THE NIGHTMARE GOES ON

By JAY BRANEGAN/BRUSSELS

When most people think of Belgium, they consider its hearty beer and delicious chocolate, perhaps its quirky fondness for mayonnaise on French fries and certainly its slightly gray rectitude. The tiny country of 10 million is a wildly improbable candidate to be the epicenter of scandal in Europe. But since the summer, it has been rocked by a series of lurid revelations. They include tales of an exceptionally repellent child-sex torture-murder ring, the arrest of a former minister for the Mafia-style political assassination of a rival, official corruption and bribery, all topped off by law-enforcement bungling on a grand scale. Public anger and disgust are so high that when citizens' groups last month organized a demonstration to demand a government clean-up, silent, white-clad protesters numbering 300,000--fully 3% of the country's population--thronged the streets of Brussels.

The White March was a cathartic moment for a badly troubled society, but the respite from dismaying news ended last week. This time a popular and telegenic Deputy Prime Minister who is gay, Elio Di Rupo, 45, was accused by local prosecutors--who petitioned Parliament to lift his official immunity so he could be formally charged--of having sex with underage boys. At the same time, similar charges were leveled against Jean-Pierre Grafe, 64, a regional minister who is also homosexual. Both men denied the accusations. The case of Di Rupo, a key insider, could lead to the breakup of the coalition government. Prosecutors based their accusations on the sometimes conflicting testimony of a single witness, who said he had sex with Di Rupo in 1989 and 1990. Di Rupo claims to be the victim of "a witch-hunt, a McCarthyism of the worst sort." Following intense political haggling, Parliament last week voted against stripping Di Rupo of his immunity, concluding that the evidence is still too flimsy. But the reprieve was only temporary; the country's highest court was ordered to continue investigating the minister, and lawmakers will again consider lifting his immunity next month.

Though his case is unrelated to earlier ones, the national outcry was immediate. "The problem is, he's an official, and there are allegations of pedophilia. Those are the two most sensitive topics in Belgium right now," says political scientist Kris Deschouwer. Sensitive scarcely begins to describe it. The country is still shaken by the discovery last August of a child-kidnapping ring that preyed on young girls. A 12-year-old and a 14-year-old who had been abducted and raped were freed from a macabre underground dungeon in a home of the accused ringleader, Marc Dutroux, near the southern city of Charleroi. Police dug up the bodies of four other girls, ages 8 to 19, missing for more than a year. The tragedy transfixed Belgium, and national TV broadcast their funerals live. Shock then turned to outrage when it was disclosed that Dutroux was a convicted kidnapper-rapist, released early from prison against prosecutors' advice. Worse, vital information about the original abductions was withheld by competing investigators, and Dutroux allegedly had high-level protection.

In that atmosphere of revulsion and suspicion, a few weeks later, the former Minister of Pensions, Alain Van der Biest, was charged with hiring hit men to kill another powerful politician, Andre Cools; in 1991 he had been gunned down outside his mistress's apartment in eastern Liege. Long-held suspicions resurfaced of a political cover-up in the murder probe.

Whether Di Rupo is guilty or innocent, the country's rush to judgment reflected something close to hysteria. Many saw Di Rupo as a victim of gay bashing, and even the country's leading children's rights crusader, Marie-France Botte, told a local paper, "Things have gone too far. We have entered into a climate where everyone denounces one another."

Nonetheless, normally self-satisfied Belgians are engaging in a round of long-overdue soul searching. "We eat well, we know how to enjoy ourselves. We always knew things were wrong here, but as long as we didn't really feel it, that was O.K.," said Deschouwer. Uneasily divided between the French-speaking, rust-belt south and richer, Flemish-speaking Flanders in the north, Belgium has long been run by spoils-sharing governments that swept problems under the rug with repeated applications of the famed compromis a la belge, or Belgian compromise. But the current crisis has worsened linguistic tensions and boosted racist, right-wing parties. Like other European countries--Italy, Spain, France--where old, snug interrelationships covered over patterned corrosion, Belgians are confronting central questions about themselves. The inquiry is painful and the taste bitter.