Former Zaire President, Mobutu Sese Seko, used to say “petit pays, petit esprit” (small country, small mind) referring to Belgium, especially Belgian politics, not its people. Here is why:
Howard W. French, a US professor in his book said: “King Leopold II, seemed like a quixotic quest to find a foreign land that could power his country’s growth, whether through unequal trade relations or an imperial takeover. This search inspired dreams of Belgian control over China and the Philippines, among other places, before finally leading him to what the Yale University historian Robert Harms describes in his book Land of Tears: The Exploration and Exploitation of Equatorial Africa as the final frontier of European exploration and expansion: the heavily forested heart of Africa. There, disguising his true ambitions behind a screen of anti-slavery rhetoric and humanitarianism—claiming to want to suppress the trading of Africans into slavery in the Indian Ocean––Leopold maneuvered.
Leopold maneuvered Europe’s big powers to grant him the rights to the territory that would later become the Congo, a country approximately 88 times the size of tiny Belgium and as vast as all Western Europe. As Harms writes, one of Leopold’s fraudulent but grand-sounding front organizations, the International Association of the Congo, counted the king as its sole known member.
Leopold’s posturing against slavery did not prevent him from taking over this territorial bonanza as his private property, under the cruelly ironic name of the Congo Free State, and imposing a regime of forced labor for the purpose of harvesting hundreds of thousands of pounds of ivory as well as one of the successor commodities to sugar in Europe’s drive toward industrialization and wealth: rubber. In the pursuit of rubber production.
In time, this produced an international scandal that required Leopold to surrender personal control of the Congo to the Belgian state, but as many as 10 million inhabitants of the territory were killed outright or driven to early deaths by the dire conditions that prevailed during and immediately after his rule. The Belgian state ruled the Congo very differently but also catastrophically, extracting enormous wealth from its colony while investing little.
Even today, some Belgians deny this history or try to downplay it, saying they created many roads in the colony as well as schools and hospitals. What they decline to acknowledge in making specious arguments like these is that the limited construction that was done was carried out not through investment but again through the forced labor of Africans, and almost none of Belgium’s colonial subjects in the Congo were provided even secondary education”.
At Independence in 1960, a Belgian Officer wrote on a blackboard at the attention of the Congolese Force Publique policemen: “Avant Indépendance = Après Indépendance”, meaning nothing’s gonna change.
The last 60 years in DRC were indeed a total chaos fuelled by corrupted Belgian politicians and businessmen from Societe Generale, sleeping in bed with the Mobutu regime and others.
Of all people in this world, Belgian leaders should be the one saying less. They have no moral authority to get involved in the search for a solution for the Great Lakes region where they sowed hate and division.
Quoting Howard W. French again: “There can be no excuse for the horror and neglect of Belgian misrule. But even if it had wanted to, that little country never had even close to the kind of resources needed to colonize a territory as immense as the Congo in ways that could produce benefits for its subjects there. Similarly, Belgium today is far too small to dramatically shift Congo’s trajectory in a positive direction”.
If sanctions may be imposed, it’s on Belgium itself. People of the Great Lakes must hold them responsible and claim reparations for having destroyed our societies, looted minerals for a century, killed millions of people and walked away with those murders, in the name of “civilizing the savages”.
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