Fatshimetrie
In a landmark decision, a Brussels appeals court ruled Monday that the Belgian state committed a crime against humanity in the case of five mixed-race women who were taken from their black mothers at a young age, in a landmark case exposing the nation’s colonial past in Africa.
The five women have been waging a nearly six-year legal battle to force Belgium to acknowledge its responsibility for the suffering of thousands of mixed-race children. Known as “métis,” the children were taken from their families and placed in religious institutions and homes by the Belgian authorities who ruled Congo from 1908 to 1960.
A first-instance ruling had initially rejected their appeal in 2021, but they have appealed.
“It’s a relief for my mother now that she finally has closure,” said Monique Fernandes, the daughter of Monique Bintu Bingi, one of the five plaintiffs. “It has finally been recognized as a crime against humanity,” Fernandes told The Associated Press.
The original ruling said the policy, while unacceptable, was not part of a widespread or systematic, deliberately destructive policy that constitutes a crime against humanity and should be seen in the context of European colonialism.
Monday’s ruling also orders the state to pay damages of about 50,000 euros to each of the plaintiffs, which Fernandes said would help cover any costs involved. “We didn’t want to settle for a symbolic moral euro, because that would be a kind of insult after everything my mother endured,” she added.
The five women, now in their 70s and 80s, filed their lawsuit in 2020, amid growing demands for Belgium to reexamine its colonial past in Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.
Following protests against racial inequality in the United States, several statues of King Leopold II, who is blamed for the deaths of millions of Africans during Belgian colonization, have been vandalized in Belgium, and some have been removed.
In 2019, the Belgian government apologized for the state’s role in taking thousands of babies from their African mothers. And for the first time in the country’s history, a reigning king expressed regret four years ago for the violence perpetrated by the former colonial power.
The lawyers explained that the five plaintiffs were between 2 and 4 years old when Belgian colonialism tore them from their families, at the request of the Belgian colonial administration, in collaboration with local authorities of the Catholic Church.
According to the legal documents, in all five cases, the fathers did not exercise parental authority, and the Belgian administration threatened the girls’ Congolese families with reprisals if they refused to let them go.
The lawyers explained that the Belgian state’s strategy was aimed at preventing interracial unions and isolating mixed-race children, known as “children of shame,” to ensure they would not claim a connection to Belgium later in life.
“We were always told: look, we did so much good in Congo. But there is also such a dark history,” Fernandes said.