The Brussels Court of Appeal on Monday found the Belgian state guilty of “crimes against humanity” for kidnapping five mixed-race women when they were children in Congo under colonial rule.
Overturning a lower court decision from 2021, the judge said that the government at that time had “a plan to systematically search for and abduct children born to a black mother and a white father, raised by their mother in the Belgian Congo, solely because of their origins,” RTBF reported.It ordered the state to pay €50,000 each in reparations to the women for “moral” or emotional damages.The women who sued the state are now in their 70s, and represent an estimated 20,000 mixed-race children — so-called métis — snatched away from their families in Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) between 1948 to 1961 in the run-up to the country’s independence from Belgium.
They were placed in schools and orphanages run by the Catholic Church in Belgium.
Colonial Belgian authorities saw the mixed-race children as a threat to the white racial supremacy of the colonial order, and decided to kidnap them and change their names to make sure they would not be able to reconnect with their families, according to the women’s lawyer.
Congo was a Belgian colony from 1908 until 1960, when it gained independence.
The Belgian government apologized for abducting the métis in 2019.
“In the name of the federal government, I present my apologies to the métis of the Belgian colonial era and their families for the injustices and the sufferings they have endured,” then-Prime Minister Charles Michel told MPs.But the women who lodged the appeal did not think an apology was enough, and sued the Belgian government in 2020.
In 2020, the Belgian king issued a statement expressing his “profound regret” for the wounds of the colonial past, as Belgium started to break the taboo on country’s brutal colonial past in the wake of global Black Lives Matters protests.The protests also sparked a debate on what to do with numerous colonial monuments in Belgium. Brussels, for instance, is full of monuments dedicated to Leopold II, the Belgian king who ran Congo as his private colony and whose rule killed as many as 10 million people.
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