BRUSSELS — A month before the Paris terrorist attacks, Mayor Francoise Schepmans of Molenbeek, a Brussels district long notorious as a haven for jihadists, received a list with the names and addresses of more than 80 people suspected as Islamic militants living in her area.

The list, based on information from Belgium’s security apparatus, included two brothers who would take part in the bloodshed in France on Nov 13, as well as the man suspected of being the architect of the terrorist plot, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Molenbeek resident who had left for Syria to fight for the Islamic State in early 2014.

“What was I supposed to do about them? It is not my job to track possible terrorists,” said Ms Schepmans in an interview. That, she added, “is the responsibility of the federal police”.

The federal police service, for its part, reports to Interior Minister Jan Jambon, a Flemish nationalist who has doubts about whether Belgium — divided among French, Dutch and German speakers — should even exist as a single state.

As Brussels remained locked down this week, the failure to stop two brothers clearly flagged as extremists highlighted the tribal squabbles of a country that holds the unenviable distinction of going without a functioning government for 541 days.

Flemish nationalists, ever eager to show that Belgium in its current form does not work, have jumped on the mess, with Mr Karl Vanlouwe, a member of the Belgian Senate, writing in the newspaper Le Soir on Tuesday that “20 years of laxity” by the French-speaking Socialist Party had turned Brussels into a “rear base of Islamic barbarity”.

The perennial dysfunctions of a small country with just 11.2 million people would not normally transcend its borders, but they are now blamed for having helped turn Belgium into a hub of terrorist activity that is threatening lives, as well as Europe’s troubled enterprise of integration and intelligence sharing.

Belgium has a government, unlike the long stretch of limbo after inconclusive elections in 2010. But with its capital paralysed and its political elite pointing fingers over who is to blame for letting jihadists go unchecked, the country is again being ridiculed as the world’s most prosperous failed state.

An Italian newspaper called it “Belgistan”, and a German one declared Belgium “kaput”.

Belgians, accustomed to being derided, have, in the main, not risen to the bait. But Belgians, too, are wondering what went wrong.

A POLITICAL MAZE

With three uneasily joined populations, Belgium has a dizzying plethora of institutions and political parties divided along linguistic, ideological or simply opportunistic lines, which are being blamed for the country’s seeming inability to get a handle on its terrorist threat.

It was hardly difficult to find the two Molenbeek brothers before they helped kill 130 people in Paris: They lived less than 100m from the borough’s city hall, in a subsidised apartment clearly visible from the Mayor’s second-floor corner office. A third brother worked for Ms Schepmans’ borough administration.

Much more difficult, however, was negotiating the labyrinthine pathways that connect — and also divide — a multitude of bodies responsible for security in Brussels, a capital city with six local police forces and a federal police service.

Brussels has three Parliaments, 19 borough assemblies and the headquarters of two intelligence services — one military, one civilian — as well as a terrorism threat assessment unit whose chief, exhausted and demoralised by internecine turf battles, resigned in July but is still at his desk.

Lost in the muddle were the two brothers, Ibrahim Abdeslam, who detonated a suicide vest in Paris, and Salah, who is the target of an extensive manhunt that has left the police flailing as they raid homes across the country, so far without result.

To the system’s rising chorus of critics, the scale of the lockdown itself is a reflection of diffuse incoordination. Of 16 people detained in a huge sweep last Sunday evening, 15 were promptly released. No explosives or guns were found — a blow to efforts to avoid what the federal government asserts is a “serious and imminent” threat of an attack.

The author of a book on the Belgian security system, Mr Lars Bove, said cooperation between different layers of government and security services was improving, but information sharing remained a problem, particularly between federal and local authorities.

Responsibilities, he said, “tend to overlap”, with only fuzzy rules for who is supposed to do what.

Ms Muriel Targnion, Mayor of the eastern town of Verviers, where the federal police stormed a terrorist safe house in January, said she had been told by security services in Brussels that her town had 34 suspected jihadists. But that was all she was allowed to know. “All I was given was a number,” she said. “No names, no addresses. Nothing.”

HISTORY OF RIVALRIES

Information sharing does not come easy in a country with fierce rivalries between groups that, in some cases, cannot talk to each other, at least not in a common language.

On top of language, said a former political magazine editor, Sus van Elzen, “it is in our genes to reject all centralising power” and, on all sides of the linguistic divide, to mistrust outsiders.

Belgium’s history, he added, is a “very unhappy story” of constant retreat from intruding forces that have sought to impose a centralised order.

Today, centralised order hardly seems the problem, except when it comes to tracking terrorists. Even if intelligence professionals all speak Belgium’s two main languages, they are still divided into feuding fiefs.

Veteran intelligence officer Luc Verheyden, who helped set up the Coordinating Unit for Threat Analysis (OCAD) in 2006, resigned four years later, citing his frustration over the refusal of the police and other security services to cooperate.

“The creation of OCAD was not appreciated by certain services because it forced them to share information,” he told the Belgian news media when he quit.

OCAD’s chief, Andre Vandoren, resigned in July after political sniping and complaints from a secretive parliamentary committee that he had trespassed on to intelligence gathering turf that belonged to Surete de l’Etat, Belgium’s more established intelligence service.

“Everything in Belgium is politicised; you cannot have an administrative function, particularly a senior one, if you don’t have a political affiliation,” said Mr Claude Moniquet, a former French intelligence officer.

LANGUAGE DIVISIONS

Language divisions might not prevent intelligence experts from communicating, but they shape the political environment in which the experts operate and decide who fills the ministerial positions that set their priorities.

Mr Jambon has infuriated many French-speaking Belgians with what they see as insinuation that they alone are to blame for the growth of Islamic militancy in Belgium.

“The link that has again been established between terrorism and our country forces us to look into the mirror,” said Mr Jambon, two days after the Paris attacks. The reflection he saw, however, was heavily filtered by the lens of Belgium’s tribal politics.

“The question I ask myself is: Why did we succeed to eradicate radicalism in Antwerp and other Flemish cities, and why doesn’t it work in Brussels?” he said, contrasting his Dutch-speaking region of Flanders with Belgium’s mostly French-speaking capital.

Antwerp, the largest city in Flanders, has cracked down on Islamic extremists. This year, the city was the site of Belgium’s biggest terrorism trial, with more than 40 defendants accused of travelling to fight in Syria or of encouraging others to do so.

But the trial was held in Antwerp only because that was where its principal defendant, Fouad Belkacem, and the now-banned organisation he led, Sharia4Belgium, a well-known jihadi recruiter, had operated for years.

From there, Belkacem reached out to French-speaking areas, notably Molenbeek, where in 2012 he organised a rally outside a police station to protest the arrest of a woman wearing an Islamic head covering.

Before the trial, when he was sentenced to 12 years for supporting terrorism, Belkacem was “very active here”, Ms Schepmans said, and he set alarm bells ringing about the dangers of extremism.

The federal authorities were so worried that they offered to help Molenbeek with money to set up a unit to combat radicalisation. But the money offered was paltry — 60,000 euros (S$89,000). The borough found funding from its own budget and the radicalisation unit now has four employees. Only one speaks Arabic.

Molenbeek’s police force knows the neighbourhood and its residents, but the Mayor said that it “has neither the means nor the powers” to keep tabs on Islamic militant suspects.

Mr Arthur van Amerongen, a Dutch writer who lived in Molenbeek a decade ago while doing research for a book on Islamic extremism, said it had been obvious for years that militants were making inroads there, but “nobody wanted to know because this did not fit their political agenda”.

Neither local authorities nor the central government showed interest, said Mr van Amerongen, noting that his book was greeted with accusations of racism and bias against French-speaking Molenbeek.

Intelligence services, too, have struggled with the same political calculations and constraints.

While long derided for its often chaotic and fractious ways, Belgium is if anything “over-organised”, with so many overlapping bodies and agencies that nobody is ever really in charge, said Belgian political commentator Hubert van Humbeeck.

“It works more or less normally, but when something so unpredictable like terrorism happens, all the institutions collide. This is the Belgium disease. Everyone always says it is not their fault, and they are often right.”