Belgian Court Rules Colonial-Era Family Separations Were Crimes Against Humanity, Awards Reparations To Victims

by Daniel Johnson December 8, 2024 The government will have to pay reparations to the families of five mixed-race women who were forcibly separated from their families in the colonial-era Belgian Congo. In his 1899 semi-autobiographical novella Heart of Darkness, author Joseph Conrad explored the horrors of colonialism, which centered on the exploitation and oppression of African people in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Belgium. On Dec. 2, a court in Belgium ruled that the country will now have to pay for its crimes against the Congolese people. The Belgian Congo was a Belgian colony in Central Africa from 1908 until independence in 1960 and became the Republic of the Congo. According to the BBC, the government will have to pay reparations to the families of five mixed-race women who were forcibly separated from their families in the colonial-era Belgian Congo. The women, who are now all in their 70s, are owed the compensation because they were taken from their mothers as young children and placed in various orphanages, which the court said was evidence of Belgium’s “plan to systematically search for and abduct children born to a Black mother and a white father.” The...