BELGIUM's deputy prime minister, Elio Di Rupo, accused of having had sex with minors, is to face further investigation by the country's top court, the Cour de Cassation.
However, his parliamentary colleagues yesterday refused, on the advice of their committee of inquiry, to take the more drastic step of removing his parliamentary immunity and laying formal charges against him.
Criminal charges against ministers can only be laid by parliament, and the subsequent trial must be before the Cour de Cassation.
But is this erstwhile liberal country, convulsed by the trauma of discovering a hideous secret in its midst, itself about to perpetrate a monstrous injustice against a man whose lifestyle it simply does not understand? And has the principle of innocence until guilt is proven been abandoned by a self righteous, sectarian, and amoral press? Is this really what 300,000 people marched for only weeks ago?
The partial respite for Di Rupo (until the state prosecutor reports back to parliament on December 9th), means that the flamboyant minister, who has strongly protested his innocence in the face of what he sees as a witch hunt, does not have to resign. Yet.
Di Rupo (45), effectively the country's second most senior Socialist Party politician, is the popular son of Italian immigrants, an easy going politician as likely to be seen at a rock concert with a can of beer in his hand as in a night club. He has never denied that he is gay and contends that he is the victim of an hysterical, dangerously misguided confusion of two issues - homosexuality and paedophilia - in the wake of the Dutroux case.
One of Belgium's leading campaigners against child abuse warns that the witch hunt may be going too far. "We must not confuse issues," says one of them, MarieFrance Botte. "We know that homosexuality has nothing to do with paedophilia. It's too easy to take it out on a minority. The paedophiles I meet in Bangkok are fathers of families."
The evidence against Did Rupo, the federal deputy prime minister, and against Jean Pierre Grate, a minister in the Walloon government, also under parliamentary inquiry, comes from a young man "Olivier T", arrested on quite unrelated robbery charges. He has made three separate contradictory statements naming Di Rupo as a one time lover. In only one of them, the last, does he allege that sexual relations occurred when he was under the legal age of consent of 16.
What makes the evidence, heavily leaked from supposedly closed inquiries, less than wholly credible is that Olivier, an employee of one of Belgium's most famous restaurants, is described by some of those who know him as a fantasist, who has variously claimed to be a baron and a diplomat.
He claims, more plausibly, in his first statement that he only started frequenting gay venues in his home town of Genk at the age of 15. Two years later, he said, he began to visit Brussels venues and did not meet the deputy prime minister until he was aged 20 at a well known disco, Le Garage where he had sex with him in a toilet. Later, he claims, he returned to Di Rupo's flat.
In his second version, he claims to have met Di Rupo at 17. In neither of the first two statements is the deputy prime minister alleged to have done anything illegal.
Di Rupo, who testified before the parliament's commission of inquiry on Wednesday, says he has no recollection of meeting Olivier. He has not denied that he is gay, but he insists he has only had relationships with "mature and consenting partners".
The accusations against Grafe might be more difficult to answer. The Walloon Minister for Education, a member of the Social Christian Party who is also known to be gay, is no stranger to such charges.
In 1982 and 1984 complaints were laid against him that he had sex with underage minors; in the latter case one alleged that the victim was repeatedly made to pose for pornographic photographs in the home of the minister. In those cases either the Walloon Parliament or the prosecutor found that there was insufficient evidence to proceed with charges.
Now Olivier has alleged that Graft also made him pose for pornographic films in his Liege flat, involving, he claims, young boys of between 12 and 15. Grafe denies the charges and says he will clear his name.
Olivier, who claims to have documentary evidence to back up his claims, has yet to produce it.
The charges against Di Rupo come as yet another body blow to the Socialists, a key component of the governing coalition. Some fear Di Rupo's resignation could be the coup de grace for a party enmeshed in scandal and bring down the government.
In 1994, three SP serving ministers, Guy Spitaels, Guy Coeme and Guy Mathot were forced to resign over the Agusta bribes scandal (although Spitaels was later cleared). The party last year lost a foreign minister, and its former leading member, Willy Claes, had to give up his job as Secretary General of NATO over the same issue.
Former minister, Alain Yander Biest, is in jail on charges related to the killing of a former colleague.
