A Belgian court has ordered the government to compensate five mixed-race women who were forcibly removed from their families in the colonial Belgian Congo, BBC reports.
The women, now in their 70s, were taken from their mothers in early childhood and placed in orphanages in accordance with government policy. The court said the government had a “plan to systematically seek out and abduct children born to a black mother and a white father.”
On Monday, the judges called it a crime against humanity and said the abductions were an “inhuman act of persecution.”
In 2019, the Belgian government formally apologised to some 20,000 victims of forced family separation in Congo, as well as Burundi and Rwanda. Congo was administered by Belgium as a colony from 1908 to 1960.
Monique Bitu Bingi, Léa Tavares Mujinga, Noëlle Verbeken, Simone Ngalula and Marie-José Loshi began a legal process demanding compensation in 2021. They were all removed by the state before the age of seven and placed in orphanages largely run by the Catholic Church. Bitu Bingi previously told AFP news agency:
“We were destroyed. Apologies are easy, but when you do something you have to take responsibility for it.”
On Monday, their legal fight succeeded in the Brussels Court of Appeal, which overturned a previous court ruling that ruled too much time had passed for them to claim damages. Because the court ruled the state’s actions were a crime against humanity, it lifted the statute of limitations.
“The court orders the Belgian State to compensate the appellants for the moral damage resulting from the loss of their connection to their mother and the damage to their identity and their connection to their original environment,” the judges said.
The women had asked for an initial sum of €50,000 (£41,400). It is the first case in Belgium to deal with some 20,000 children born to white settlers and local black women who were forcibly removed from their families in the 1940s and 1950s.
Most white fathers refused to recognise their mixed-race children or acknowledge paternity, and the children were not automatically granted Belgian citizenship either.
Consequently, they were taken into care and placed in church-run orphanages, where in many cases they were further abused.
In 2017, the Catholic Church apologised to the victims for its involvement in the scandal. And in 2019, the Belgian government apologised for its involvement as part of a “step towards awareness and recognition of this part of our national history.”
