Archive for category Belgium

An infantile Belgian burka ban

Posted by Bruno Waterfield in Ban nothing, Belgium, Civil liberties on April 29, 2010

Belgium has become the first country in Europe to ban the Islamic burka.

Is this the real threat to Belgium? (Photo: superblinkymac)

MPs voted for the ban despite being unable and unwilling to get to grips with a real problem: the latest Flemish-Walloon crisis over the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde electoral boundaries.

It is clearly easier to play childish games with civil liberties over a fictitious “national security” issue – the alleged danger posed by the few dozen cranky Muslims who wear the full veil – than it is to address the real problems facing the nation.

The outbreak of infantilism was universal. In rare display of unity, out of 136 Flemish and Walloon MPs in the chamber, not a single one of them voted against. There were two abstentions.

An earlier attempt to debate a solution to the latest Belgian crisis was not possible after cowardly French-speaking MPs ducked out of discussion by sounding a procedural “alarm bell” blocking debate they described as a Flemish “aggression”.

This is a warped sense of priorities to say the least, more evidence (if any were needed) that the Belgian political class is completely out of touch with reality.

The ban will be imposed in streets, public gardens and sports grounds or buildings “meant for public use or to provide services”.

Those who ignore the ban could face fines of 25 euros and a jail sentence of up to seven days unless they have written police permission to wear the garments.

Most analysts agree that the wearing of the full veil is a “marginal phenomenon” among the 400,000 or so Muslims living in Belgium.

Human Rights Watch research found that in 2009, a tiny number of 29 women were stopped by police in the eight Brussels municipalities that already banned the full Muslim veil.

The ban is based on an invented problem. It is also illiberal.

Amid the generally moronic debate surrounding the issue, Isabelle Praile, part of the Muslim Executive of Belgium, made a good point.

“Today it’s the full-face veil, tomorrow the veil, the day after it will be Sikh turbans and then perhaps it will be mini-skirts,” she said.

The burka does not pose a threat to Western civilisation, nor does Islam.

Nor did jazz, rock and roll, mini-skirts, the bikini or punk outfits – all trends or forms of clothing that have, in the past, got the “something must be done” banning brigade hot under the collar.

Guy Harpigny, Catholic bishop of Tournai asked rightly: “Does the state really have the right to regulate the symbols of personal beliefs?”

The answer should be a resounding No.

If people want to put a veil or a nun’s wimple over their head because of religious belief, fashion or sheer cussedness let them be.

John Dalhuisen, of Amnesty International, said:  “The Belgian move to ban full face veils, the first in Europe, sets a dangerous precedent.”

Societies, whether Belgian, French, Dutch or British, that get their knickers in a twist over the burka are self destructively proclaiming their inability to define problems or keep a moral sense of proportion.

Laws, like this one, that sacrifice freedom to sate hysterical and groundless fears are far greater threat to us all – whether we wear the burka or not.

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Bye, bye Belgium?

Posted by Bruno Waterfield in Belgium, Democracy on April 24, 2010

Belgium is in crisis again – it’s my fourth one I think. Bye, bye Belgium? Stark predictions that the country will split between the Dutch-speaking Flemish and francophone Walloons are headlines again.

But these periodic spasms aside, this division is already hardwired into Belgium’s political institutions. I do think the real crisis is as state institutions struggle and fail to find accommodation between Belgium’s dysfunctional Dutch-speaking and francophone political classes.

Real Belgium, a poster protesting at the laws that forbid the serving of food in bars that allow smoking

Life goes on for Belgians. It is the state (and its frequently corrupt politicians and officials) not the people, which is the one with the true identity crisis. The latest “crisis” is playing out from problems that spring from bureaucratic institutions rather than real lived lives.

There are so many depressing examples. In Brussels suburbs estate agents illegally conspire with bigoted councillors to make sure foreigners, who tend to be francophones, and Walloons cannot buy property. This takes place just a few kilometres from the EU institutions that are supposed to uphold the single market.

Elsewhere, couples are asked to sign pledges that Flemish-Dutch is the main language spoken at home before being able to get access to the childcare entitlements that they paid for.

In another Brussels suburb, Flemings can grass up businesses that do not use the only authorised language for trading – that is a charming but antiquated Dutch.

Then there are those three elected mayors, again in the Brussels suburbs, blocked from taking up public office because they have not been acquiescent enough about speaking Dutch.

The Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde issue, which yet again has caused the government to collapse, also revolves around state-sponsored linguistic apartheid.

Flemish politicians want the district to be split into separate Dutch-speaking and francophone electoral constituencies in line with the country’s deeply flawed Federal constitution.

They are it seems within their rights – just as Afrikaner Boers once were, speaking a similar tongue, in another land far away that was also built on institutionalised difference.

In most Federal states, politics is organised on a regional, territorial basis and is then federated at the national level.

In Belgium, politics is organised on the basis of language and is not federated at the national level. Voting districts, such as B-H-V, separate Belgians on a primarily linguistic not territorial basis.

Surely the best way forward is to is to allow political parties, whether Flemish or Walloon or German, to campaign anywhere in the country in whatever language voters will listen to them in?

The problem with Belgium is not that it brings two or more peoples together but that the Belgian state organises political structures around linguistic differences.

European history is full of nation-states that formed around common interests that transcended parochial cultural, ethnic, linguistic or religious differences – and a good thing too.

Those of us who are pro-European internationalists are still looking forward to a day when politics is organised around ideas, much bigger than countries, rather than the limitations of nation states.

Enlightenment thinking and humanism, that so many Europeans have struggled for over the centuries, are ideas that step beyond narrow divisions, especially one as ridiculous as language in today’s modern Europe.

So should they split? Flemish separatists should beware. It would prove difficult, if not impossible, to build a succesful outward-looking new nation called Flanders on the bigotry and the backward bureaucratic practices that are the assertion of difference rather commonality.

Many of the Flemish people I know pride themselves on their modernity and flexibility of thought, how crazy then to define a new Flemish state around something as obscure as a fading Dutch dialect?

Belgium is artificial not because the Flemish and Walloons are brought together but because today’s state institutions create and maintain barriers that keep people apart.

The intolerance and discrimination to be found in the Flemish suburbs of Brussels have not been demanded by mobs but are required under Belgium’s insane Federal model.

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