HE'S as Belgian as chocolate and lace but when you arrive at Brussels airport you won't see him any more. These days there are empty spaces on the airport walls where there used to be full colour photographs of the Manneken Pis Fountain.
Known as Brussels's "oldest citizen", the small naked bronze boy peeing into a pool is still a mecca for tourists. In the souvenir shops he is reproduced in everything from chocolate to sticky coloured lollies. But this innocent Belgian joke is suddenly not funny anymore.
According to an airport official, Prince Albert meets airport executives every two or three months to determine the best image of Belgium. She did not know if the scrapping of the Manneken had any connection to Belgium's recent troubles.
In the dark days since the end of summer, when investigators discovered five bodies and rescued two of the victims of Marc Dutroux, Belgians have become increasingly disturbed about their country and themselves.
At best the Dutroux affair has exposed a bungling police, judicial and political establishment whose incompetence led to the deaths of four girls. At worst Dutroux and his accomplices ran a highly profitable paeodophile ring thanks to some "friends in high places".
Around Dutroux's house in Sars la Buissiere the digging has stopped. Last August he led investigators to the bodies there of eight year old Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeune, and his accomplice Bernard Weinstein.
Dutroux had buried Weinstein alive after feeding him barbiturates punishment for letting Julie and Melissa starve to death while Dutroux was in prison. The grass is growing back over the clammy mud. And if you pick your way across, you can peer inside the house. A chess set and a green plastic baby bath have been left on the living room floor.
Dutroux and his second wife, Michelle Martin, had three children. She has been arrested as an accomplice and has claimed to police that she was too scared to feed the starving children in her basement.
The village is eerily silent. In the bar beside the house they have also removed a few Belgian images: the topless girlie postcards that used to hang behind the bar.
Today the digging goes on behind closed doors, in the dossiers and police files that charted Dutroux's criminal career. A government commission is looking at the investigation to see where it went so badly wrong.
Days before Dutroux showed them where the bodies were buried, two of his other victims, Sabine and Laetitia, were found alive but deeply traumatised by their abuse at the hands of his clients.
At the funeral of Julie and Melissa, the nation's grief reached its pinnacle when the parents of missing teenager An Marchal hugged Melissa's father. Dutroux had told police he had kidnapped An and her friend Eetje Lambrecks and sold them into prostitution abroad.
Eleven days later the bodies of An and Eefje were found under a shed behind Weinstein's house. Belgium went on an emotional rollercoaster and thousands grieved publicly at the funerals, homes and graveyards. Flowers, cards and toys turned the grisly Dutroux houses into shrines.
The frost has made mush of the flowers now. Outside the grubby redbrick house in Marcinelle, where Dutroux kept Julie and Melissa in a windowless dungeon, a hand drawn sign names the former justice minister: Melchior Wathelet.
"Thank you, Wathelet," it says, "from Julie and Melissa and all Belgians." Wathelet authorised the conditional release of Dutroux after only three years of a 13 year sentence for child kidnap and rape. Dutroux walked free from Mons prison in April 1992 despite a prison director's report that he had psychopathic and perverse tendencies.
His crimes are not crimes that the Belgian public will allow to remain unsolved, like so many others. While Dutroux has himself confessed, Belgium believes that others have blood on their hands. Since August they have learned about shady police operations and the involvement of at least one senior police officer in Dutroux's carstealing ring. The investigation into the assassination of former deputy prime minister Andre Cools has suddenly been reactivated. Old and new crimes have all been linked in the public mind.
This week a preliminary hearing of the High Court ruled that the deputy prime minister, Elio Di Rupo, has no case to answer on one set of charges of paedophilia and is now considering later charges. And regional minister Jean Pierre Grafe, also accused of paedophilia, has resigned, while maintaining his innocence. The High Court is considering the charges and whether to lift parliamentary immunity.
FOR most Belgians the Dutroux affair has exposed a dark side to their generally staid country. The bleakest view is that the authorities who should have been protecting the murdered children were actually protecting Dutroux.
Much of this speculation centres on his associate Michel Nihoul, a successful public relations figure who moved in powerful circles. In 1976 he was sentenced to eight months for fraud. He never served a day of the sentence, thanks, according to him, to the nod from a friend in a high place.
Politicians have responded to the public hysteria by promising legal reform. The country's 31 prisons are bursting, due to an immediate ban on all early and conditional releases. The authorities are terrified of releasing another possible Dutroux into the community.
Prison officers recently went on a 24 hour strike, warning of potential riots if nothing was done to ease the overcrowding.
The Dutroux affair has also led to an avalanche of corruption scandals involving politicians. One minister is accused of VAT fraud, another of awarding a public contract to a favoured firm. If the High Court finds that either Di Rupo or Grafe has a case to answer, the question of lifting parliamentary privilege and prosecution arises.
Public opinion appears to have swung back in favour of the two men - to Di Rupo, in particular, who is seen as a very able politician. And the press has from the start questioned the bona fides of the man making the allegations against them.
As one commentator said, however, in the current climate any allegation of paeodophilia must be seen to be taken seriously. In October public anger spilled onto the streets when a court ruled that the investigating judge, Mr Jean Marc Connerotte, should be removed from the case. The 48 year old high profile judge had attended a fund raiser organised by a charity for missing children. Sabine and Laetitia were also at the dinner and Connerotte accepted a Biro, a plate of spaghetti and a bunch of flowers.
Dutroux's lawyer said he had been compromised by the gifts and a court agreed. Connerotte was not a case judge in the Irish sense. Under the Belgian legal system he led the prosecution investigation and would have had no role in judging Dutroux and his accomplices innocent or guilty.
Now car stickers showing plates of spaghetti are displayed beside the faces of Julie and Melissa. On October 20th more than 300,000 people swamped the stern streets of Brussels carrying white balloons, in a demonstration called the white march, behind the parents of the dead children.
In the public mind Connerotte and his prosecutor Michel Bourlet had become the white knights who saved Sabine and Laetitia and might together discover the truth about the dirty world of Dutroux. Connerotte's removal was seen as another example of the gulf between real justice and the justice system.
In 1992 the same judge had been removed from an investigation into the murder of Andre Cools, the 63 year old former deputy prime minister who ruled his Liege suburb Sicilian style as mayor. He was shot outside his mistress's apartment in 1991.
Connerotte's line of investigation was that Cools had been killed because of what he knew about a share laundering operation with links to the New York mafia. After the investigation was stopped, the case went quiet. Then last September an anonymous person, called Witness X, started feeding information to the Liege investigating judge, Veronique Ancia.
Since then Cools's socialist colleague and former regional minister Alain Van der Biest, his private secretary Richard Taxquet, and his former chauffeur Pino Di Mauro have been arrested. Taxquet had become a police officer and Di Mauro was working as a prison officer. All three had been implicated in Connerotte's investigation.
The conspiracy theorists believe Connerotte was stopped because he was too close to the truth and that criminals around Dutroux are somehow connected to the Cools assassination.
However, another theory is that the new information on Cools came from a secret investigation carried out by Belgian gendarmes. On the day of the autopsy on the bodies of Julie and Melissa, a Liege judge discovered the existence of Operation Othello.
This investigation into Dutroux was set up by the Charleroi gendarmerie on August 25th 1995, two months after Julie and Melissa's disappearance. For the gendarmes Dutroux was a prime suspect in the case. He was put under surveillance, his houses were searched and a dossier was opened.
None of the information gathered in this investigation was shared with the civil police. Had both arms of the law co operated, it is possible the girls would have been found alive.
Some believe that Witness X in the Cools affair could be a gendarme who is spilling the beans in order to avoid the embarrassment of a second secret operation being uncovered.
In a recent three hour special on Belgian television, the Dutroux story was told. A hand held camera re created what he must have seen as the doors of Mons prison swung open nine years before his sentence was due to finish.
In a sinister Dutroux eye view, the camera swung around to catch passersby and children. In studio, Melissa's mother, Carine Russo, said the only thing she felt guilty about was that she had trusted the authorities to find her daughter. If she had been allowed to investigate herself then Melissa might still have been alive, she said.
The programme replayed footage of the parents frequent television appearances during the 14 months their daughters were missing. Of the two
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