUobserver, which also put their reputation on the line. Prévot "was under pressure from inside his own camp" to lash out, Sinardet said. The foreign minister said on Friday he was not optimistic of finding a solution for the 13 students, given the depth of division. But "given the strength of his declaration, I think it's reasonable to expect that he won't give up on the Gaza evacuations so easily. If he'd wanted to say 'OK. I did my best, but it's not my fault', then he wouldn't have spoken out in such harsh words," said the professor. Prévot's full proposal had been to take in the 13 students, gradually resume humanitarian evacuations from Gaza, and pay for care of sick Gaza children in Jordan in a third step. But the N-VA's immigration minister, Anneleen Van Bossuyt, and prime minister, Bart De Wever, rejected all that.