A commission of the Belgian Parliament on the colonial past, created in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, completed its work on Monday on a finding of failure, for lack of consensus on “apologies” to be made to the former colonies.
The announcement comes on the same day that Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte issued the government’s official apology for the Dutch state’s role in slavery.
The Belgian commission had been considering for almost two and a half years the actions of Belgium in its three former colonies “and the consequences that should be reserved for them”.
This concerns the Congo – the current Democratic Republic of the Congo -, Rwanda and Burundi, which became independent between 1960 and 1962.
Belgian socialists and environmentalists felt that their liberal partners in the ruling coalition bore responsibility for the failure of this commission, by their refusal to vote on a report including such “apologies”.
The French-speaking (Mouvement réformateur, MR) and Flemish (Open VLD) liberals responded by accusing the chairman of the commission – the Flemish ecologist Wouter De Vriendt – of having “attached to his unique point of view”, even if it meant ” sacrificing more than two years of work”.
Monday was the day of the final meeting of the “special colonial past commission” supposed to lead to a series of recommendations made to the Chamber of Deputies. But due to lack of consensus within the majority, the 128 recommendations drafted by Mr. De Vriendt were not submitted to any vote.
“The Liberals sabotaged the work of the commission out of colonial dogmatism,” accused French-speaking environmentalist deputy (Ecolo) Guillaume Defossé, targeting the political family of Prime Minister Alexander De Croo.
“It’s a waste, a huge disappointment,” he added to AFP. Today, back home, the Liberals are not able to come to terms with that past. »
In November, the French-speaking Liberals, through MP Benoît Piedboeuf, announced that recommendation number 69 constituted, in their eyes, a stumbling block.
“Deepest regrets”
This provided that the Chamber “apologize to the Congolese, Burundian and Rwandan peoples for colonial domination and exploitation, violence and atrocities, individual and collective violations of human rights during this period, as well as racism and the discrimination that accompanied them.
Mr. Piedboeuf said he was “radically against” apologies “for the globality of the facts”, which would have created two opposing groups; “the victims on one side, the culprits on the other”.
“Why should all Belgians today apologize? added the Flemish liberal Maggie De Block on November 28.
On June 30, 2020, in an unprecedented step for a descendant of the much maligned Leopold II (who had exploited the Congo as his personal property from 1885 to 1908, using violence), the King of the Belgians, Philippe, had expressed to Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi his “deepest regrets” for the wounds of colonization. Remarks repeated in Kinshasa during the sovereign’s first trip to the DRC in June 2022.
It’s a waste, a huge disappointment. Today, back home, the Liberals are not able to come to terms with that past.
In the eyes of the liberals, the commission should have stuck to these words of the king, an acknowledgment of the misdeeds of colonization which “implies no legal responsibility and cannot therefore give rise to reparations”.
The “obstinacy” in recommending an apology “is all the more regrettable” as “120 recommendations out of 128 achieved consensus” in the parliamentary majority, further argued the MR and the Open VLD.
From the summer of 2020, voices had been raised among the Afro-descendants of Belgium to demand “apologies” beyond these “regrets” from the king. The global shock wave caused by the murder of African-American George Floyd had given rise to demonstrations in Belgium and the unbolting of several statues of Leopold II.
According to Guillaume Defossé, the impossible consensus on the “apologies [est] a new blow” for the Congolese, Rwandan and Burundian populations.
“Nevertheless, there remains all this work done, unpublished remarks, a debate which has been created and must continue”, he notes.