Right-wing Flanders leader Bart De Wever has disowned Flemish nationalist collaboration with the Nazis in World War II, still a hugely sensitive issue in a sharply divided Belgium.
Allegations of collaboration by Flemish nationalist parties, forerunners of De Wever’s own New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), regularly stoke tensions with Belgium’s French-speaking community in the south which takes pride in its WWII resistance to the Nazis.
“My own grandfather was a member of the VNV (Flemish National League), the nationalist party which collaborated massively,” De Wever told a Holocaust commemoration attended by members of the Jewish community in Antwerp, where he is mayor.
“I want to look at this straight in the eye. This collaboration was a terrible mistake, on all levels,” he said late Wednesday on VRT Flemish public TV.
“This is a dark page in history which Flemish nationalism has to look at squarely and never forget.
“Nazism and the Shoah were criminal mistakes. Nobody can deny and there is nothing to soften it,” he added.
— AFP
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