Two Heads for One

Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgium's Socialist Premier, is usually several jumps ahead of political trouble. Last week he was caught off guard. Paul Struye, Spaak 's Minister of Justice, had just commuted the death sentence of two Belgian collaborators. When Socialists joined Communist deputies in protest, Struye, a member of the Catholic party, handed in his resignation, bringing down the coalition cabinet of Socialists and Catholics.

"This is not a political crisis," he declared, "It is a crisis for our consciences." Out of 1,166 Belgian traitors sentenced to death since the liberation, 232 had already been shot. Struye (himself a Resistance hero) had personally sent 107 to their death. Said he: "On my soul and conscience, I declare that those 107 deserved supreme punishment." Now he thought it was time to slow down. Spaak, just back from the U.N. in Paris, agreed. "Yes," he declared, "this government is contemplating a policy of mercy . . .

Should we not return to those happy days when the death penalty was abolished in Belgium?/- Is not the abolition of the death penalty a victory of humanity and civilization?" A Communist deputy jumped to his feet. "Don't interrupt me," exclaimed Spaak. "It's hard enough to see my way clearly as it is." When the Regent Prince Charles asked him to form a new government, Spaak resisted: "With the U.N., the chairman ship of O.E.E.C., Western military union and the direction of Belgium's Foreign Office, don't you think that's enough for one man?" But he finally gave in, promised to try to form a new coalition cabinet. Sensible Belgians agreed with a tart observation made by the Brussels newspaper, Nation Belge: "To save two heads, the government was decapitated. Was it worth it?"

/- Spaak was wrong. The death penalty was never legally abolished in Belgium, but from 1865 to 1909 King Leopold II automatically commuted all death sentences.

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