******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
Belgium’s colonial crimes in the Congo. A duty to remember https://www.cadtm.org/Belgium-s-colonial-crimes-in-the-Congo-A-duty-to-remember <https://www.cadtm.org/Belgium-s-colonial-crimes-in-the-Congo-A-duty-to-remember> This policy eventually triggered an enormous international campaign against the crimes perpetrated by the regime of Leopold II. Black pastors in the United States were protesting against this situation, then were joined by British activist E.D. Morel. Morel worked for a British company in Liverpool, and was regularly called on to travel to Antwerp. He observed that while Leopold II claimed that Belgium was undertaking commercial exchanges with the Congo Free State, ships were returning from the Congo with cargoes of elephant tusks and thousands of kilos of rubber, and the return cargoes were mainly arms and foodstuffs for the colonial forces. Morel considered this to be a very strange kind of trade, a strange kind of exchange. At the time, those Belgians supporting Leopold II never acknowledged this truth. They declared that Morel represented the interests of British imperialism and only criticized the Belgians in order to take their place. Paul Janson, a member of parliament who gave his name to the main auditorium of the Free University of Brussels, declared, I shall never criticize the actions of Leopold, because those who criticize him, especially the British, do so only in the spirit of ‘move over and make room for us’. However, criticism grew, with books such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and The Crime of the Congo, a too-little known work by Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. An international campaign against the exploitation of the Congo generated demonstrations in the United States and also in Great Britain, finally producing results. Leopold found himself obliged to set up an international commission of enquiry in 1904, which met on the spot, in the Congo, to take evidence. The testimonies received there are overwhelming. They are available in manuscript form in the Belgian state archives. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
