Franco-Belgian border war: Why Tintin & Poirot are having a chuckle

Here’s something straight out of ‘Toba Tek Singh,’ Sadaat Hasan Manto’s masterful story about the absurdity of national borders. Except in this case, instead of a Sikh inmate in a mental institution caught in the madness of Partition, we have a Belgian farmer managing to question the notion of territoriality between France and Belgium —and, effectively, between all post-Westphalian nation states. Finding a stone, marking one point in the 620km boundary between the two countries, obstructing his tractor’s path, he moved it 7.5 feet into French territory. As a result, at least till the shifted stone was spotted by two history-enthused Frenchmen with topographical OCD, the farmer had made Belgium a little bigger at France’s expense.

The stone that was moved dates back to 1819, just before the Franco-Belgian border was officially recognised by the Treaty of Kortrijk after Napoleon’s defeat in Waterloo in 1815. Attempts are being made to contact the farmer so that, as protocol dictates, he returns the stone to its original location. Hopefully, as folks who know how border tangles can be taken very, very seriously, this won’t grow into a full-scale border war. But this unintentional ‘show of aggression’ on the part of an unnamed Belgian farmer would have elicited chuckles from two of his countrymen: nos amis Tintin and Hercule Poirot.