WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE . . .
Belgium is now at the centre of Nato. But, says
Paul Belien, its politicians have some very strange
and dangerous ideas about collective security
Brussels BELGIUM, although a small country, has traditionally played an important role in European politics. When Britain, France and Germany cannot agree on who should be given top posts in important interna- tional organisations, they often pick a Bel- gian because they feel he is equally close to all three.
Although Belgian politics is in itself rather insignificant, it becomes more important when one takes into considera- tion that contemporary national politicians in Belgium have a greater chance of becoming international functionaries than their French, German or British col- leagues. Hence it is important that Belgian politicians be properly screened. If the Wall Street Journal Europe had not pub- lished an article last March which revealed who the Belgian Prime Minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene, really was, Mr Dehaene might have ended up succeeding Jacques Delors, Unfortunately, Bill Clinton was too stupid to discover who Mr Willy Claes was, and too unprincipled to veto his appointment to the secretary-generalship of Nato. Belgians have become extremely dan- gerous people to appoint to leading politi- cal positions because the current generation of Belgian politicians has been infected by a notion of neutrality which places them outside the Western Alliance. In the past, the Belgians were aware of their unique geographical position in between the three major nations of west- ern Europe, and they were very careful to maintain equally friendly relations with Germany, France and Britain as well as America. The Belgians remained neutral within the Atlantic Alliance, and this served them well.
All this changed when the Social Democrats joined the Belgian government in 1988. During the missile debate in the early 1980s, the Social Democrats, like those in many other countries, defended a position of neutrality between the Soviets and the Americans, i.e. a neutrality out- side the Western Alliance. Unlike their British or German counterparts, the Social Democrats in Belgium crawled back into government in the late 1980s. They were able to influence Belgian defence and foreign policy, where they 'I've been beating my wife again.' continued their anti-American policy' which, because Britain was one of the most outspoken allies of the Americans In Europe, soon became an anti-Anglo- Saxon policy. Unlike Britain, where Labour, after much pain, managed to neutralise the extreme Left radicals within the party, the Belgian radicals took over the Socialist Party. One of these is the present Belgian minister of foreign affairs, the 39-year-old Frank Vandenbroucke. He is an intolerant young ideologue, who became party chair- man in 1989, and led his party from one electoral defeat to another (losing many of the traditional Socialist electorate to the extreme Right). These electorial disasters did not undermine his position, however, for all this time he was patronised and pro- tected by the real party leaders Louis Tobback, the minister of the interior, and Willy Claes, the minister of foreign affairs — who also appointed Mr Vandenbroucke to succeed Mr Claes when the latter recently moved to Nato. As a student, Frank Vandenbroucke, the son of a wealthy professor, had joined the Revolutionary Workers League (RAL). Ifl 1976, the 21-year-old 'Comrade' Vanden- broucke, then an economics student at Louvain University, became a member of RAL's politburo. RAL was the Belgian branch of the Trotskyite Fourth Interna- tional. Its emblem was the figure four sur- rounded by a hammer and sickle. In December 1975, the vice-chancellor of Louvain University asked political student organisations to sign an agreement In which they promised not to bring anY weapons, such as cudgels, lead pipes or chains, on to the university premises. RAI" refused to sign. The League declared Its adherence to 'the dictatorship of the prole- tariat'.
'We are no pacifists. In the opposition against the violence of the employers armed warfare is one of the means, employed for the liberation of the workers, the League's weekly magazine Rod declared in September 1977. Like rnallY extremist organisations (whether theY belong to the Right or to the Left), RAL was also virulently anti-Semitic. In Novern- ber 1977, it declared Israel to be 'a state, born of terror and sustained by terror • When in July 1976 Israeli commandos lib- erated Jewish hostages at Entebbe airP°11', Rood condemned the action as 'an act r,:u state terrorism'. Lenin was RAL's hero. It is difficult not to put a man like this on 3 pedestal,' said Rood in October 1977. T.° journal was also renowned for defendul terrorist groups such as ETA, the IRA al); the Baader-Meinhof gang. 'Andreas BO': er and Gudrun Ensslin are dead,' statu Rood in October 1977. 'They were "wield" ed". The real terrorists are the Gernlan employers and those who serve thenj loyally under the flag of Sefici Democracy.' In 1978 Comrade Vandenbrouac applied for a position as assistant lecturer at Louvain University and, despite his involvement with the RAL, he got the job. Shortly afterwards, however, he defected from the Fourth International to the social democracy he despised so much and became a member of the Socialist Party. In 1982, he went to work for the party's think-tank. He justified his switch by point- ing out that his Trotskyite group was doomed to political impotence and was 'unable to change any social or political system'. If one wanted to change the system, one had to work from Within.
1i0 the mid 1980s, Mr Vandenbroucke was active in numerous so-called 'pacifist' groups protesting against the deployment of American Cruise and Pershing missiles in western Europe. He adopted a strong anti-American and anti-Nato position. In 1985, he became a socialist member of parliament and was elected president of the party in January 1989. When the totali- tarian regimes in Eastern Europe col- lapsed in the early 1990s, he was asked Whether he did not feel compelled to examine his own conscience. 'No,' he said. 'Stalinism had stolen our name, but that is no reason for me to change mine.' For a man like Mr Vandenbroucke, is to blame for the failures of socialism, not Marx or Lenin. He affirmed this in a newspaper interview in May 1991. 'The collapse of the Berlin Wall has proved that Stalinism is not freedom, but capitalism does not necessarily bring prosperity,' he said. Not socialism — nor even commu- nism — was to blame for the misery in Eastern Europe, but Stalinism. Moreover, as capitalism cannot solve the present problems, one must now try real socialism. When Mr Vandenbroucke's party joined the Belgian government in 1988, the Party's leading politician, Willy Claes, became Belgium's vice-premier, and the country broke its solidarity with the West. In October 1988 it declared that it would °PPose any arms modernisation by the Alliance so long as Nato did not agree to a comprehensive concept of disarmament'. The first thing Mr Vandenbroucke did When he became party president on 14 January 1989 was to veto the deployment of Lance missiles on Belgian territory that very same day. A year later Belgium distanced itself f.r_nnt its western allies during the Gulf war. Mr Vandenbroucke vetoed sending Bel- gian soldiers to the Gulf. When in Septem- ber 1990 the British army asked the 8elgiall army to sell them some of its !rninunition stocks to prevent their troops from running out of ammunition in the Arabian desert, the Belgian government (with the present Nato secretary-general as itsv• ; ce-premier) refused, stating that Bel- Stunt 'gave absolute priority to a diplomat- ic solution' to the Gulf conflict. Belgium also started pampering terror- ists. In January 1991 the Belgian govern- ment issued a tourist visa to Walid Khaled, a well-known Palestinian terrorist. He took a stroll around the Grande Place in Brussels, was arrested by the police and set free by the government. Earlier that same month, the Belgian government released from jail another Palestinian ter- rorist who had thrown a grenade at a group of Jewish children in Belgium ten years earlier. Belgium also refused to extradite IRA and ETA terrorists to Britain and Spain. In November 1988, it set free Patrick Ryan, an IRA arms-suppli- er who had been arrested in Brussels and whom the British government had asked to be extradited to London. Although a Belgian court recommended that the government com- ply with Britain's request, the cabinet let him go.
Whenever the government was criticised for taking up 'neutral' positions between the West and its enemies, it brushed the arguments aside. It said it was acting on behalf of Europe and against 'Anglo- Saxon' dictates. As criticism came mainly from America and Britain, the Belgian politicians in the end began to believe their own conspiracy theory. When in September 1993 the Wall Street Journal published an article which was critical of Belgium's huge foreign debt, the minister of foreign affairs, Willy Claes, told a Bel- gian newspaper that the article in the American paper was part of 'an Anglo- Saxon conspiracy' to destabilise the Belgian economy just when the country was presid- ing over the European Community's Coun- cil of Ministers. 'In this Anglo-Saxon world,' Mr Claes said, `there exist organisa- tions and people who prefer to keep a divided Europe, condemned to play a sec- ondary role in the great economic argu- ments, instead of a well-structured Europe.'
Apparently, the Americans devoted little attention to Mr Claes's conviction of a great British-American conspiracy to keep Europe down. Barely 12 months after his anti-Anglo-American diatribe, the Clinton administration got him elected Secretary- General of Nato. If there is a conspiracy, it is probably of another nature. When Mr Clinton was elected in November 1992, the former Trotskyist Frank Vandenbroucke was jubilant. 'This man is our ally. We should make him a member of our Euro- pean Party of Social-Democrats,' he said in an interview.
Today, Mr Vandenbroucke heads Bel- gian diplomacy and his protector, Willy Claes, the Western Alliance. Thank you, Mr Clinton.
Paul Belien writes for the Belgian financial magazine, Trends, and is director of the Centre for the New Europe, a Brussels-based think-tank
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