The Belgian state has been found guilty of crimes against humanity for the forced removal of five mixed-race children from their mothers in colonial Congo.
In a long-awaited ruling issued on Monday, Belgium’s court of appeal said that five women, born in the Belgian Congo and now in their 70s, had been victims of “systematic kidnapping” by the state when they were removed from their mothers as small children and sent to Catholic institutions because of their mixed-race origins.
“This is a victory and a historic judgment,” Michèle Hirsch, one of the lawyers for the women, told local media. “It is the first time in Belgium and probably in Europe that a court has condemned the Belgian colonial state for crimes against humanity.”
Monique Bitu Bingi, who was removed from her mother aged three, told the Guardian that justice had been done. “I am relieved,” she said. “The judges have recognised that this was a crime against humanity.”
She received news of the judgment alongside the four other women who brought the case in their lawyer’s office. “We jumped for joy,” she said.
Noëlle Verbeken, who was removed from her mother and placed 500km away, told Belgium’s francophone public broadcaster RTBF: “This decision says that we have a certain value in the world. We are recognised.”
Bringing the case with Bitu-Bingi and Verbeken were Léa Tavares Mujinga, Simone Ngalula and Marie-José Loshi. 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, many miles from their home villages.
Reversing an earlier decision, the court of appeal said their forced removal was “an inhuman act” and “persecution constituting a crime against humanity” in accordance with the Nuremberg tribunal statute, recognised by the UN general assembly in 1946.
The five women had launched an appeal after losing their case in a lower court in 2021. 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 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.
The women had limited damages they sought to €50,000, because if they had lost they would be liable to pay the state compensation based on the original claim.
The Belgian ministry of foreign affairs, which represented the government, has been contacted for comment.
Although the precise numbers are unclear, 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 Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.
The system had its origins with Belgium’s King Léopold II, who ruled Congo as his personal fiefdom from 1885 until 1908, when the territory was ceded to the Belgian state. The removals policy was updated in 1952, even after the legal concept of crimes against humanity was established after the horrors of the second world war.
Arriving at the mission at Katende, the girls were enrolled on the register of “mulattoes”, an offensive term to describe a person of mixed parentage. The register stated that their fathers were unknown, a falsehood; the father’s name was even written in brackets in some cases. The women were given new surnames and some had their date of birth falsified.
At the Catholic mission, they were told they were “children of sin” and received meagre rations and little care from nuns, who resented having to look after them. When Congo became independent in 1960, the girls were abandoned by the departing colonial power. In the chaos of civil war that engulfed the newly independent state, two of the girls were raped by militia men.
Decades later, four of the women obtained Belgian citizenship, often after lengthy legal battles. Marie-José Loshi was never granted Belgian nationality and eventually settled in France, where she acquired citizenship. The other four women live in Belgium.
Offering slender relief for the Belgian government, the court decided that the women’s difficulties in obtaining Belgian nationality and official documents about their childhood could not be considered crimes against humanity.
In 2018, Belgium’s then prime minister, Charles Michel, apologised for the treatment of the children of mixed couples, known as métis, saying the state had breached their fundamental human rights. The government set up an official body to help people taken from their parents to trace their origins in the colonial archives. That organisation, Résolution-Métis, is also investigating how many people were affected by the policy, but has said sources were “deficient and fragmentary”.
