Belgium: Empire Poverty

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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).