They will have shed light on a tragic and long hidden reality, but it is, at this stage, their only victory. The Brussels civil court ruled, on Wednesday, December 8, that the lawsuit that five mixed-race women born in Congo brought against the Belgian state had no reason to exist. These “mulatto children” who had become combative in their seventies, had been forcibly removed from their black mother and listed as “born of an unknown father”, although the latter was white and clearly identified.
The plaintiffs wanted the former colonial power to recognize first their suffering, then its responsibility in what they consider to be a policy based on purely racial criteria, amounting to a crime against humanity.
The facts are prescribed and, at the time they took place – between 1948 and 1961 – the criminalization of a crime against humanity did not exist in Belgian law, argued the court. The latter, however, recognizes in his judgment that “The political will more and more widespread today to repair historical prejudices” would allow, in 2021, to consider that the abduction of children and their placement in religious institutions fall within such a definition.
“Protection of the indigenous population”
The Belgian colonial authorities acted against the Métis on the basis of a decree adopted at the end of the 19th century.e century by King Leopold II. He spoke of the obligation to “Protection of the indigenous population and improvement of its living and moral conditions”, especially for mulatto children.
The Belgian Church recognized, in 2013, that it had participated in the ordeal of the Métis, deprived of essentials in religious institutions and left to fend for themselves in the bush at the time of independence. However, we had assured these children, sometimes very young, that it was a question, by removing them from their father, of avoiding them “A destiny of negroes”.
In 2018, the Chamber of Deputies denounced the “Targeted segregation” of which the Métis populations had been victims. And in 2019, Charles Michel, then Prime Minister, followed up and presented an official apology by deploring the uprooting and abandonment of the victims. A special commission was then set up to shed light on different facets of the Belgian colonial past but, obviously divided, it is very far from concluding its work. In the immediate future, the archives of the time are, in any case, still forbidden to the lawyers of the plaintiffs.
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