Bye Bye Belgium
Bye Bye Belgium (code name: Tout ça (ne nous rendra pas la Belgique) , in German for example: All das (will not bring Belgium back) ) is a fictional live report ( mockumentary ) that was released on Wednesday, December 13, 2006 , broadcast by the francophone public broadcaster RTBF on La Une . It was broadcast unannounced during prime time at 8:15 p.m.
action
It was reported that the Flemish regional parliament in the north had unilaterally declared the independence of the Dutch-speaking part of the country; In Flanders , cheering crowds took to the streets, the new borders were only more difficult to cross (among other things, a Brussels tram was stopped at the language border) and even King Albert II and his wife had already crossed the country with a military machine in the direction of Kinshasa ( Democratic Republic of the Congo ; Belgian colony until 1960 ). During the nearly two-hour broadcast, over 2,600 viewers who did not recognize the parody called the station, whose website collapsed under the onslaught and was still overloaded on Thursday.
The regular program was - apparently - interrupted by breaking news reporting . At the beginning of the broadcast, the words Ceci n'est peut-être pas une fiction (German: “This is perhaps not a fiction”) were displayed, but only for a brief moment. This was a nod to the famous painting by Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte , Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe), which depicts a pipe. However, it took half an hour, at the instigation of the responsible media minister of the French Community of Belgium , Fadila Laanan , the line "This is a fiction" appeared instead.
consequences
The Belgian newspaper “ Le Soir ” reports that the coup took two years to create and that it had the working title “BBB - Bye-bye Belgium”.
Politicians from both parts of the country and all parties, including Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and journalists, criticized the program. Those responsible defended them; they stated that they wanted to bring the real problem of the Flemish-Walloon conflict into public discussion. Because in Belgium the tensions between the economically prosperous Flanders and Wallonia have intensified, to which the right-wing extremist Flemish nationalists from Vlaams Belang have made a decisive contribution.
Alain Gerlache, RTBF television director, said that the program was so “spectacular” “because not only the viewers of the public broadcaster, but also politicians, foreign journalists, ambassadors and international organizations” believed in the claim that the country had been split would have.
literature
- Daniel Ebner: The Political Mockumentary . Master thesis. University of Vienna, Vienna 2017 ( othes.univie.ac.at [PDF; 996 kB ]).