Separatism haunts austerity-wracked EU

Pro-independence parties are now at the helm in Spain's Basque Country, while elections in Catalonia could bring about even more separatist forces to the forefront.

White King, Red Rubber, Black Death

The story of King Leopold II of Belgium's brutal colonisation of central Africa, turning it into a vast rubber-harvesting labour camp in which millions died.

Belgian television will show the BBC documentary "White King, Red Rubber, Black Death," about Belgian King Leopold II's reign of terror in his private Congo colony in 1885-1908. The documentary, hardly the stuff of controversy anywhere else, almost didn't make it onto the airwaves here.
Louis Michel, the Belgian foreign minister, and the Royal Palace both pressured state television not to broadcast "White King." The Royal Palace expressed its "concern" about the documentary's "historical accuracy." "This is a partisan work and its thesis is completely one-sided," Mr. Michel said. "The film is a biased diatribe."

As a compromise the state television documentary was "put into the right context" by Belgian "specialists." Jan Van den Berghe of Belgian television says: "We have had the facts qualified by Belgian specialists such as the curator of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren."
The blood-stained history of the former Congo Free State isn't much in dispute anywhere except in Belgium, where it is seldom mentioned. The CFS was a private colony of Leopold II's until 1908 when he sold it to Belgium. He turned the CFS into a labor camp, laying the foundation of his immense personal fortune. His managers on the ground -- the king never set foot in the Congo himself -- used mutilation and killing to get the natives to bring in the rubber. Often, wives and children were taken hostage without food or water to speed up the work. In the 23 years of CFS rule, about half the Congo's 20 million inhabitants perished.

Red Ice Creations

Mussolini 'had affair with Italy's last queen'

Not much has stayed secret about the tumultuous private life of Benito Mussolini. That is apart from the true nature of his relationship with the woman who was to be Italy's last queen, Marie-José of Belgium.

Mussolini's mistress, Claretta Petacci, claimed in her diary that in 1937 the then princess and wife of the heir to the throne tried and failed to seduce the dictator at a beach resort near Rome. But Marie-José may have been more successful than her rival suspected, if evidence that emerged on Wednesday is to be believed. In a letter reproduced by the weekly magazine Oggi, Mussolini's son Romano quotes his mother as saying that there was a "brief period of intimate romantic relations between my father and the then princess of Piedmont".

The daughter of the Belgian king, Albert I, Marie-José was born in 1906. While still a child, it was decided that she should marry into the Italian royal family and in 1930 she wed Umberto of Savoy, the only son of King Victor Emmanuel. By her own subsequent account, the marriage was not a happy one, and she separated from her husband after the Italian monarchy was abolished by referendum in 1946. She lived for most of the rest of her life in Switzerland where she died in 2001. In contrast to the Savoy family, Marie-José had little time for fascism and during the Second World War made a failed attempt to broker a peace treaty with the United States.

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