
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 9, 1993                   TAG: 9305090258
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JOEL HAVEMANN LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LANGUAGE IS AT HEART OF BELGIUM'S PROBLEMS

When Belgium was carved out of what had been the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830, the Roman Catholic religion united the new nation but language divided it. From the beginning, Dutch speakers in the North outnumbered French speakers in the South. But Wallonia, rich with coal, dominated the country economically, and French was the new nation's official language.

"From the very first day, Flemish people were forced to fight for their rights," says far-right Vlaams Blok President Karel Dillen, whom Belgian voters elected to the European Parliament in 1989.

Dutch-speaking soldiers in World War I could not understand the orders of their French-speaking officers. In the courts, Dutch-speaking defendants were convicted in a language they could not speak. French was the language of the public schools; pupils who spoke Dutch even on the playgrounds were punished.

The tide began to turn 100 years after Belgium's founding. The University of Ghent became the nation's first Dutch-language university in the 1930s. The Belgian capital of Brussels, until two decades ago a French-speaking enclave just inside Flanders, is now officially bilingual.

Now Wallonia, whose smokestack industries of coal and steel are in decline, has lost its economic dominance to Flanders, home to most of Belgium's high-tech industry. Flemish economic output was about $16,000 per capita in 1988, against $13,000 in Wallonia.

"We are the most intelligent part of the country," boasts Dillen, a Vlaams Blok member of Parliament. "We work harder. We have the authors, the artists, the intellectuals."

On top at last, Flanders intends to get even. Flemish politicians have raised alarms among Belgium's French speakers with a series of incendiary proposals:

A member of the Belgian Parliament from the Christian People's Party has proposed a law that effectively would prevent many French speakers from moving to the Flemish suburbs around Brussels.

Six of those suburbs already have French-speaking majorities, and the Flemish regional Parliament has prohibited the cable television companies serving two of them from carrying two French-language television channels.

Another Parliament member has proposed giving bonuses to store owners on the Belgian shore, which is part of Flanders, who change their shops' names from French to Flemish.

Tensions are highest along the language frontier, where it is not so much the ordinary people as the politicians who are exploiting the issue. Squarely on the front line is Myriam Delacroix, mayor of Rhode-St. Genese, one of the Brussels suburbs that is located on Flemish territory but has a majority of French-speaking residents.

Two years ago she set up an exhibition that displayed the works of both French-speaking and Flemish artists. "But in the second year," she says, "lots of Flemish artists did not show up, saying they had received threats from some Flemish regional authorities."

by CNB