Five mixed-race women sued the Belgian state for taking them away from their families in racially motivated abductions.
The women who sued the state are now in their 70s, and represent an estimated 20,000 mixed-race children snatched away from their families in Congo between 1948 to 1961. | Hadrien Dure/AFP via Getty Images
December 2, 2024
By Ketrin Jochecová
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.
Belgium convicted of crimes against humanity in Colonial Congo
‘Today’s ruling is a positive step towards repairing these historical injustices’ - Rym Khadhraoui
In a historic move today, Belgium has been convicted of crimes against humanity for acts committed during colonisation which must signal as a turning point for European States, said African Futures Lab and Amnesty International.
The Brussels Court of Appeal recognised the responsibility of the Belgian State in the abduction and systematic racial segregation of Métis children under Belgian colonial rule, after five Métis women born between 1948 and 1952 in the Belgian Congo, initiated legal proceedings against the Belgian state. After a Brussels court ruled against their claims in 2021, they continued to seek redress and appealed the decision, reaching this historical ruling today.
Like thousands of Métis children born to European fathers and African mothers, Marie-Josée Loshi, Noëlle Verbeken, Léa Tavares Mujinga, Simone Ngalula, and Monique Bintu Bingi were taken from their Congolese mothers, forcibly placed in religious institutions, deprived of their roots and identity, and later abandoned to fend for themselves when Congo gained independence. Even today, the wounds of that era remain profound. The Métis children of colonisation still grapple with the consequences of these devastating practices, despite the official apology made by the Belgian Prime Minister at the time, Charles Michel, in 2018, and the Federal Parliament's adoption of the 'Métis Resolution' in 2019.
During the appeal hearing, Ms. Léa Tavares Mujinga stated:
"The Belgian state uprooted us, cut us off from our people. It stole our childhood, our lives, our first names, our surnames, our identities, and our human rights."
This decision represents long-awaited recognition and supports additional claims for reparations for Métis people, victims of Belgian colonisation. African Futures Lab and Amnesty welcome this courageous decision which paves the way for full recognition of the atrocities committed during colonisation and their ongoing harmful effects on the lives of survivors and their descendants.
Geneviève Kaninda from African Futures Lab, said:
"This historic decision highlights, beyond apologies, the importance of the right to reparations as defined by the United Nations General Assembly in 2005. While the Métis Resolution was limited to reparations 'by moral and administrative means', these five Métis women have succeeded in obtaining the reparations they considered necessary and appropriate for the harm they suffered during colonisation.”
Rym Khadhraoui, Amnesty International’s racial justice researcher, said:
“For far too long, reparations have been a longstanding demand from individuals and communities, such as the Métis women who took the Belgian state to court. Today’s ruling is a positive step towards repairing these historical injustices. We hope it is the sign of hope for those who seek accountability for the long-lasting impact on human rights of European colonialism.”
By Raf Casert - Associated Press - Monday, December 2, 2024
BRUSSELS — A Brussels appeals court ruled on Monday that the Belgian state committed a crime against humanity in the case of five mixed-race women in Congo who were taken away from their Black mothers in infancy.
In a landmark case addressing the Belgian colonial past in Africa, the five women fought a legal battle over some some six years to make Belgium recognize responsibility for the suffering of thousands of mixed-race children. Known as “métis,” the children were snatched away from their families and placed in religious institutions and homes by Belgian authorities that ruled Congo from 1908 to 1960.
A lower court had first dismissed their challenge in 2021 but they appealed.
“It is deliverance for my mother now that she finally has closure,” said Monique Fernandes, the daughter of Monique Bintu Bingi, one of the five plaintiffs. “She finally has it recognized as crime against humanity,” Fernandes told The Associated Press.
The initial ruling had said that the policy, even if unacceptable, was not “part of a generalized or systematic policy, deliberately destructive, which characterizes a crime against humanity” and had to be seen within its context of European colonialism.
Monday’s decision also orders the state to pay damages of some 50,000 euros to each of the plaintiffs and Fernandes said it would help cover all the costs involved. “We did not want to go for a moral symbolic euro since it would amount to some sort of insult after everything my mother went through,” she said.
The five women, who are now in their 70s and 80s, filed their lawsuit in 2020 amid growing demands for Belgium to reassess its colonial past in Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.
In the wake of protests against racial inequality in the United States, several statues of former King Leopold II, who is blamed for the deaths of millions of Africans during Belgium’s colonial rule, have been vandalized in Belgium, and some have been removed.
In 2019, the Belgian government apologized for the state’s role in taking thousands of babies from their African mothers. And for the first time in the country’s history, a reigning king expressed regret four years ago for the violence carried out by the former colonial power.
Lawyers said the five plaintiffs were all between the ages of 2 and 4 when they were taken away at the request of the Belgian colonial administration, in cooperation with local Catholic Church authorities.
According to legal documents, in all five cases the fathers did not exercise parental authority, and the Belgian administration threatened the girls’ Congolese families with reprisals if they refused to let them go.
According to the lawyers, the Belgian state’s strategy was aimed at preventing interracial unions and isolating métis children, known as the “children of shame,” to make sure they would not claim a link with Belgium later in their lives.
“The story always was: look, we have done so much good in Congo. But there is also such a dark history,” said Fernandes.
___
Associated Press writer Sam Petrequin in London contributed to this report.
No comments:
Post a Comment