If you haven’t heard the story, see the clip at the end of this post. I warn you that it’s not for the faint-hearted. In a word, two gangs savagely beat one after the other a Bulgarian student at a Brussels metro station. In the end, the second one consisting of African immigrants, throw his body at the tracks from 10 m. height. He is saved by random bystanders and miraculously survives. All this took place on New Years Day, but for some reason, the police released the case and the video tapes to the public only 3 days ago.

The boy’s name is Lyuben, a law student in Haag and comes from Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria.

This is a truly tragic story and I really hope that the gangs will be caught. I wish however to point out the comments under one of the uploaded reports in YouTube. Similar opinions can be found in many forums and posts on the topic.

It is clear that those comments are coming out of anger, but they also show another serious issue – we readily accuse anyone and anything foreign for our own problems. This doesn’t hold true only for Bulgaria, but for the whole EU, because many of the comments I found were not by Bulgarians. Yes, the black gang has really beaten an innocent man to death and this problem exist all over Europe. It is also true however that it’s not just black gangs.

Something I forgot to tell you about my trip to Brussels for the TH!NK1 opening event a year ago, is that I had a quite close encounter with a Bulgarian gang. I was on my way back from an official dinner, it was late and I got lost on my way to the hotel. In an alley I passed by several men, who were considering in Bulgarian whether it’s worth it to rob me. They didn’t.

It’s a fact that in all big cities there is such crime and if it’s not a gang of immigrants, it would consist of local boys. Nowadays it’s hard to say what a „pure“ German, Bulgarian or British is. This is also true for Belgium. That’s why it’s easy to assign ethnicity to crime – „it was a Belgian, but of African decent“, „it was a German, but of Turkish heritage“, etc. When in Germany they unveiled a terrorist plot near the city I’m studying in, the Germans were mostly shocked by the fact that one of the men was a pure Arrian, who accepted Islam. If they all were Moroccan, it would have been much easier to set a psychological border and point fingers. If that gang weren’t African, they would be Moroccan. If not them – then someone else or us – Bulgarians. What is the difference – crime is crime, violence is violence. What does ethnicity have to do with anything? Except prejudice that is.