December 8, 2024
Belgian Court Rules Colonial-Era Family Separations Were Crimes Against Humanity, Awards Reparations To Victims
The government will have to pay reparations to the families of five mixed-race women who were forcibly separated from their families in the colonial-era Belgian Congo.
In his 1899 semi-autobiographical novella Heart of Darkness, author Joseph Conrad explored the horrors of colonialism, which centered on the exploitation and oppression of African people in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Belgium. On Dec. 2, a court in Belgium ruled that the country would now have to pay for its crimes against the Congolese people.
The Belgian Congo was a Belgian colony in Central Africa from 1908 until independence in 1960, when it became the Republic of the Congo.
According to the BBC, the government will have to pay reparations to the families of five mixed-race women forcibly separated from their families in the colonial-era Belgian Congo.
The women, who are now all in their 70s, are owed the compensation because they were taken from their mothers as young children and placed in various orphanages, which the court said was evidence of Belgium’s “plan to systematically search for and abduct children born to a Black mother and a white father.”
The panel of judges referred to the actions perpetuated by the Belgian government as a crime against humanity, calling the kidnappings of the women “an inhumane act of persecution.”
The ruling follows a legal case from Monique Bitu Bingi, Léa Tavares Mujinga, Noëlle Verbeken, Simone Ngalula, and Marie-José Loshi, launched in 2021.
Bingi previously characterized their abductions as a destruction in comments to the AFP News Agency.
“We were destroyed. Apologies are easy, but when you do something you have to take responsibility for it,” Bingi said.
Because the court ruled the actions of the Belgian government and the orphanages mostly managed by the Catholic Church a crime against humanity, there is no statute of limitations on their allegations against the Belgian government.
“The court orders the Belgian State to compensate the appellants for the moral damage resulting from the loss of their connection to their mother and the damage to their identity and their connection to their original environment,” the judges proclaimed.
In 2019, the Belgian government apologized publicly, two years after the Catholic Church did the same for its involvement in the forced removal of children from the custody of their mothers.
The case is the first to address the plight of an estimated 20,000 victims of family separation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda.
According to Michèle Hirsch, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, “This is a victory and a historic judgment. It is the first time in Belgium and probably in Europe that a court has condemned the Belgian colonial state for crimes against humanity.”
Bingi, who was removed from the custody of her mother at three years old, told The Guardian that the women jumped for joy when they received the news.
“I am relieved,” she said. “The judges have recognized that this was a crime against humanity. We jumped for joy.”
According to their reporting, the Belgian government maintained order through white supremacy, and mixed-race children born through the union of white fathers and Congolese mothers represented a threat to this arrangement.
This arrangement was the brainchild of King Leopold II, who ruled the Congo from 1885 to 1908 when he ceded it to the Belgian state, which endeavored to fulfill his wishes.
The judges granted the women’s request for €50,000 ($52,852) in damages because if they lost, they would be liable for that amount.
In part, they arrived at their ruling because Belgium was a signatory of the Nuremberg tribunal statute, which was set up to convict members of the Nazi Party of their crimes during the Holocaust.
In addition to this judgment, the court also ruled that the government would be required to pay “more than €1m” ($1,057,050) in legal costs.
According to The Guardian, the girls were officially designated as “mulattoes,” an offensive term denoting a mixed person’s parentage, and had their documents falsified.
While at the Catholic missions, the girls were often told they were “children of sin” and received little care or rations from the nuns, who despised looking after the children.
Further, two of the girls were raped by members of a militia set up as the Congo gained its independence in 1960.
According to The Guardian, following a 2018 apology issued by then-Belgian prime minister Charles Michel, the government set up an official government body, the Résolution-Métis, to help people who had been taken from their parents to trace their origins, but has since declared that sources in that effort are “deficient and fragmentary.”
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