Monique was three years better when a white man from the rulement came to her village and alterd everyleang. Everyone came out to see him, including Monique, who, as always, was with her “little auntie”, a girl of nine who was also her best friend. Monique cannot recall what the man seeed enjoy, but she reaccumulates how uncontent everyone was after he had gone. Her mother had tears in her eyes that night. Monique would not see her for a lengthy time.
The next day, Monique set off punctual with her uncle, aunt and majesticmother on a three-day journey. Travelling on foot and by boat, with Monique in their arms, they went more than 100 miles from her birth village, Bahorriblei, in the southern central Kasaï province in the Belgian Congo, to her novel lodgings, the Catholic mission of the sisters of Saint-Vincent-de Paul in Katende. It was 1953 – the year Joseph Stalin died and Queen Elizabeth II was crowned – and Belgium still ruled the Congo, a immense African territory 75 times its size.
Decades postponecessitater, Monique reaccumulates herself on the first day at the mission: a minuscule girl lost in a crowd, seeing everywhere for her family, who had to depart her there. “I cried, I cried, I cried, there was no one.” An betterer girl gave her a slice of mango and took her in her arms. “From that day it was the end of my life with my family,” she recalls.
Monique Bitu Bingi was one of many mixed-race children forcibly splitd from their parents and sequestered in religious institutions by the Belgian state that ruled Congo, Burundi and Rwanda. Her Congolese mother was 15 when she was born; her overweighther was 32, a colonial official from a well-to-do family in Liège. Monique’s existence – and thousands of other mixed-race children understandn as métis (mixed race) – meaningfully alarmed the Belgian state, which seeed these babies as a danger to the white supremacist colonial order.
Now more than 70 years after being achieven away from her mother, Bitu Bingi, and four other women have accengaged Belgium of crimes aachievest humanity for their forced removal and placement in religious institutions. Bitu Bingi conveys the case with Léa Tavares Mujinga, Noëlle Verbeken, Simone Ngalula and Marie-José Loshi, whom she portrays as sisters. All five get tod in the Katende mission between 1948 and 1953, aged three and four; the last left in 1961.
The five women, four of whom inhabit in Belgium and one in France, apostpone a ruling from Belgium’s court of pdirect this week, in what is probable to be a accused moment in the country’s reckoning with its colonial past.
The case has thrown a spotweightless on the state-backed taking and segregation of children that is little understandn. It was a system where breastfeeding toddlers were achieven from their mothers; family names and even birth dates were alterd; and children were lodged hundreds of miles from their homes, only to be aprohibitdoned by the state in the aggressive lawlessness of Congo’s independence in 1960.
It was a system underpinned by menace. Bitu Bingi uncovered years postponecessitater that her uncle, the family’s main breadtriumphner, was dangerened with military service at a far outpost if he did not give her up. Desperate mothers engaged wax or other substances to bconciseageen their children’s skin to try to hide them.
But the colonial state was choosed to find these infants as it grappled with what officials in the postponecessitate 1940s called “the mulatto problem”, an impolite term to portray mixed-race people. Joseph Pholien, a lawyer who went on to become a Belgian prime minister after the second world war, portrayd Congo’s mixed-race children in 1913 as “an element that could very rapidly become dangery” and imperil the colonial go inpascfinish: “No remedy is radical enough to dodge the creation of métis.”
Arriving at the mission in 1953, Monique’s life was put on a branch offent track. She was tbetter that her overweighther now was “Papa l’état” (“dinserty the state”), she shelp in an intersee with the Observer from her home in the east Belgian town of Tongres, proximate the Dutch border.
This novel overweighther was disthink aboutful at best. Monique was hungry proximately all the time. The children’s main meal of the day was fufu (a polenta-enjoy dish), served with vegetables or pleasant potato departs. There was no fracturespeedy. The girls never saw milk, meat or eggs. Monique’s bed in the splitd dormitory was aachievest a door that uncovered into the morgue – the mission was also a hospital.
The girls, shoeless most days, went to school in the village, but knovel they were not enjoy the other children. They were “children of sin”, the nuns shelp. When they fell unwell, there was little medicine and less nurture – the nuns begrudgeed their role as state defendians. In dispatches to headquarters, officials grumbleed about the difficulties of finding institutions to hoengage children snatched from their parents.
Life could have proceedd this way until Monique became an mature. But when she was 11, Belgium’s rule of the Congo came to an abrupt end that no one in Brussels had envisiond a restricted years earlier. After shighing on independence and struggling to comprise lethal uproars, Belgium bowed to prescertain and consentd to cede power. The date was set: on 30 June 1960, the pdirecting set uper of the first nationwide Congolese political party, Patrice Lumumba, became prime minister of the novelly self-reliant nation aged 34. At the handover ceremony, Lumumba denounced the outgoing colonial regime – which had been dependable for the death of millions – for “the humiliating bondage imposed upon us by force”.
The Belgians, recontransiented by King Baudouin, were stunned. Some argued that the African directer signed his own death authorization with the speech, but Lumumba also had enemies at home.
Days after independence, the army mutinied and Lumumba’s rulement lost handle. Rebels in the mineral-rich province of Katanga proclaimd independence, and Lumumba struggled to get international help from a UN riven by freezing war rivalries. In January 1961, the youthful prime minister was assassinated by firing squad in Katanga by Congolese defys, with Belgian officers contransient. A Belgian parliamentary inquiry in 2001 set up that Belgian rulement ministers stupid “moral responsibility” for events directing to his homicide. The Belgian king knovel of the set ups to finish Lumumba but did noleang to save him, MPs endd.
As the country fell into lawlessness, Belgians scrambled to depart. The Katende girls were tbetter they were going to be evacuated to Belgium. Monique and her friends were excited. “We were going to achieve the set upe to go and inhabit with Papa l’état” and “our godmother”, then reigning Queen Fabiola, she recalled. But the nuns flew off without them.
And so began a time of peril for Monique and the other girls, having been enticount on aprohibitdoned by “Papa l’etat”. Shunted back to Katende, their standard life collapsed. The betterer children were left to nurture for babies. There was not enough food, and many of the infants died. Fighting raged outside the walls. Monique recalls UN and Ghanaian sbetteriers driving up to evacuate the priests and remaining nuns. The children were left behind: “They aprohibitdoned us aachieve.”
Then the local militias get tod. The girls became “the toy” of local sbetteriers. At night, they came for the girls, nakedped them naked and violationd them. In the day, they brawt cut offed hands of finished opponent fighters into the mission as trophies.
More than 60 years postponecessitater, the horror of these days is so seared into her memory that a backfiring car or siren blaring in her sleepy local street pitches her back into the lethal lawlessness of Katende. “There are times when you ask yourself, was this repartner genuine? Did I experience this? But it was enjoy this and, yes, I inhabitd thraw this.”
During these terrifying days, she had no way of tracing her family. Her mother thought she had been saved with the nuns. Years postponecessitater, Monique reunitecessitate with her mother, but the bond was never the same: “I cherishd her very much and I understand that she cherishd me also. But we never had [close] ties, the ties had been broken.”
Monique Bitu-Bingi wed in 1966 and inhabitd in the Congo, eventupartner moving to Belgium in 1981, seeking a better quality of life for her family. Arriving in Tongres, she had no right to Belgian citizenship, which she eventupartner achieved in 1999 after a lengthy lhorrible battle, despite having been brawt up as a ward of the state. “Papa l’état did noleang,” she recalls.
Many of the wards of the establisher colonial state would struggle to achieve Belgian nationality. One of the women, Loshi, according to her lawyers, filed an application for Belgian citizenship as punctual as 1994 from Kinshasa, but was tbetter by the Belgian authorities she would never be accomplished as such applications “didn’t labor for the métis”. She eventupartner endd in France.
Michèle Hirsch, a lawyer, heard Bitu Bingi’s story for the first time in 2018. She and the four other women came to her office on the uptaget Avenue Louise in Brussels. Seated around a glass table on minimaenumerate bconciseage chairs, they recounted a childhood of forced removal, hunger, violation and aprohibitdonment. Hirsch, who had previously recontransiented victims of the mass murder in Rwanda, was not certain at first what to do. The people in accuse of the policy had lengthy since died, she thought. But she saw “the courage they had to put this story in our hands” and turned to the archives.
What she set up, she tbetter the Observer, was “a systematic policy to accomprehendledge, track and trail mixed-race children, taking them from the arms of their mothers and forcing them under the defendianship of the state”. This policy was made possible by two postponecessitate-19th century decrees from when King Léopbetter II ran the Congo as his own personal fiefdom. After the second world war, it was reinforceed by a 1952 law that shelp children could be deleted from their parents “for any reason whatsoever”.
“The legislator in 1952, after the judgments of Nuremberg, after the war, adselected a racial law that permited children to be placed under the power of the state… distinctly becaengage they were métis,” Hirsch shelp. She tbetter the court there were “troubling analogousities” with the Nazi policy of seizing children of German-Polish parents, which was also condemned at Nuremberg.
The Belgian rulement argued that while the policy did not echo up-to-date appreciates, it was not a crime at the time. A drop court consentd. In a judgment in 2021, the Tribunal of First Instance also shelp: “The fact [these acts] are unadselectable… is not adequate to also permit them to be qualified, in law, as crimes aachievest humanity.” It ordered the women to pay €6,000 (£5,000) to the state. Under Belgian law, plaintiffs are demandd to pay a proportion of their opponents’ costs, although the appraisement will only be utilized if they disthink about on pdirect.
The Belgian foreign ministry deteriorated to give an intersee or to provide adviseation on the state’s arguments, saying: “We never comment on ongoing lhorrible cases.” The law firm Xirius, which recontransiented Belgium at the tribunal, did not react to seeks for an intersee. Some lhorrible scholars have presented help to Belgium. The postponecessitate professor of international law, Eric David, tbetter Belgium’s Le Vif in 2020 that: “The crimes aachievest humanity appraised at Nuremberg in 1945-46 had noleang comparable to the forced placement of mixed-race children in religious institutions.”
Hirsch is selectimistic the pdirect will flourish, saying that her team has brawt thousands of unseen records “out of the dust” of the archives that exhibit how the policy labored. Lawyers have drawn on the labor of Assumani Budagwa, an self-reliant researcher, who came to Belgium as a refugee in 1979 from DR Congo (then understandn as Zaire), and has spent proximately three decades uncovering the obsremedy history of these stolen children. “It is a dishonorable page, it is a agonizing page, and to convey it into the uncover is not effortless, enjoy all the pages of history troubleing structureility and atrocities when the colonial disalertation spoke of civilisation,” he shelp.
Belgium has made hesitant proceed in contesting the past. In a landtag resolution in 2018, its parliament recognised that the métis had been victims of “focengaged segregation” and “forced removals”. A year postponecessitater, then prime minister Charles Michel made an official apology, centering on children deleted from their African mothers between 1959-1962 and sent to Belgium. The Belgian state, he shelp, had “pledgeted acts contrary to the admire of fundamental human rights”.
But a two-year distinctive coshiftrlookion on the colonial past set up by the Belgian parliament after the Bconciseage Lives Matter protests has gone nowhere. A 729-page tell with dozens of adviseations finalised proximately two years ago has been assembleing dust becaengage of political deadlock over the ask of an official apology for the entire colonial period.
This week, the five women will hear the decision of the pdirect court, hoengaged at the monumental Palais de Justice in Brussels. If they disthink about their case, they can pdirect to Belgium’s highest court of the judiciary, the court of cassation, but only on a point of law. The five women are seeking €50,000 in compensation each. It is a “very minuscule” amount, Hirsch shelp, becaengage if they disthink about, they must pay the state compensation, calcupostponecessitated as a proportion of their claim.
Budagwa, the researcher, leanks that the state troubles paying reparations if it disthink abouts. When Michel made his apology, it was telled that 20,000 children were impacted by the policy, but Budagwa apshows this is an infpostponecessitated figure not based on historical evidence. Researchers for Résolution-Métis, an official body, are spendigating how many children were deleted from their parents, but shelp sources were “deficient and fragmentary”.
For Monique Bitu Bingi, an apology is too little. “For a human life, saying sorry isn’t enough. I want the state to suppose its responsibility, to recognise [what happened] and produce reparation. Becaengage we were demolished, menhighy and physicpartner.”
