The Black Country

Periodically over the centuries, the area known as the Borinage gives a twitch of excruciating pain, and all Belgium suffers. Death has always been close by in that flat, depressing southern region.

Sometimes it came deep in the earth where Borinage miners scratch out coal from overworked shafts in constant expectation of cave-ins, poison gas, flooding, fire and explosion. More often it came on the grey, slag-heaped surface as miners coughed out their lives. Emile Zola saw the Borinage in the 1880s and poured its horror into his powerful classic, Germinal. A few aged miners still remember the emaciated, stubble-bearded Dutch preacher named Vincent Van Gogh, who lived in one of their hovels, held services and sketched their bowed bodies with fever-palsied hands.

To the Barricades. Last week the Borinage, hardly changed since the days of Author Zola and Painter Van Gogh, erupted again. Its grimy miners, many of them leather-jacketed foreigners--Sicilian and Spanish peasants, Greek sponge fishermen attracted by the wages--barricaded the streets with overturned coal cars. They ripped up rails, destroyed signal equipment, scattered broken glass at crossroads, where their wives shrilly ordered cars and trucks to turn back. At Quaregnon, 20,000 strikers and sympathizers jammed the city square under banners crying: "Death to the Coal and Steel Community!" "Work, not Charity!"

Just as in Zola's day, it was jobs and bread that the miners wanted. The spontaneous strike was called to protest the decision of the Belgian National Coal Board to close down eight of 13 Borinage mines and to limit production in the remaining five to 8,000 tons daily. Yet the decision has long been inevitable and was postponed only because successive governments feared to make it.

The Borinage mines are small, obsolete and uneconomic. As in the U.S.'s depressed Harlan County, Ky. (TIME, Feb. 23), coal seams are ever deeper and narrower, and the extraction cost is far above that of the big, modernized mines in the German Ruhr. Last year's recession created a glut in European coal--the surplus now stands at 26 million tons, with 7,000,000 in Belgium alone. The formation of the six-nation European Coal and Steel Community--creating a common market in these products in France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg--finally forced the government's hand.

Accepting Liabilities. In Brussels. Socialist and Communi&t Deputies made a tumultuous attack on the coalition Catholic-Liberal government. Cried one: "You not only condemn to death the 18,000 Borinage miners but the entire region--its shopkeepers, all other industries, everyone who is dependent on them." Catholic Deputy Fred-Bertrand, a former miner, shouted in reply: "Do you think you'll attract foreign companies and new investment by creating this revolution?" A government minister promised "replacement jobs" for the miners but was hooted down when unable to give any details. Premier Gaston Eyskens refused to consider nationalizing the mines, argued that the liabilities as well as the benefits of the six-nation Coal and Steel Community must be accepted: "Belgium can no longer decide on its own coal policy or even its own economic policy. We have to adapt ourselves."

At week's end the strikers still lingered at crossroads and in marketplaces. They had been beaten back by tear gas and police truncheons in an attempt to free 13 strikers imprisoned in Mons. There was still talk of a march on Brussels, but for the most part, the men watched sullenly as gendarmes cleared away their barricades, swept the broken glass from the roads. Accepting the inevitable, some miners were already packing up and leaving. In the Borinage, where hope has always been scarce, last week there was less than ever.

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