Belgium guilty in historic forced removals case

Belgium was last week found guilty of crimes against humanity for the forced removal of five mixed-race children from their mothers in colonial Congo. The victims, who are now in their 70s, launched an appeal after losing their case in a lower court in 2021. Belgium’s Court of Appeal said the government had a ‘plan to systematically search for and abduct children born to a black mother and a white father’. BBC News reports that the judges said the kidnappings were ‘an inhumane act of persecution’. Bringing the case with Bitu-Bingi and Verbeken were Léa Tavares Mujinga, Simone Ngalula and Marie-José Loshi. The Guardian reports that all five were born to Congolese mothers and European fathers, putting them in the crosshairs of the Belgian colonial state that deemed mixed-race children a threat to the white supremacist order. They were forcibly removed from their Congolese mothers between 1948 and 1953, as small children, and sent to a Catholic mission in the central southern Kasaï province in the Belgian Congo, far from their home villages.

The tribunal of first instance sided with the Belgian Government in finding their forced removal and segregation was not a crime during the colonial era. The Guardian reports that the court of appeal rejected these arguments, noting that Belgium had been a signatory of the Nuremberg tribunal statue set up to convict Nazi crimes, which introduced the concept of crimes against humanity. The court ordered the state to pay the women €50 000 in damages each for the suffering caused by breaking their ties to their mothers, home environments and loss of identity. It also said the government must pay ‘more than €1m’ in legal costs. Thousands of children were affected by the policy of forced removals and segregation during Belgium’s decades-long rule over the territories of the modern-day DRC, Rwanda and Burundi. ‘This is a victory and a historic judgment,’ said Michèle Hirsch, one of the lawyers for the victims. ‘It is the first time in Belgium and probably in Europe that a court has condemned the Belgian colonial state for crimes against humanity.’