Brief and unaided escape has left Belgium reeling

On Thursday afternoon, the popular children's Belgian TV programme Bla Bla was interrupted to announce that the convicted paedophile Marc Dutroux had escaped. Within minutes, calls started to come in on national child help lines from terrified children. The nightmare was beginning again.

This was the man who was facing further charges of abducting and torturing children, imprisoning them in cellars and leaving them to die slowly of starvation.

On television and on radio, doctors warned of the need to explain to children what it meant, of the need to calm their fears by listening and talking; of the need to express anger.

Dr Jean Yves Hayez, a child psychiatrist at the university hospital of Saint Luc, spoke of his fear of the re-emergence of multiple cases of post-traumatic stress disorder among children. Many more would not sleep easy. "The first reflex of children will be to be desperately afraid," he warned. "An enormous fear because this man was portrayed as the complete incarnation of the most evil things that can befall children. In the child's mind, the wolf or the ogre has come out of the woods."

For adults, the escape, for just over three hours, was no less shocking, although less fear-inducing. "After everything else . . .," they say, pausing to shake bewildered heads and then to express a deep sense of national shame, a sentiment reflected editorially by the press yesterday.

The conspiracy theories abound, but the circumstances of the escape point to an individual act of opportunism on Dutroux's part. With outside help he would certainly have been able to get further, yet if it was easy for him to escape unaided, people are asking, how much easier if there had been outside help?

Parents and lawyers of the murdered children reflect the bitter weariness of people who want to say "we told you so".

For nearly two years they have warned that despite a parliamentary committee of inquiry which produced damning evidence of bureaucratic complacency and official internecine conflict, nothing was changing. No one answered for their inertia, the guilty were promoted.

The shock to the political system is profound. Marc Verwilg hen, the respected chairman of the parliamentary commission and member of the Liberal opposition, put it bluntly: "Has the government got enough moral authority to run the country?"

He said the centre-left coalition of Mr Jean-Luc Dehaene had no option now but to quit. "After this debacle, it is the only thing he can do." Opposition parties have tab led three separate motions of no confidence in the coalition. Parliament will vote on them on Tuesday.

The reality, however, is that the majority parties appear determined to soldier on. Their prospects in an immediate election are likely to be grim with strong gains, particularly in Flanders, predicted for the far-right Vlaams Blok. They argue that they have a job to do to complete the unfinished - some would say unstarted - reform process.

The scale of the government's panic is reflected, however, in the fact that within three hours of the escape two cabinet heads rolled - the first members of the administration, political or bureaucratic, to pay a price for the shambles of the paedophile investigations.

Fourteen months from the next scheduled legislative elections, the resignations may yet be sufficient to save the government's bacon, although they pose immediate problems for Mr Dehaene.

Because the linguistic balance of the cabinet has been altered by the departure of two Flemish ministers, the cabinet can no longer legally meet until they are replaced.

Indeed to observers, this linguistic dimension to the crisis serves to remind us that Belgian politics has been dominated in recent months, not by the serious business of implementing the recommendations of the Dutroux commission by reforming the deeply discredited gendarmeries and arms of the judicial apparatus, but by intercommunal bickering.

The most bitter of these rows has been about whether Francophone residents of Flemish-dominated communes on the outskirts of Brussels should be entitled to receive correspondence from the communes in French.

Now the nomination of the successor to the minister for justice appears likely to be complicated by the fact that a likely candidate has recently called for the regionalisation of the justice system.

Meanwhile, the picture that has emerged of Dutroux himself is of a complex, intelligent and manipulative figure, capable of seductive charm, which by all accounts he deploys regularly whether to jailers, investigators or lawyers.

A panel of psychiatrists appointed by the prosecuting authorities in their report last month found he was far from mad and not a paedophile - several of his alleged victims were young women. The panel described him as a perverted psychopath with strong sadistic tendencies who was at the time of his alleged crimes completely responsible for his actions.

Born in 1956 in the Brussels suburb of Ixelles, he had a deeply disturbed childhood during which the abuse he received from his authoritarian, highly-strung father he passed on in liberal measure to the younger members of his family.

Reports suggest that his father particularly mistreated him because he was uncertain about Marc's paternity, but the whole household was dominated by fear and the children were expected to show unquestioning obedience and even to play in silence.

His brother Henri committed suicide, a fact Dutroux attributes to an alleged incestuous affair with their mother.

She vehemently denies the claim and has completely repudiated him in repeated attacks through the media. "He always played by his own rules. No one else ever counted for him," she has said of his self-obsession.

Expelled from several schools for ill-discipline, Dutroux left the education system at 16 to work variously but usually briefly in a number of factories. He became involved in a relationship with an older man, claiming later that it was only for cash, and then took to petty crime, car thefts and burglary.

A first marriage produced two children but ended after repeated abuse. His second, to Michele Martin, was to be with the woman who repeatedly colluded in rape and abduction and allowed two children to starve to death in the cellar of one of their homes while he was in jail.

In 1989, Dutroux was sentenced to 13 years for the rapes of five girls in 1985 and the abduction and torture of a woman of 58. On April 6th, 1992, the then Minister for Justice, Mr Melchior Wathe let, used his discretion to order his early release.

Mr Wathelet has recently been confirmed by the Belgian government for his second term in the European Court of Justice.

As for Dutroux, why should he not believe, in the face of the apparent indifference of the state to the enormity of his crimes, in his complete impunity?

Abductions, rapes and torture now led to death. The story of the deaths of Julie, Melissa, An and Eefje, of the discoveries of Laetitia and Sabine alive, of the bungling competing police services, has since been told many times - testimony to the downward spiral of a monster, to the system which allowed him so much rope and to the old adage that for tyranny to prosper it only requires good men to do nothing.

On Thursday, for the first time in two years, someone accepted responsibility and paid a price for that indifference. Two ministers, by all accounts talented and diligent men, sent a signal to Belgian society that the wringing of hands is not enough.

Belgium, perhaps, has crossed a Rubicon.