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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (17553)	5/10/2001 11:01:41 PM
From: average joe	Respond to of 17770

Das Kasefachgeschaft in Weinfelden chaesrenz.ch

To: average joe who wrote (17553)	5/11/2001 3:29:42 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 17770

A Nazi Embarrassment for Belgium Barry James International Herald Tribune Friday, May 11, 2001 Government Official Quits After Attending Meeting of SS Veterans BRUSSELS Less than two months before Belgium takes over the presidency of the European Union, the nation's image has been sullied by a cabinet minister who attended a meeting of SS veterans from World War II along with hundreds of Nazi sympathizers and then only reluctantly resigned. The official, Johan Sauwens, interior minister in the government of the Dutch-speaking Flanders region, protesting that he was not "a little Nazi," at first tried to shrug off his attendance of a meeting of the St. Martin's Fund, a mutual aid society for the veterans, as an error of judgment. But under pressure from coalition partners in the regional government, he stepped down near midnight Wednesday after a videotape revealed that his participation in the meeting had been far from casual. He was shown joining in the singing of a Nazi song at the meeting in Antwerp last weekend that was attended by neo-Nazis from all over Europe, many of them exchanging the straight-arm Hitler salute. The meeting, which was guarded by uniformed Flemings in gray shirts and black ties, included a parade by far-right militants bearing flags and Nazi insignia. Although the incident has seriously destabilized the regional coalition, it does not pose an immediate threat to the federal government. Nevertheless, it has seriously compromised the pretensions of Foreign Minister Louis Michel to turn Belgium into a kind of conscience of Europe. "His attendance at the meeting damages our image in Europe," Mr. Michel said of Mr. Sauwens. "He casts doubt on our European values." When the Liberal prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, succeeded in ousting a coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats nearly two years ago, he set about rebuilding Belgium's image, which had fallen to rock bottom because of the previous government's inability to deal with corruption and a pedophile scandal that appeared to have reached into the higher reaches of society. The government has stressed human rights, seeking the extradition and trial of Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. Mr. Verhofstadt went to Africa to apologize publicly for Belgium's lack of action in preventing the genocide in Rwanda, and the government is behind a current trial of four alleged participants in that massacre, including two Roman Catholic nuns. Mr. Michel led a European diplomatic boycott of Austria, after the far-right Freedom Party won there, but his position was undermined by the strength of the equally radical and nationalist Vlaams Blok, or Flemish Bloc, at home. Now the Sauwens incident appears to have deprived the government, and indirectly the EU, of ammunition just as far-right parties appear poised to enter the government in Italy after elections on Sunday. The Socialist and Green coalition partners in the Flemish regional coalition brought the government close to collapse by publicly demanding Mr. Sauwens's resignation. "We couldn't act otherwise," said Ludo Sannen, head of the ecologists. "Not to have reacted on the eve of the Belgian presidency of the EU would have been disastrous for our image." Mr. Sauwens is a member of the small but influential Volksunie, or United Peoples Party, which is increasingly divided between its moderates and those who lean toward the extreme nationalism of the Vlaams Blok. The democratic parties in Flanders have agreed to maintain a cordon sanitaire around the Blok, but there is a constant temptation for politicians to reach out to Blok voters, who total more than a third of the electorate in Antwerp. Mr. Sauwens may have been trying to ingratiate himself with such voters by attending the meeting of the St. Martin's Fund, which has close links with the Vlaams Blok. The St. Martin's Fund was established in the 1950s to help the families of Flemish volunteers who joined the elite Waffen SS on Germany's eastern front against Soviet Russia. Many of the volunteerssaw a German victory as the best hope for Flemish independence. Survivors returned to serve long terms of imprisonment and were stripped of their civil rights, meaning that many of them and their families are today indigent, and Mr. Sauwens explained his 25-year membership of the fund as a humanitarian gesture. The French-speaking minority in Brussels and the southern Walloon region often cite the wartime collaboration and continuing rightist nationalism of many Flemings as a stick to beat Flanders in this country's interminable linguistic conflict. iht.com