The intrigues of the "Council of Flanders" are merely a comedy intended to mask this policy. The policy rests upon a clever juggling with the question of languages. Under cover of the principle of free self-determination of peoples, it seeks to internationalize an internal problem in the hope of dislocating the Belgian nationality. Perhaps it also aims at the creation of a fictitious Government which shall furnish the German Government with the means for opening fallacious peace negotiations to deceive the world and weaken the cohesion of the Allies. Many German newspapers have allowed these aims to appear, and some have boldly unveiled them.
ALL BELGIUM PROTESTS
But the strong protests of Flemish communities and of the entire Belgian Nation have foiled these plans, and the news coming from the occupied region enables us to determine with precision the character of the rôle played by the "Council of Flanders." At the same time it attests the determination of the Belgian people to repel all foreign interference and to maintain its unity unshaken.
What is this "Council of Flanders"? It has no representative character. It was created by a private assembly which had no mandate from the people. It now pretends to seek popular sanction through an election. This is only a subterfuge. There has been no election. There has been no consultation of the people. The promoters have limited themselves to assembling groups of adherents in theatres or restaurants, and causing gatherings composed of their proselytes, with an admixture of the curious and the idle, to vote on lists of candidates previously arranged in the private offices of those who are directing the work.
The Deputies and Senators, in a protest to the Chancellor, thus denounced the pretense of an election that was organized in Brussels:
A meeting was called at a day's notice in an exhibition hall. Everybody entered who wished to, Belgians or strangers, men, women, and children. There were in all 600 or 700 persons. It was these unknown persons, come together by chance, without control or guarantee, that in a few moments, as an interlude in a speech, proclaimed the election of twenty-two Deputies to the "Council of Flanders" and fifty-two Provincial Councilors, Such was the expression—without the knowledge of the people—of the will of the Municipality of Brussels, which has 200,000 electors and almost 1,000,000 inhabitants.
PROTESTS OF CITY COUNCILS
Foreign occupation has not wholly destroyed legitimate and regular representation in Belgium. The Provincial Councils and the City Councils are still functioning. The administrative framework of the country survives. The municipal organization, so solidly rooted, has not ceased to exercise power. The Provincial and Municipal Councilors, like the Deputies and Senators, most of whom remain in the country, have been elected by universal, direct, and secret suffrage. They alone in the occupied territory are competent to express the true national opinion, and that opinion is strikingly voiced in the protest of the Flemish and Walloon members of Parliament, in that of the Common Councils of the capital and the large cities of Antwerp and Ghent, whose example has been followed by an increasing number of prominent citizens and local Governments of smaller towns in Flanders.
It has been demonstrated that the "Council of Flanders" is pursuing an enterprise of usurpation, that it is a tool of the invader, and that its members are in reality only agents of the German authorities. They went to Berlin a year ago to ask for administrative separation. Herr von Walraff met them at Brussels at the beginning of 1918 to arrange for political separation. When Tack and Borms were arrested by the Belgian police on the order of Belgian Magistrates it was the German functionaries who, by force, compelled their release, and they came out of prison by the side of the German officer who had liberated them. It was the Kommandantur of Antwerp that ordered the communal administration, disregarding its resistance, to authorize the "activist" demonstration of Feb. 3, and to have this protected by the police, in violation of orders of the Burgomaster that had been in force nearly four years. It was the German military headquarters, too, that forbade all demonstrations of other groups and commandeered the hall of the Chamber of Commerce, placing it at the disposition of the organizers of a demonstration judged by the Burgomaster to be one to wound public sentiment and endanger the public peace.[1]
At length Governor General von Falkenhausen stamped the "Council of Flanders" with the seal of German investiture, deciding by a decree of Jan. 18, 1918, (published Feb. 10,) that the appointment of the "council's" delegates was subject to his ratification, and that these delegates were called to collaborate with him in his legislative labors.