Belgian power-sharing may have perpetuated divisions

Nothing in life, it's been said, is certain except death and taxes. In Belgium we add to the list linguistic division and intolerance. And no sphere of Belgian life is exempt from this rule.

When they came recently to announce the national team for the World Cup, the Red Devils, the French press noted how few francophone players had been selected, while the Flemish said that those who were there for their linguistic rather than footballing skills.

So it has hardly surprised observers that when the Suykerbuyk decree was passed last week through the Flemish parliament with barely a ripple of protest, the francophone political community went bananas.

The decree, named after its sponsoring deputy, provides for the provision of some small state pensions and welfare benefits to a dwindling group of ageing former Nazi collaborators, and only to those of them who are genuinely destitute.

Hermann Suykerbuyk insists it is a social measure and not intended as an amnesty or political gesture of support for their previous actions, which he says he disapproves of. Only about 4,000 may be affected, he says, all of them people who have either been pardoned or served their punishment.

For the francophone community, the decree is proof positive of latent Flemish far-right sympathies and an attempt to whitewash widespread perceived Flemish nationalist collusion with the Nazis in their hope to win support for independence - a perception fostered by the fact that the far right Vlaams Blok was needed to secure a majority.

After the war the state opened files on 448,160 people for alleged collaboration, notably only a small majority of them in Flanders. In the end 1,693 were condemned to death, of whom only 242 were executed. But tens of thousands lost their civil rights and were fined, and the process of their rehabilitation gradually over the years since 1961 has proved deeply divisive.

Yet, as Mr Suykerbuyk points out, "not all Walloons were resistance fighters, any more than all Flemings collaborators".

Legal action against the Flemish government has already been threatened by the Walloon government which runs the south of the country, the francophone government which protects francophone linguistic interests, the federal government, the "martyr" cities of Bastogne and Dinant, both of which suffered heavily during the war, and several individuals, most notably veterans' leaders.

The Prime Minister, Mr Jean-Luc Dehaene, usually careful not to antagonise his Flemish constituency, has warned that the decree is probably ultra vires and that the court established to rule on the competences of each of Belgium's six overlapping parliaments will have to deal with the issue.

The row comes hard on the heels of a confrontation between the Flemish community in the Brussels suburbs and their francophone neighbours that has already provoked a major political crisis and is poisoning the atmosphere ahead of scheduled discussions next year on the 1994 federal constitution's future.

Six of the communes on the edges of Brussels are formally Flemish in character but have provided "facilities" for French speakers in the form of translations of official documents under an agreement with the minority that was supposed to be a "transitional" arrangement while they learnt Flemish.

Fed up with the slowness of that process - no one is surprised - a Flemish minister, Mr Leo Peeters, issued a decree requiring the communes not to issue French translations of documents to individual citizens unless specifically requested to do so in respect of each document.

No French-language document will be deemed legally valid, he said, unless it had previously been issued in Flemish and a translation had been specifically requested.

The French community saw the move as a provocation that was in breach of inter-community agreements, has threatened legal action, and found other means of retaliating where it is in a majority.

There have also been rows about setting new quotas from each community for Brussels city jobs, disputes about funding of arts groups . . .

The danger is that as tensions are deliberately whipped up ahead of next year's talks, the delicate compromise of a highly complex federal structure, built around legally entrenched power sharing at federal-level will unravel. There is a real prospect that the country could end up splitting in two.

Political scientists say the final straw would be the federalising of the social welfare system, advocated by Flemish nationalists because they say that Flanders is subsidising the unemployed of Wallonia.

From an Irish perspective it is worth noting that, far from healing the divisions between Belgium's two communities, a process of institutionalised power-sharing not unlike that adopted for the North may well have served in this country to perpetuate them.

While the federalisation of the country may have slowed the downward spiral towards disintegration, it has given a constitutionally guaranteed lifeline to parties that might otherwise have declined into insignificance.

And the division of the spoils on explicitly sectarian lines has given endless opportunities for the corruption of the political system and bureaucratisation of the public service that has produced the Dutroux and other scandals.

Beware, Northern Ireland. If power-sharing is to heal, you need another magic ingredient, the patient's desire to be healed - political good will.