Mixed-race women sue Belgian state over post-colonial ‘abuse’
FIVE mixed-race women born in the Belgian Congo are suing Belgium for alleged abuse they suffered after colonial rule, in a trial that starts today.
The women, now in their 70s, accuse it of “stealing our youth, our innocence and our roots”, via a disastrous colonial policy that ripped them from their mothers and left them at the mercy of marauding militias in orphanages.
Such babies were once known as “children of sin” because of their mixed heritage. They had Congolese mothers and Belgian fathers.
When the colonial power pulled out of the country in the 1960s, it evacuated nuns from the orphanages in which the children had been placed, leaving them to fend for themselves. Some of them wore name tags around their necks,
One of the accusers, Simone Ngalula, said she was raped with a candle by a militiaman she thought had come to guard her. Many of the abandoned children died.
“We slept right next to the morgue,” said Monique Bitu Bingi, who was forced into an orphanage at the age of four.
“Every night we heard people crying,” she told Flemish newspaper Het Nieuwsblad.
The women are each seeking €50,000 (£42,420) in damages at the trial, which is being held in Brussels.
Surviving victims have for decades fought not only for the Belgian state to accept responsibility but also to have archives opened to enable them to trace their biological fathers.
Only in 2019 did Belgian prime minister Charles Michel recognise that the government had deliberately segregated mixed-race children fathered by Belgian colonialists, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This is the first time a court will hear accusations of crimes against humanity committed by the Belgian state.
The Central African country was once ruled directly by King Leopold II, but was handed over to the Belgian state in the early 20th century after growing international pressure over the alleged brutal treatment of tribes by the king.
Statues and busts of Leopold II have been defaced and removed across Belgium, though a member of the Belgian royal family defended him as recently as last year.
♦ Medics in eastern Congo have begun an Ebola vaccination campaign days after the death of a boy aged two raised fears of another major outbreak.
He died on Wednesday in a clinic in the eastern city of Beni, which was at the centre of a 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak that killed more than 2,200 people and infected about a thousand more. Three people from the same neighbourhood died last month after suffering Ebola-like symptoms.