'Bye Bye Belgium' - RTBF's Flemish secession hoax

DEC 13 2006

On the evening of 13 December 2006 the French-language Belgian public broadcaster RTBF interrupted programming with a fake special news bulletin claiming the Flemish parliament had unilaterally declared independence, dissolving the Belgian state. It used interviews with real politicians, footage of flag-waving crowds and reports that the king had fled, with an intermittent caption reading 'Ceci n'est peut-être pas une fiction'. RTBF only announced it was fiction after about half an hour, by which time the story had reached the United States. Not an April hoax, but the most consequential broadcast hoax in Belgian history.