De Clerck later explained he had meant to speak of reconciliation (verzoening) and forgiveness (vergeven) rather than forgetting (vergeten). But the statement continues to cause anger, as does the idea of amnesty for collaborators. As Flanders Today went to press, De Clerck was due to meet leaders of the Jewish community in Belgium to clarify his position further.

Shimon Samuels, director of international relations for the Wiesenthal Center, wrote to prime minister Yves Leterme to ask for De Clerck to be dismissed. "No wonder anti-Semitism and other hate crimes grow unchecked in Brussels - ‘The Capital of Europe' - and across Belgium, when your chief lawman allegedly advocates on national television ‘to forget Nazi crimes, as they lie in the past'," the letter reads.

The subject came up because of a vote the previous week in the Senate to give consideration to a bill, presented by Vlaams Belang, to grant amnesty to those convicted of collaborating with the enemy during the occupation of Belgium by the Nazis after 1940. Many politicians saw merit in discussing the matter, regardless of whether they would go on to support it.

The question of Belgium's wartime record of collaboration is still a thorny issue and one that divides Flanders and Wallonia. Both sides had collaborators, from the Rexist party in Wallonia to the Flemish National Union (VNV), to the Flemish and Walloon Legions, both divisions of the Waffen-SS. Part of that collaboration took the form of helping deport some 25,000 Belgian Jews, mainly through Mechelen, to Auschwitz. About 1,200 survived. After the war, 400,000 Belgians were investigated as suspected collaborators, with 56,000 of them convicted. The death penalty was exercised in 242 cases. By 1950, only about 2,500 were still in prison; the others had either served their time or been pardoned.

However, prison was not the end of the story: Those
convicted of collaboration also suffered the removal of certain civic rights, including compensation for war damages, the loss of pension years and other matters like the granting of firearms licences for hunting.

The chances of a change to the law on collaborators are slim. While the French-speaking CDH said it would take part in a debate, the French-speaking parties as a whole are against any change in the law. On the Flemish side, the debate was opposed only by Groen!, but N-VA leader Bart De Wever dismissed the idea of new legislation. "If someone came forward tomorrow with a bill to ban the N-VA, then we'd also give it consideration," De Wever said. " You have to be able to debate anything in a democracy."