5 women win reparations from Belgium for crimes under colonial rule

A court in Brussels ruled on Monday that five mixed-race women, now in their 70s and 80s, were owed reparations from Belgium for crimes the state had committed against them under colonial rule in Belgian Congo.

The women, the children of African mothers and European fathers, were taken from their parents by the Belgian authorities at ages as young as 2 and sent to religious schools hundreds of miles away that were run by the Catholic Church. They grew up in poverty and suffered from malnutrition and physical abuse, and their identities were hidden from them. The policy started in the late 19th century and continued until after Congo’s independence in 1960.

The court said that Belgium had committed an inhumane act and an act of persecution that amounted to a crime against humanity. The five women won 50,000 euros (about $52,000) each.

“There is no doubt for the court that the appellants have experienced great suffering since, and as a result of, their kidnapping before the age of 7 by the state,” the Brussels Court of Appeal said in its ruling.

From 1908 to 1960, the Belgian state ruled what today includes Congo, Burundi and Rwanda. Europeans and Africans were not allowed to have sexual relations, and authorities took thousands of children from their families and sent them to Catholic institutions in Congo. A small number were sent to Belgium.

Monique Bitu Bingi, one of the appellants, said in an interview Monday that the decision was a victory, not just for her and the others taken from their parents, but also for their Congolese mothers. “I feel so relieved,” said Bitu Bingi, 75. “The Belgian government took my youth away, and it was something I had to fight for, to explain to the world what happened.”

Bitu Bingi brought her case alongside Marie-José Loshi, Simone Ngalula, Léa Tavares Mujinga and Noelle Verbeken. The court of appeals overturned an earlier ruling that too much time had passed for the case to be valid. By ruling that the state had committed crimes against humanity, the case became exempt from statute of limitations rules.

Bitu Bingi’s lawyer, Michèle Hirsch, said the case could pave the way for other victims to take similar legal action.

Monique Fernandes, the daughter of Bitu Bingi, said in an interview Monday that her mother, and the other four appellants, had only told their children the full story during the summer of 2018 over a barbecue at her mother’s house in Belgium. They decided there that they would pursue legal action.

Charles Michel, when he was prime minister of Belgium in 2019, apologized for the kidnappings of mixed-race children that occurred between 1959 and 1962, the first official acknowledgment of the policy. But Belgium has stopped short of a formal apology for the devastating human and financial toll committed during eight decades of colonization.

King Philippe of Belgium in 2020 expressed his “deepest regrets” for Belgium’s actions in a letter to the president of Congo, the first public acknowledgment from a member of the Belgian royal family of the atrocities that took place under colonial rule.

Bambi Ceuppens, an anthropologist at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, called the ruling historic.

“The arguments that it was a thing of the past, that it had to be seen in a colonial context, and that the Belgian modern state couldn’t be sanctioned for deeds committed under colonial rule, have been made in the past,” Ceuppens said. “This time, it didn’t hold.”

The court ruled as invalid arguments from the Belgian state that taking children away from their mothers during colonial rule was not an infraction at the time, and that other colonial powers had resorted to the same practice.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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