Belgian justice had 200 boxes of documents from the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba placed under seal in the Federal Parliament, to which it wishes to have access, the federal prosecutor’s office indicated on 20 January. These are the reports of hearings conducted behind closed doors by Belgian deputies more than twenty years ago, within the framework of this committee. These are documents that Parliament never wanted to make public. According to the daily The Evening (paid link), they relate to “88 hours of meetings behind closed doors”. This sealing “was made in good agreement between justice and Parliament”, assured AFP Eric Van Duyse, spokesperson for the federal prosecution. It aims to allow these documents to be added to the court file, which will still have to be validated by a decision of the investigating court of the Brussels Court of Appeal, said the spokesperson.
Patrice Lumumba, short-lived Prime Minister of the current Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after the independence of the former Belgian Congo in 1960, was assassinated by Katangese separatists helped by Belgian mercenaries on January 17, 1961 in the south- is from his country. He was 35 years old. His body, dissolved in acid, was never found. He was eliminated with the alleged support of senior Belgian state officials and his assassination was the subject of a parliamentary inquiry in Belgium in 2000-2001, then a judicial inquiry after the complaint was filed in Brussels in 2011 by the eldest son of Patrice Lumumba. At the independence of his country, this nationalist leader was perceived as pro-Soviet, representing a threat to Belgian interests, particularly in Katanga, a province rich in copper. Until you qualify as “Devil”, from man to “eliminate”, according to telexes exchanged at the end of 1960 between Brussels and the former colony.
The family’s complaint, which led to the investigation for “war crime”, accused “various administrations of the Belgian State” having “participated in a vast plot for the political and physical elimination of Patrice Lumumba”. Without deciding on a possible trial date in Belgium, the federal prosecutor’s office ensures that “the investigation is continuing by all means allowing a better understanding of what happened”. Today, only two of the ten people initially targeted by the complaint are still alive. They are former diplomat Etienne Davignon, 89, and former senior official Jacques Brassinne de la Buissière, 92, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The authorities of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have postponed until June 2022 the ceremony for the restitution by Belgium of a “relic” of the country’s first Prime Minister, Patrice Emery Lumumba. Initially, Belgium was to officially hand over on June 21, 2021 to DRC President Félix Tshisekedi a tooth that a Belgian police commissioner claims to have taken from Lumumba’s body when he helped make him disappear. In 2000, Belgian police commissioner Gérard Soete told AFP that he cut up and dissolved in acid the bodies of Lumumba and two of his followers, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo, who were murdered at the same time as him. In a documentary broadcast on the German channel ARD the same year, the Belgian commissioner had claimed to have kept teeth from Lumumba, and had shown them.
In 2001, the parliamentary commission of inquiry, the majority of whose hearings were conducted behind closed doors, concluded that “moral responsibility” of Belgium in the assassination. The following year the Belgian government presented the “apologies” from the country.