A 93-year-old retired Belgian diplomat has been ordered to stand trial for what prosecutors say is his role in the 1961 assassination of the first Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, a leader in the fight against colonial rule who became a martyr figure in Africa’s liberation movement.
A Brussels court ruled Tuesday that the retired diplomat, Étienne Davignon, must face war crimes charges over the killing of Mr. Lumumba. The ruling was the culmination of a criminal complaint that Mr. Lumumba’s children filed 15 years ago and a milestone in Belgium’s decadeslong effort to reckon with crimes committed during its brutal rule of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mr. Davignon is the only surviving member of a group of Belgian officials who prosecutors say organized the kidnapping and murder of Mr. Lumumba, as part of a coup against the newly elected government shortly after Congo gained independence from Belgium in 1960. Belgian officials saw Mr. Lumumba as a rabble rouser who might tilt the country toward the Soviet Union.
Mr. Davignon, who has denied the charges, has the right to appeal the court’s decision. His lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.
The Brussels court found sufficient grounds for Mr. Davignon to face charges for the unlawful detention and transfer of Mr. Lumumba, for depriving him of the right to a fair trial and for humiliating and degrading treatment. The court also ruled that Mr. Davignon must face trial for the deaths of Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo, associates of Mr. Lumumba who were executed alongside him by a firing squad.
“For our family, this is not the end of a long struggle, but the beginning of a reckoning long demanded by history,” Mr. Lumumba’s family said in a statement. “We are convinced that this moment has a significance for Congo, for Africa, and for all former colonies that extends beyond our name.”
When he was a junior diplomat, Mr. Davignon was dispatched to Congo during a particularly turbulent time. With various factions wrangling for power, he plotted how to remove Mr. Lumumba, the Lumumba family’s lawyers say, exchanging telex communiqués with Belgium’s foreign minister at the time and other officials in Brussels. After Mr. Lumumba was forced out and detained, he was beaten in captivity.
The family’s lawyers said Mr. Davignon helped orchestrate Mr. Lumumba’s arrest and transfer to Katanga Province, a part of the country where separatists were hostile to his socialist government, and where he would ultimately be killed.
“Davignon was insisting that he would be transferred to Katanga because he knew perfectly well, and the Belgians and the organizers knew, that once he was in Katanga, he would be assassinated,” Jehosheba Bennett, a lawyer representing the family, said.
Mr. Davignon went on to lead a distinguished career in the foreign ministry, joining the European Commission and later being named a viscount.
Yema Lumumba, Mr. Lumumba’s granddaughter, 33, said that the family’s legal battle had been part of her upbringing. “The fact that so much time has passed actually deepens the wound,” she said.
Ms. Lumumba and other grandchildren have joined as plaintiffs in the case first brought by Mr. Lumumba’s son François Tolenga Lumumba Belgium’s Parliament acknowledged moral responsibility in 2001 for the state’s role in the independence leader’s death but stopped short of taking criminal responsibility.
This past January the Brussels court agreed to decide whether the case should be brought to criminal trial.
“It’s a step that should have been taken decades ago,” Ms. Lumumba said.
Lynsey Chutel is a Times reporter based in London who covers breaking news in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
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