Empire Poverty

Thrown ignominiously out of its prize Congo colony, scorned and abused by the world for its policies, and facing money troubles after a decade of opulence. Belgium no longer could contain its frustration. Last week half a million normally quiescent Belgians erupted from their homes, marched in grim phalanxes through the major cities. The more zealous ripped up cobblestones, overturned autos, spat on police. All over the country, workers went on strike and took to the streets.

Brussels was like a city under siege.

Few motorists dared venture into the dark, empty boulevards. Restaurants, dimly lit by candles to save electricity, were sparsely occupied by diners who whispered anxiously over their food. Postmen delivered the mail accompanied by police escorts.

Garbage piled up, and armed troops huddled at key intersections awaiting the next foray of the strikers.

It all began when Premier Gaston Eyskens brought up the bill for leaving the Congo. Suddenly, Belgians discovered that the Congo would cost not only humiliation but money--in lost export revenue, tourist income, shipping profits and earnings on Congo raw materials. To make up the loss of empire and to streamline Belgium's overburdened social welfare system, Eyskens proposed an austerity program that would raise taxes by $120 million, cut government spending by $200 million on such things as unemployment benefits and old-age pensions.

The pinch would be felt by all classes, the Premier insisted, but the opposition Socialists rose with angry shouts when Eyskens proposed a legislative catchall called the Lot Unique (single law). Labeling it the Loi Cynique, they insisted its tax provisions (e.g., a 20% boost in sales tax as well as income tax increases) would hit workers hardest, argued that its cuts in health and unemployment programs (which, some Socialists admit privately, are outrageously featherbedded) were "a step 25 years back into the past." "Not True, Not True." When the bill came up for debate on the floor of Parliament just before Christmas, the Socialists knew they could not block it with their minority of 84 votes out of a total 212 in the lower house. They resorted to jeers and interruptions, finally provoked fist fights on the floor with Eyskens' Liberal-Christian coalition Deputies. Then the strikes began, and in town after town pent-up frustration exploded with the fury of a coiled spring. First out were the solid, dependable teachers and low-level provincial employees. Then, unexpectedly, thousands of postal workers, railroad engineers, electricity and gas plant workers, coal miners and dockers downed tools in the factory-filled French-speaking south, where the Socialists are strongest.

Astonished Premier Eyskens protested that the workers "have been willfully and systematically misinformed" about the austerity program. "It is not true." he cried, "that the law aims at raising rents. It is not true that the purchase tax will raise the price of bread, butter and potatoes. It is not true that we will drastically cut unemployment payments." The bill, he said, would only eliminate payments to people who were not legitimate claimants (e.g., part-time workers, such as baby sitters).

From South to North. Although Eyskens' proposals were eminently sensible, few would listen. For the squabble somehow had touched off the deep, complex disputes that have plagued the nation for years. Once again the French-speaking Walloon southerners, who played a big role in forcing Leopold III to abdicate ten years ago, were up in arms against their cultural rivals of the north, the Flemish, and were taking it out on Flemish Premier Eyskens. Once again the deep clerical and anticlerical feud was out in the open; the Roman Catholic Church openly opposed the strike, and the big Catholic trade union group refused to join it; bitterly, the anticlericals hung Belgium's Catholic primate in effigy in some southern towns.

Socialist leaders were glad to capitalize on the nation's deep division. When the strikers' spirits flagged, Socialist leaders called a series of nationwide meetings urging workers to stay away from their jobs until the law was withdrawn. The strikes spread to the less industrial Flemish north. Bruges, the "Venice of the North," closed up for the day, and the docks at Antwerp, one of Western Europe's biggest ports, were paralyzed. At Mons 15,000 strikers held a mass rally, and all 60,000 workers at the big steel plants in Liege took the day off to march through the streets, were joined by the city's miners and chemical industry workers.

"I have not seen a strike of this intensity since 1923," said the burly boss of the Liege steelworkers, Robert Lampion, adding ominously, "We have no financial problem. We can keep this up longer than the government can . . . We have been accused of irresponsibility, but who is more irresponsible? The threatened workers or Parliament, away on its vacation--or the first citizen of the kingdom, away on his honeymoon?" Hurrying Home. It was not the first caustic comment on the fact that, in Belgium's time of crisis, young King Baudouin and Fabiola, his bride of a fortnight, were honeymooning in sunny Spain.

Premier Eyskens advised the palace that the King should not cut short his honeymoon, because to do so would be a confession that the strike wave was expected to get worse, not better, as the government had been insisting. But when word got through to Seville that the Socialists were planning a mass march of 50,000 strikers in Brussels, 30-year-old King Baudouin and his bride boarded a waiting Belgian air force transport and hurried home to Laeken Palace.* While the King was still in the air, a column of demonstrators 16 abreast with locked arms began a slow march from Socialist Party headquarters toward the heavily guarded zone around the Parliament building, the Premier's office and the palace. Troops, rushed in from NATO garrisons in West Germany, waited grimly with rifles at the ready; mounted gendarmes drew sabers. Then at the last minute, the crisis subsided; the mob lost its nerve, veered away from the official area, chose instead a path through the center of the city. Many of the marchers carried stones and iron bolts, hurling them at plate-glass windows of banks and shops that had dared to remain open through the strike.

One group of young hotheads rushed to the main railway station, breaking win dows inside and smashing the front of the station post office. When mounted gendarmes galloped up, the rioters hurled firecrackers at the feet of the police horses.

New Undertone. Through it all, supporters of the throne detected an insistent, alarming new undertone. One of the first buildings attacked and smashed was a movie house advertising a film of the royal wedding. Some in the marching crowds cried "Vive la Republique!" interspersed with chorus after chorus of the Marseillaise, which in Belgium has a distinctly revolutionary, antimonarchical flavor. Baudouin and bride heard none of this as they stepped out of the plane at the airport. "Vive le Roi! Vive la Reine!" cried the small welcoming delegation. Then, under heavy escort, their limousine bore the royal couple through the riot-torn city to the palace.

But Baudouin's presence did nothing to soothe the strikers. Next day a rampaging mob of 5,000 clashed with saber-swinging police in front of the Sabena airlines of fice; in the crowd, someone pulled a pistol and fired wildly, fatally wounding one striker, injuring others. It was the first serious bloodshed, but perhaps not the last, since the Socialists swore to keep the protests going indefinitely.

Would the King bow to Socialist demands that the Crown Council -- which meets only at the most critical moments in the nation's history -- be convened to discuss Premier Eyskens' proposal? Eyskens himself opposed the idea, insisting he always was ready to discuss amend ments to the bill in the proper place --Parliament. Withdrawal of his Loi Unique would amount to an admission of defeat and political suicide for the present government. The young man in the royal palace, however, has his own future to consider.

As for the nation's deeper malaise, Economics Minister Jacques Van der Schueren had stern words for Belgium's commoners. "Ten years ago," he said in a nationwide radio address, "Belgium was rich, envied and respected. But this privileged situation carried within itself its own seeds of destruction. Belgians felt they had to live better and better . . . We refused to contemplate our own future . . ."

* Recalling Baudouin's departure for a Riviera holiday at the height of Belgium's storm and flood disaster in 1953 and, a few days later, his return amidst a storm of criticism.

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