A court has ordered Belgium to pay millions of dollars in compensation to five mixed-race women who were forcibly taken from their homes in the Belgian Congo as children, under a colonial-era practice that judges said was a “crime against humanity”.
The landmark ruling on Monday by the Brussels Court of Appeal came after years of legal battle by the aggrieved women. It sets a historic precedent for state-sanctioned abductions that saw thousands of children kidnapped from today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo because of their racial makeup.
An earlier ruling from a lower court in 2021 rejected the women’s claims.
However, the Appeals court on Monday ordered the Belgian state to “compensate the appellants for the moral damage resulting from the loss of their connection to their mothers and the damage to their identity and their connection to their original environment”. The five women will receive 250,000 euros ($267,000) combined.
Monique Bitu Bingi (71), one of the women who brought the case in 2020, told Al Jazeera she was satisfied with the ruling.
Why were the women kidnapped?
The five plaintiffs, including Bitu Bingi, were among an estimated 5,000 to 20,000 mixed-race children who were snatched from their mothers in the former Belgian Congo (today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo) and forcibly taken to faraway cities, or, in some cases, shipped to Belgium for adoption.
Following the violent rule of King Leopold II, which resulted in the deaths and mutilations of millions of Congolese, the Belgian state took over the occupation and continued to operate an immensely exploitative system over the colony between 1908 and 1960.
Belgium also controlled the then Ruanda-Urundi, or today’s Rwanda and Burundi, where hundreds, if not thousands of bi-racial children were also taken.
Now called Metis, a French term meaning ‘mixed’, the children were kidnapped between 1948 and 1961, in the lead-up to Congo’s independence.
Belgian colonial authorities believed that bi-racial children threatened the white supremacy narrative they had continually pushed and that they used to justify colonialism, experts say.
“They were feared because their mere existence was shaking the very foundations of this racial theory that was at the core of the colonial project,” Delphine Lauwers, an archivist and historian at the State Archives of Belgium told Al Jazeera.
Authorities
systematically discriminated against the children and referred to them as “children of sin”. While white Belgian men were not legally allowed to marry African women, such interracial unions existed. Some children were also born to women as a result of rape, in situations where African housekeepers were treated as concubines.
Catholic missions were key to the abductions. From a young age, bi-racial children were snatched or coerced away from their mothers and sent to orphanages or missionaries, some in Congo or Belgium. The state justified the practice based on a colonial-era law that allowed for the confinement of bi-racial children to state or religious institutions.
Some of the Belgian fathers refused to acknowledge paternity – because they were from supposedly reputable homes – and so, in many cases, the children were declared to be orphaned or without known fathers.
Colonial authorities also changed the children’s names, first so they would not affect their father’s reputation, and also so the children would not be able to connect with their family members. It was not until 1959, when the three colonies were near attaining independence, that the kidnapping and shipping of children from the region began to abate.
In Belgium, some of the children were not accepted because of their mixed backgrounds. Some never received Belgian nationality and became stateless. Metis said they were treated as third-class citizens in Belgium for a long time. Most of those affected can still not access their birth records or find their parents.
