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 will now have to pay for its crimes against the Congolese people.
According to the BBC, 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.
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.”
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 governments 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.
According to Michèle Hirsch, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, “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.
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.
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.
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Source: Black Enterprise
