Throughout history, borders have caused unfathomable bloodshed, ageless feuds and decades-old legal disputes, which makes plans for a friendly exchange of land between the Netherlands and Belgium all the more remarkable.
While Belgium will be losing a splendid piece of nature that juts into the Meuse River dividing the two nations, it will also unburden itself of a jurisdictional nightmare that developed over time as the river meandered to turn the portion of land belonging to Belgium — about 15 soccer fields worth — into a peninsula linked only to the Netherlands.
Over time, the area was rumored to be increasingly lawless, a haven for drug dealers and illicit sexual escapades. Then, some three years ago, passersby stumbled onto a headless body. “They alerted Dutch authorities, who told them it was Belgian territory,” said Jean-Francois Duchesne, police Commissaire of the Lower Meuse region.
In short, the Dutch could not go there because it was Belgian territory, and Belgian police and judicial authorities found it extremely tough to get there. They are not allowed to cross into the Netherlands without special permission and the peninsula had no proper landing zone for boats or equipment coming in by water.
But soon there will be no more wading in water, and a peaceful swap should be reality.
Preparatory work has been done and the two nations’ parliaments should be able to complete a deal sometime in 2016, sources confirmed, almost two centuries after the 1843 border posts were set. And all with a smile on everyone’s face, even though Belgium will get only a tiny part around a lock that has been built to promote traffic between the two nations.
Border swaps can happen but mostly after bitter quarrels.
On the Indian-Bangladeshi border this summer, a dispute that raged since India’s independence from British colonialists in 1947 was settled when the countries swapped more than 150 exclaves of land.
Earlier this month, it took the United Nations’ highest court to settle a dispute between two Central American nations. The court ruled that Nicaragua violated Costa Rica’s territorial integrity in a longstanding fight over a small chunk of land near the shores of the Caribbean Sea.