Belgians Limp Along, Hobbled by Old Language Barriers

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Belgians Limp Along, Hobbled by Old Language Barriers

By Delphine Schrank Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, January 30,
2008; A10

ZAVENTEM, Belgium -- In this Brussels suburb, where neat houses on
twisting lanes stand a few streets away from NATO headquarters and the
glassy towers of multinationals, Jean-Ren Delval is packing up his home of
32 years and moving with his wife to Spain. Delval, a French speaker from
the country's south married to a Dutch speaker from the north, long ago
grew accustomed to relying on his wife to fill out the strictly Dutch-only
paperwork from the local mayor's office.  Like many people raised in
Wallonia, the country's French-speaking region, Delval's Dutch is at best
rudimentary, a relic of weekly classes in school.

But in recent months, the linguistic obstacles have accumulated beyond the
merely niggling. New regulations stipulate that public land in Delval's
municipality can be sold only to people who speak Dutch or demonstrate a
willingness to learn it. Teachers in his granddaughter's kindergarten are
now forbidden to speak French on school premises. And one recent night,
Delval said, police failed to respond to his French-language call asking
them to investigate a strange noise outside his front door. "I am a
Belgian above all," said the 58-year-old retiree, who jokes that pretty
soon passports will be needed to pass across the country's linguistic
fault lines. "But I'm fed up with the state of this country."

Delval's frustration grows from a new flare-up of old tensions in this
country, where French- and Dutch-speaking populations were thrown together
by border redrawings after the Napoleonic wars. Following national
elections last June 10, the country limped along with no federal
government for a record 195 days. Flemish Prime Minister-elect Yves
Leterme failed three times to form a coalition that would represent the
interests of both communities.

The impasse turned largely on Flemish demands for greater autonomy and
precipitated a country-wide identity crisis. Many people began
contemplating Belgium's dissolving into a very loose confederation or even
splitting entirely, as the Czechs and Slovaks did in Czechoslovakia in
their bloodless divorce of 1993. The instability resonates beyond the
country's borders. Political analysts worry that if Belgium, seat of the
European Union and long a symbol of pragmatic unity between antagonistic
communities, ceases to exist, Western Europe's many breakaway groups in
Spain, Northern Ireland, France and northern Italy might be emboldened.

As secessionist movements go, this one has been relatively civil. At most,
Flemish protesters last fall slashed street signs bearing names in French
and Dutch and paraded with coffins symbolizing Belgium's demise. The issue
continues to simmer, with near-daily debates in each of the country's six
parliaments and animated discussion in the news media, business clubs and
cafes.

Some of the talk is characteristically self-mocking. In September, one
Belgian posted the country for sale on eBay as a "kingdom in three parts."
The listing was pulled after attracting an offer of $13 million.

Even the Miss Belgium 2008 pageant, held in the Flemish city of Antwerp
last month, degenerated into controversy when the newly crowned beauty
drew boos from the crowd after she proved unable to answer a question in
Dutch.

Other Belgians, though, have responded with a commitment to unity. On Nov.
18, 35,000 people marched through Brussels in a sea of red, black and
yellow, the colors of the national flag. Hundreds of flags hung for weeks
afterward from wrought-iron balconies and windows across the city.

So for now Belgium remains one, officially at least -- Dutch-speaking
Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia, with the officially bilingual and
thriving cosmopolitan capital, Brussels, in the middle. But Dutch and
French speakers live largely separate lives, governed by parallel
officialdoms. They watch separate television stations, attend distinct
schools and universities and vote for Dutch and French wings of the same
political parties.

Meanwhile, a caretaker government runs day-to-day affairs; Leterme has
been given until March 23 to form a coalition.

But politicians are skeptical that the underlying points of disagreement
can be addressed in the remaining two months. "We are two opinions, two
peoples, with two different democracies, really," said Geert Bourgeois,
the Flemish minister of administrative affairs and founder of the
separatist New Flemish Alliance. "Our visions are different, and our
problems are different."

Chief among Flemish grievances is the economy. Flemings resent the
southward transfer of massive subsidies from the prosperous north. They
also disagree with Wallonia's more socialized, welfare-model approach.
Once the coal and steel powerhouse of the country, the French-speaking
zone now has approximately double the unemployment of the north.

Many Flemings see the safeguarding of Flemish culture and language as a
reversal of a historic injustice. French was the language of public
official life until the 1960s, when the country settled on its current
system of linguistic zones.

But that delicate system is being tested as Brussels grows and its
French-speaking population fans out into Flemish zones. Peter Dejaeghar,
spokesman for the Flemish minister responsible for language decrees, sees
in this population spread an "imperial" tendency to "Gallicize" Flanders.

Flemings must stand their ground, said Francis Vermeiren, mayor of
Zaventem. "If I went into the Washington, D.C., town hall and asked for my
ID card in Dutch, wouldn't they look at me as if I were from the moon?" he
said. "It's the same here. We respect each culture . . . but we ask for
respect in return. Flemish culture must be defended." His town, he notes,
is only about six miles from Wallonia.

Though most of the separatist sentiment comes from Flanders, Flemings who
live in Wallonia sometimes also feel friction from authorities. One of the
few Dutch-speaking schools there had to turn to Flemish authorities after
the Walloon government declined to fund it, on the grounds that it had too
few Flemish students, said Tom Vandermeulen, its principal.

For many, though, who see themselves as Belgians rather than Walloons or
Flemings, the language barriers between places that are often fractional
distances apart can border on the absurd.

Rachida Hadgit, 44, a French-speaking house cleaner, recently moved from
Brussels to a Flemish suburb five minutes away, where she could afford a
house rather than a cramped apartment.

But her Dutch, she said, was too scanty to deal with the police or with
the bureaucrats in the town hall, who sometimes answer her when she speaks
French and sometimes don't. The headache was enough, she said, to lead her
to scale back her workload for six months and enroll in three hours of
Dutch classes a week.

"I felt like my parents" -- immigrants from Algeria, she said -- "a
stranger in my own country, unable to read and write."

In three of the six municipalities of Flanders around Brussels that
officially permit use of both languages, mayors who were elected in
October 2006 have been denied official acceptance by the Flemish
parliament because they circulated electoral notices in French to their
French-majority constituencies. The mayors contend this violates the
government's own rules.

"Ideally, Belgium should become completely bilingual," said Hadelin del
Marmol, 48, a consultant and reserve officer in the army, who proudly
cites two generations of relatives who fought and died for Belgium. "But
what I'm saying is utterly utopian. Flemings are afraid that their culture
will disappear." And Walloons, he added, haven't much desire to learn a
language they can't use outside the country or the Netherlands.

Marmol, a Walloon by birth, recently moved to the picturesque Flemish town
of Overijse outside Brussels after his wife inherited property there. Now
he fumes over the town's lack of a French-speaking school, the dearth of
French books in the public library and the lack of French-speaking
officials in the town's sports organizations.

"We have in common the long road of history we've traveled together," he
said. "And one of the country's great strengths is its multiculturalism.
But that's a richness we're in danger of losing."

"I'm a Belgian," he added. "But I'm not a Belgian at any price."

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/29/AR2008012903286_pf.html