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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/europe/story.jsp?story=105358
Belgium admits role in killing of African leader
By Stephen Castle in Brussels
17 November 2001
Forty years after the unsolved murder of Africa's most promising
post-independence leader, Belgium has owned up to its role in an
assassination which became a symbol of colonial wrongdoing.
The findings of an official inquiry published yesterday give a damning
account of Belgium's part in the murder in 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, the
Congo's first premier, and said a Belgian minister then in office was
morally responsible.
Eighteen months of research by parliamentarians and experts has produced a
painstaking account of how officials, ministers and even Belgium's King
Baudouin either plotted to kill Lumumba or were aware that others were doing
so. In particular it chronicles how Belgium handed Lumumba to his enemies in
the breakaway province of Katanga without requesting guarantees of his
safety a move which sealed his fate.
The commission of inquiry did not call specifically for an apology to the
Congo, but invited parliament to debate the issue. The Foreign Minister,
Louis Michel, who set up the investigation, may make an expression of regret
next week when he visits Kinshasa.
Lumumba, born into a peasant family in Kasai province, became an icon of the
left after his untimely death in January 1961. Less than a year before, in
June 1960, he had attacked the racism and paternalism of the outgoing
colonial rulers in an breathtaking speech in front of King Baudouin and the
Belgian Prime Minister, Gaston Eyskens. His words crystallised a rift with
Belgium and its Western allies, increased Cold War suspicions that Lumumba
was a communist subversive and strengthened the determination to get rid of
him.
Within days of independence, Congo was in turmoil as Belgium intervened
militarily and helped to orchestrate the secession of the mineral-rich
Katanga province, led by Moise Tshombe. As he battled to prevent the
disintegration of the country, Lumumba was detained and, on 17 January 1961,
transferred to Katanga. Within five hours of his arrival, he had been
tortured and executed by a firing squad commanded by a Belgian.
Even as the government in Brussels insisted that Lumumba was alive and well,
a Belgian police commissioner named Gerard Soete cut up the body and
dissolved it in acid, keeping two teeth as a grisly souvenir. Yesterday's
report was produced by a unique inquiry, which opened the Belgian royal
family's archives and its security services, and raided the homes of some
key players who are still alive.
Initially dismissed as an irrelevant sideshow, the tribunal silenced its
critics through painstaking work which proved the complicity of much of the
Belgian establishment in the destabilisation of a newly-independent nation.
Daan Schalck, a Flemish socialist parliamentarian on the inquiry, said: "We
have seen that the Belgian government and the king pursued a different
policy in the Congo. We have seen that even among the officials advising the
minister they were making plans to kill Lumumba, who was the Prime Minister
of Congo, and that the minister knew about it."
Few leading Belgian figures emerge well, King Baudouin included. With his
own informants in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) the king sometimes seemed to
be running a policy at odds with that of his government. The inquiry
established that he saw at least one letter which revealed that Tshombe
planned to eliminate Lumumba. Although Baudouin marked the document himself,
there is no evidence he did anything to avert the plans or that he even
passed the information to his own government.
However, the chief villain in Brussels emerges in the shape of the minister
for African affairs, Harold Aspremont Lynden, who had himself written a
letter referring to the need for Lumumba's "elimination". Here the
tribunal's findings are careful. There was clearly a plan to murder Lumumba
since he was taken swiftly to a point of execution where preparations had
been made. While Aspremont Lynden approved the transfer to Katanga, there is
no evidence he knew about the murder plot.
Nevertheless, the minister was well aware of the threat to Lumumba, sought
no guarantees of his safety and therefore bore a moral responsibility for
the assassination.
Evidence that Britain and the USA played a role in the killing were not
investigated.
Belgium's 19th-century colonisation of Congo wasparticularly brutal and
history has coloured subsequent relations. The inquiry president, Geert
Versnick, said its work had provided an important way for Belgium to
confront its past and to repair relations which Africa.
But it also tells a more simple human story. As Mr Versnick put it: "I am
shocked by the lack of respect for the life of a human being. At that time
the fact that Mr Lumumba should not be in power was the most important thing
for Belgium. We do not say that the murder was planned by Belgium, but they
[in Brussels] did not care."
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