Belgium: Thunderflash in Brussels

Though Europe moves ever closer to unity, divisive forces still crackle and hiss close to its surface. Last week 100,000 French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemings fought a violent battle in the very heart of Brussels, capital of the Common Market.

Bilingual Lumps. Roughly the size of Maryland and not much more populous than New York City. Belgium nonetheless has been more like two nations than one since Dutch rule ended and independence was achieved in 1830. In the north are the farm lands of Flanders, inhabited by a conservative, Catholic people with deep roots in Holland; in the south the spiritedly liberal, anticlerical Walloons occupy what once was the seat of France’s Carolingian monarchy. Richer and better educated, the Walloons for a century dominated the country; so seared with bitterness were the Flemings at their second-rate position that many openly collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

The Flemings now have the numerical edge—5,250,000 to 4,000,000—a majority in Parliament, a Flemish Prime Minister and, thanks to a postwar inflow of U.S. firms to capitalize on Flanders’ cheap, ample labor, a glossy sheen of wellbeing. Wallonia, meanwhile, is practically a depressed area, dotted with played-out coal mines and plagued with rising unemployment. But the Flemings still see all sorts of injustices, complain, for instance, that they have only 13 of Belgium’s 83 diplomatic jobs abroad. While Brussels is officially bilingual from its street signs down to its liquor labels, French is preferred by the majority. One Fleming complained to Sabena Airlines not long ago because its sugar lumps were labeled sucre, but not suiker too.

Dead Chicks. To protest such inequities, demonstrators from Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges massed in Brussels. Marching ten abreast down the Avenue du Midi, some of them toting banners with the absurd slogan “Flemish Doctors for Flemish Patients,” they ran smack into phalanxes of waiting Walloons, and the riot was on. When one Flemish tough tossed a “thunderflash”—a beer can filled with gunpowder—into the crowd, 4,000 steel-helmeted riot police who had been poised just off the boulevard wheeled into action.

Before the riot ended, 20 were injured and 45 arrested. Streets were littered with thousands of dead baby chicks. They were a grisly Flemish taunt at the Walloons, whose symbol is a rooster. Said one journalist: “Nowadays we’re supposed to get along with the French, we’re supposed to love the Germans, and of course we are expected to embrace the British. All this unity is a strain. Every now and then, you have to let off steam with a little old-fashioned tribal enmity.”