10 juillet 2008 · EJP

The president of a Flemish political party lodged a penal complaint against Belgian writer and philosopher Pierre Mertens who had accused the nationalist politician of being a “resolutely negationist leader” in a tribune published in a French newspaper.

Bart De Wever, whose right-wing New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) party is linked to the ruling Flemish Christian Democrat party of Prime Minister Yves Leterme, caused a political row in October 2007 when he criticized official apologies made by the Mayor of Antwerp for the city’s role in the deportation of Jews during World War II.

De Wever called the apologies “a gratuitous act" and said that "those who led Antwerp at the time had to make delicate decisions in difficult circumstances".

Antwerp’s Socialist Mayor Patrick Janssens had apologized for the first time during a congress on the Holocaust organized by the local Forum of Jewish Organizations.

According to an official report issued in 2007 and titled "Docile Belgium", policemen and civil servants in Antwerp participated during WWII in three raids, at the request of the Nazis, which resulted in the deportation of about 1,200 Jews to Auschwitz in 1942.

Contrary to what happened in Brussels, the Antwerp authorities at the time showed overzealousness and arrested more Jews than requested by the German occupier.

65% of Antwerp’s Jews were deported during the Nazi occupation.

Of the estimated 56,000 Jews living in Belgium at the beginning of the war, around 25,000 were deported to Auschwitz. Only 1,200 of them survived.

De Wever later downplayed his remarks and although he apologized at a meeting with the city’s Jewish leaders, he mentioned what he termed “the controversy among historians who study the history of the Holocaust over the last decade”.

In a tribune published in French daily Le Monde, Pierre Mertens claimed that De Wever was a "resolutely negationist leader".

The politician has urged Mertens to “withdraw his grave comments” but the writer categorically refused to do so.

On Wednesday, the controversy took a Belgian communal turn with several Flemish newspapers accusing their French-speaking colleagues of "inciting anti-Flemish hatred" in the public opinion after daily newspaper Le Soir came in defense of Mertens’s views. "We also think that De Wever is a negationist", Le Soir wrote.

In a statement, COOJB, the umbrella group of Jewish organisations in Belgium, expressed its solidarity with Pierre Mertens and condemned De Wever’s "unacceptable" remarks .

Holocaust denial is punished by law in Belgium.

Around 18,000 of Belgium’s 40,000 Jews live in Antwerp.

© EJP