Belgium's history in Congo moves to horror

Monday, February 21, 2005 · Last updated 11:35 p.m. PT

Belgium's history in Congo moves to horror

By RAF CASERT
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

TERVUREN, Belgium -- In the massive Colonial Palace King Leopold II built as a propaganda tool for his African adventure, a new blockbuster show finally starts to lift the veil on the horror the monarch spawned in his Congo a century ago.

With "Memory of Congo, The Colonial Era" the nation takes its most exhaustive look yet at its past in Africa. And the questions are already out whether Belgium has gone far enough in admitting guilt over Leopold's ruthless rule from 1885 to 1908, or whether the show remains stuck in a morass of nuance. daunting statue of the king was moved from a central location to a far corner of the museum to make room for the show's pictures of the cruelty he inflicted on his African subjects.

In one, a father from the Nsala tribe is contemplating the chopped off hand and foot of his daughter in front of him - a victim of the goons of the Anglo Belgian India Rubber Company. Such mutilation was the kind of punishment meted out for rebellion or inability to pay taxes to the colonial masters and turned Belgium into a symbol of rapacious European imperialism.

The accompanying catalogue further lists random killings by the hundreds, all to slate the world's hunger for rubber around the turn of the century and Leopold's need for cash when he ran the colony, known as the Congo Free State, as a personal fiefdom.
(snip/...)

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apeurope_story.asp?category=1103&slug=Belgium%20Colonial%20Congo



Leopold II

Unreal

and was the object of numerous protests and boycotts at the turn of the 20th century. Mark Twain wrote and lectured extensively about Belgian attrocities. King Leopold's Soliloquy (1905) is Twain's incredibly damning indictment of Leopold's bloody rule. The book is available on the web at http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/i2l/kls.html  

It's shocking that it's taken this long for there to be acknowledgement in *Belgium* -- after all, that's what this article is about.

The actual death toll is probably between 8 and 9 million. By that measure Leopold was more of a Hitler than a Stalin. It's important to keep these things in perspective.

was responsible for "the blackest pages in the history of Africa. " His policies reduced the native population (of the Congo) from between 20 to 40 million in 1890 to 8,500,000 in 1911.

Mark Twain wrote and lectured extensively about Belgian attrocities. King Leopold's Soliloquy is Twain's incredibly damning indictment of Leopold's bloody rule. The book is available on the web at http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/i2l/kls.html

I have in my head that about 9 million were murdered, though I don't have a sense as to how that breaks down with respect to exact causes, e.g., how many were brutally slain, how many were tortured to death, how many were worked to death, how many starved because their foodstores or livelihood had been deliberately destroyed.

Here is a cheat sheet of sorts for death tolls:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat2.htm#Congo

I will try to find a source for the number in my head, because it doesn't appear to be listed by White.

Anyway, the point about 10 million being an exaggeration should be regarded as sarcastic. If one would stipulate that the number "between 8 and 9 million" may well be correct, then the number 10 million would hardly be an exaggeration on par with the representation that "Belgium did only good things during the colonial days," as was claimed by Guido Gryseels, the museum's director.

but Stalin is said to have been responsible for tens of millions of deaths. http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html

that go on today.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040308&s=goodwin
Silence=Rape
by Jan Goodwin The Nation March 8, 2004

"Last May, 6-year-old Shashir was playing outside her home near Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), when armed militia appeared. The terrified child was carried kicking and screaming into the bush. There, she was pinned down and gang-raped. Sexually savaged and bleeding from multiple wounds, she lay there after the attack, how long no one knows, but she was close to starving when finally found. Her attackers, who'd disappeared back into the bush, wiped out her village as effectively as a biblical plague of locusts. . . .

In the Congo today, age is clearly no protection from rape. A woman named Maria was 70 when the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia that led Rwanda's 1994 genocide and now number between 20,000 and 30,000 of the estimated 140,000 rebels in the DRC, came to her home. "They grabbed me, tied my legs apart like a goat before slaughter, and then raped me, one after the other," she told me. "Then they stuck sticks inside me until I fainted." During the attack Maria's entire family--five sons, three daughters and her husband--were murdered. "War came. I just saw smoke and fire. Then my life and my health were taken away," she says. The tiny septuagenarian with the sunken eyes was left with a massive fistula where her bladder was torn, causing permanent incontinence. She hid in the bush for three years out of fear that the rebels might return, and out of shame over her constantly soiled clothes. Yet Maria was one of the more fortunate ones. She'd finally made it to a hospital. Two months before we met, she had undergone reconstructive surgery. The outcome is uncertain, however, and she still requires a catheter. . . .

Rape has become a defining characteristic of the five-year war in the DRC, says Anneke Van Woudenberg, the Congo specialist for Human Rights Watch. So, too, has mutilation of the victims. "Last year, I was stunned when a 30-year-old woman in North Kivu had her lips and ears cut off and eyes gouged out after she was raped, so she couldn't identify or testify against her attackers. Now, we are seeing more and more such cases," she says. As the rebels constantly seek new ways to terrorize, their barbarity becomes more frenzied. "

Additional articles from _The Nation_ on the Congo.
http://www.thenation.com/directory/view.mhtml?t=03010o

... has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others."

These comments by Eduardo Galeano (Open Veins of Latin America) are applicable to more than one continent and time.

I've seen the devil of violence and the devil of greed and the devil
of hot desire. ... But as I stood on that hillside, I foresaw that in
the blinding sunshine of that land, I would become acquainted with a
flabby, pretending weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.

--Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness