this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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Concensus is that is was not so much "the Belgians", but mostly king Leopold II and his band of mercenaries. The Belgian government fucked up by allowing it to persist for so long.
Yeah, Congo was his personal colony.
Lots of members of civil society and private companies participated in the atrocities though. And Belgium has been a democracy since its independence, so "the people" are further responsible by being complacent despite contemporary reporting on the atrocities (especially from British investigators as I remember it).
Then the Belgian government continuously failed the Congolese people, especially with the decolonization process which was rushed and ill-prepared which led to a civil war and the rise of Mobutu.
In Rwanda Belgium was one of the actors who cowardly failed to act to prevent genocide.
To say "it's the king" or "it's the government" is way too easy. The country as a whole is responsible for what happened to the Belgian Congo.
It' also way too easy to blame the country as a whole. We're talking 120 years ago, people mostly had to believe what they were told. The availability of most information was non-existent, and lots of people were illiterate. You might think that lots op people live in echo chambers today, but back then the church told you how you should behave and that was it.
.... This was Belgium, not a backwater shithole. It was one of the richest countries in the world, the illiteracy rate was already very low. The enlightenment was two centuries prior and Belgium was very much part of it.
The individual baker who never set foot in the Congo may not be personally responsible, but there definitely is a collective responsibility from the population. Like I said, this was reported on and I am sure that if you go back you will find all the major newspapers reported on it long before the Belgian government took back control. It was just politically convenient for most to ignore Leopold II's exactions.
Nowadays the king is more a costly ceremonial position but i can imagine back then no one dared say no to their monarchs whims.
Not quite, back then the king had more power, but certainly no absolute power. However, the Congo state was not a part of Belgium but the king's own colony, so he did have absolute power there.
Bit of a weird situation in Belgium. There was a delicate balance of power between the monarch and the rest of the government. The Congo Free State was under the king's personal authority, until word of the atrocities got out and the Belgian parliament took it from him.
They didn't really take it, they were kind of forced to buy it. At a high price no less, even as the "profitability" was already in steep decline. Congo had lots of wild rubber trees, which the colonies of the competition (the other Western countries) didn't have. Rubber tree plantations took a few decades (iirc) to become operable. Leopold II took full advantage of the window of opportunity to extract as much wealth and resources as possible, using ruthless overseers that commited incredible atrocities. The situation got so extreme that it caused criticism and condemnation from all over the world, which was unique at the time. Leopold II was able to flatter, bribe, lie and blackmail his way to his own colony and the means to keep it for years. He was loaned lots of money by the Belgian government during the time he had the colony. He even managed to convince the international community that he was a philanthropist caring deeply about the people he was in reality abusing in every way imaginable. By the time the Belgian government bought the colony, the first plantations were already in operation and more importantly, the condemnation of the scandals and the violence made Leopold holding onto the Congo untenable. This is not to say the Belgian government was somehow innocent, the atrocities did not immediately stop after the transfer of ownership, and even before a lot of Belgians had benefited from the colony in some way. But by far the lion's share of the riches stolen from the Congo went straight to Leopold as the sole owner and ruler of the Congo. He used this incredible wealth to fund megalomanic extensions to the royal palace and other buildings in his possession, such as giant mansions in France. Iirc he didn't even pay off his debts to the Belgian government.
I could go on but this comment already got way too long. For anyone interested, King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild is a fantastic read. As a Belgian, I think this should be mandatory reading, it's crazy how we hardly learn any of this stuff.
I remember finding a copy in my high school library and reading it, and just being blown away that I had never even heard of what was very clearly a massive atrocity.
It would still not be "the Belgians" then, but the Belgian monarch and the government. At that time especially, that had very little to do with the Belgian people