BBC
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Belgians reacted with widespread alarm to news that their country
had been split in two - before finding out they had been spoofed.
The Belgian public television station RTBF ran a bogus report
saying the Dutch-speaking half of the nation had declared independence.
Later it said Wednesday night's programme was meant to stir up
debate.
It appears to have succeeded. Thousands of people made panicked
calls to the station and politicians complained.
"It's very bad Orson Welles, in very poor taste," said
a spokesman for Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, referring to the
famous director's 1938 radio adaptation of War of the Worlds.
That spoof fooled many Americans into believing Martians had invaded.
"In the current context, it's irresponsible for a public television
channel to announce the end of Belgium as a reality presented by
genuine journalists," he added.
The French-language TV channel interrupted regular programming
with an apparent news report, announcing that Dutch-speaking Flanders
had unilaterally declared independence and that Belgium as a nation
had ceased to exist.
It showed "live" pictures of cheering crowds holding
the Flemish flag, huge traffic jams leading to Brussels airport,
and trams stuck at the new "border".
The broadcast came amid an apparent growth of separatist sentiment
in Flanders.
Recent regional elections have shown strong support for the far-right,
nationalist Vlaams Belang party, which advocates Flemish independence.
The station's website crashed briefly as alarmed viewers sought
more information, and 2,600 calls were made to a telephone number
given out during the spoof.
"Our intention was to show Belgian viewers the intensity
of the issue of the future of Belgium and the real possibility
of Belgium no longer being a country in a few months," Yves
Thiran, head of news at RTBF, told the BBC.
He said it introduced people to the debate who would otherwise
have ignored it, but he admitted some may have taken it the wrong
way.
"We obviously scared many people - maybe more than we expected,"
he said.
Diplomatic reaction
Some politicians were in on the joke, contributing interviews
to the programme with their reactions to the "news".
But others were not amused.
The minister for audiovisual affairs for the French-speaking
community, Fadila Laanan, said the words "this is fiction"
appeared on screen half an hour into the broadcast - at her insistence.
"I find it questionable to use such a tactic, which frightened
people unbelievably," she said, adding that a number of people
had called her in panic when the "news" broke.
The AFP news agency reported that even some foreign ambassadors
in Brussels were taken in, and sent urgent messages back to their
respective capitals.
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