[lomeanor]

Met een paar delen van het artikel is het precies verkeerd gegaan, dus ik post het hier nog eens.

The Sunday Times - World

The Sunday Times February 19, 2006

Cupid's wicked arrow splits Belgium
Matthew Campbell
HE IS a senior conservative politician, she a young Socialist MP, but
it is not only a political clash of allegiances that has turned the
love affair between Hendrik Daems and Sophie Pécriaux into such a big
scandal in Belgium.

Nor was it the announcement by Daems, 46, that he is divorcing the
mother of his five-year-old daughter and having a child by Pécriaux,
38. Their greater crime — strange as it may seem in 21st-century
Europe — was loving across a cultural divide between Flemings and
Walloons. Daems paid for it last week with his job.

The separation of these two regions — Dutch-speaking Flanders in the
north and French-speaking Wallonia — has been quietly proceeding
towards divorce, and the outcry over the affair appeared to suggest
that Belgium may be flirting with Balkanisation.

"I wasn't expecting such a beating," said Daems, who resigned as
president of his parliamentary grouping after accusations that he was
"sleeping with the enemy".

A fervent Fleming separatist, Daems was known for mocking Walloons as
"lazy southerners" and supporters were bewildered to see him fall
under the spell of one of them. No less surprising was Pécriaux's
infatuation with Daems. "Cupid at his most perverse" was how one
commentator summed up the coupling.

"We are living a true love story and the child who will be born from
our union is a common project," said Pécriaux, a hitherto little known
MP, talking like a true politician. "He is a man, I am a woman, he is
Belgian, me too. Isn't it normal?" The answer, in fact, is no.

If more people followed the example of Daems and Pécriaux there would
not be a problem, but only 1% of marriages in this country of mussels
and chips are between Flemings and Walloons. They have been bickering
with each other ever since Belgium split off from the Netherlands in
1830.

Language has been a key issue but battle has also ranged from money —
Flanders is a lot richer than Wallonia — to who can justly claim
stilt-walking as their cultural tradition. Both do.

Civil war was narrowly averted almost half a century ago but the two
groups have continued to lead ever more separate lives as years of
negotiations have given increasing autonomy to the 6m Flemings and
3.4m Walloons.

Today they might as well be different countries, with the mainly
French-speaking Brussels lying in between. They have their own flags
and their own parliaments, political parties and radio and television
stations.

In Flanders, public libraries must ensure that three-quarters of their
books are in Dutch or risk losing their funding. To qualify for public
housing, applicants must be able to speak Dutch.

Besides stilt-walking, Walloons and Flemings still have King Albert in
common. The army, social security and railway systems are also
national affairs. In other respects the divorce is so far reaching
that some political analysts have wondered how long Belgium, which
celebrated its 175th anniversary in a subdued manner last year, can
endure.

The Belgian national parliament is one of the few places where
Flemings and Walloons meet, even if their exchanges are not always
friendly. It was here that romance blossomed between Daems, a Liberal
party MP — although the party is more conservative than liberal — and
Pécriaux, a Socialist.

Daems, a former telecommunications minister, need not have worried
about offending Belgian mores by impregnating a woman other than his
wife: nobody in Belgium seems to care much about children being born
out of wedlock.

"Daems is a separatist who is militating for the total autonomy of
Flanders, but his behaviour is exactly the opposite of what he says,"
complained Marc Lits, professor of journalism at the Catholic
university of Louvain in Wallonia.

Le Soir, a Francophone newspaper, revealed the affair under the
headline "Idyll in parliament" and there was more than a touch of
schadenfreude in its coverage of Daems's resignation. "He likes to
caricature us Walloons as lazy unemployed people," said Béatrice
Delvaux, Le Soir's editor-in-chief, referring to Wallonia's
unemployment rate of 18.5%, more than double that of Flanders.

Not everybody was unhappy, however. The couple have received numerous
congratulatory e-mails. "This is the solution to all our
inter-communal feuding," said one. Perhaps they should start a new
party.