Belgique / encore une TRADITION stupide

[Animal 0]

A swig of live fish: A Flemish town's ritual draws condemnation
By Stephen Castle Published: March 2, 2008

GERAARDSBERGEN, Belgium: Taking a deep breath, Rudy Van Acker raises a silver chalice to his pursed lips, hesitates ever so slightly, then takes a sip before downing the contents in a couple of swift gulps.

Van Acker, the senior Roman Catholic priest in this rural area of Flanders, is undertaking one of his more unusual pastoral duties: drinking live fish, washed down with red wine.

For centuries, thousands of revelers in this part of Belgium have celebrated the Krakelingen festival - named after the bread that will be thrown to the townspeople. The pageant, commemorating the onset of spring, combines pagan and Christian symbols and culminates in the consumption of tiny live fish immersed in red wine at a ceremony presided over by three men dressed as druids.

The ritual has aroused the fury of animal rights campaigners, who claim it is cruel and anachronistic and have succeeded in limiting the number of people who can down the fish to around two dozen a year. But so far, they have failed to get the practice banned altogether or to force the revelers to electrocute the fish before they are removed from their tanks.

Divisions between French speakers in the south and Flemish speakers in the north are eroding Belgium's national identity, even raising the prospect of the breakup of this fragile nation of 10 million people. Perhaps as a consequence, Belgian municipalities and regions cling ever harder to customs that set them apart from their neighbors.

"This is in our tradition," said Guido De Padt, a former mayor of Geraardsbergen, as he walked in the bright sunshine dressed in historical costume complete with false sideburns to the fish-drinking ceremony. "It's in our genes."

Geraardsbergen, a rural town of around 30,000 people, lies within 10 kilometers, or about 6 miles, of Francophone territory near the edge of Belgium's linguistic fault line. It is thus one of the most southern outposts of Dutch speakers in Europe.

"We are near the linguistic frontier," De Padt added. "We are not separatists, but we want to keep our identity."

The tiny grayish fish, known as grondeling, which are often used as bait by fishermen, are usually no longer than 2 to 3 centimeters, or about an inch. Though in some years they are larger and therefore difficult to swallow, De Padt says the drinker generally doesn't have a problem.

"Sometimes they are still trembling a little in your mouth," he says, but normally they have stopped moving by the time they are consumed. "You don't taste them - but the wine is good," he added, referring to the French red table wine in which the fish meets its end.

In an office in the center of Brussels, Michel Vandenbosch, the president of the animal rights campaign Global Action in the Interest of Animals, is far from amused by the spectacle.

"For the fish, being put in alcohol is like a human being thrown into a container filled with toxic waste," said Vandenbosch. In previous years, fish have jumped out of the chalice and met their end on the ground, he said.

Vandenbosch is confident the practice of drinking live fish will come to an end.

"Sooner or later, this will be ended," he said. "Either because the people of Geraardsbergen will come to understand that it is wrong or because the law will clearly not allow it to continue."

He said that the fish squirm in the wine chalice as they try to escape.

Vandenbosch is not immune to the pull of tradition. He has sought a compromise, suggesting that the fish be electrocuted before they are drunk, or, better still, substituted with fish-shaped pieces of marzipan.

Such half-measures are scoffed at by the civic leaders of Geraardsbergen, who say the tradition of which fish drinking is a part, first reliably documented by a Renaissance scholar, Joos Schollaert, around 1600, dates in fact from 1393.

The origins of the ceremony, which takes place on the last Sunday in February, remain obscure. Some of its symbolism, including the presence of druids, may be borrowed from the Celts who once lived here, and one theory is that, by swallowing a live creature, the human body is reinvigorated for spring.

After the pageant and fish-drinking ceremony, the civic leaders throw doughnut-shaped bread rolls - the krakelingen - to the people. The tradition is based on a legend that, during a medieval siege, those inside a fortress threw food over the walls to demonstrate that their supplies were unlimited and mislead an encircling army.

Van Acker, the priest, said the krakelingen festival was originally a pagan tradition though the church "has given it Christian form." Wine, bread and fishes are symbols from the Bible and the bread is blessed before the ceremony.

The leaders of Geraardsbergen have spent years in litigation fighting for the right to consume live fish. In December 2000, a Belgian court ruled that drinking living fish was a breach of animal-protection law. It did so partly because of a study by scientific experts at the University of Ghent that concluded that fish placed in alcohol suffered internal lesions.

The ruling did not hand down penalties for those who had drunk fish in the past but said that the practice should cease. And, for the first time in living memory, in February 2001 the ceremony went ahead without live fish.

However, the court of appeal in Ghent ruled that the practice was legitimate because it was not gratuitous drowning of fish in wine, but rather part of a rich tradition of historical importance.

Though the court allowed the practice to continue, it ordered that it must be limited to town officials of Geraardsbergen rather than its general population - a decision confirmed by a higher court in 2002.

Animal rights activists have persisted and last November succeeded in overturning a ruling that had banned them from demonstrating against the drinking of fish by the municipal authorities in Geraardsbergen.

Though protesters had the right to demonstrate at the ceremony this year, they did not exercise it, though they promise not to give up the fight.

"Isn't there another way to create a sense of identity, one that measures up to civilized behavior?" Vandenbosch asked. "It's barbaric. It won't be this type of tradition that saves the unity of Belgium."

But for the civic leaders in Geraardsbergen, preserving Belgium may not be on top of their minds when they gulp down live fish. Jozef Dauwe, regional minister in charge of culture for East Flanders, said the ceremony was important for the town's identity rather than that of the country.

"This is a link with our history. Here there are not many immigrants coming from Africa or Morocco," he said. "These are little old Flemish towns and we are proud of our monuments, our abbeys and castles."

He said the tradition predated the foundation of Belgium, which was established only in the 19th century. "Belgium is a creation from 1830," Dauwe added. "Geraardsbergen was founded in 1068, and people are a lot more interested in what their forefathers did than in Belgium."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/02/europe/fish.php?page=2