BRUSSELS \u2014 Belgium apologized on Thursday for the kidnapping, segregation, deportation and forced adoption of thousands of children born to mixed-race couples during its colonial rule of Burundi, Congo and Rwanda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The apology is the first time that Belgium has recognized any responsibility for what historians say was the immense harm the country inflicted<\/a> on the Central African nations, which it colonized for eight decades. Prime Minister Charles Michel offered the apology on Thursday afternoon in front of a plenary session of Parliament, which was attended by dozens of people of mixed race in the visitors gallery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThroughout Belgian colonial Africa, a system of targeted segregation of m\u00e9tis and their families was maintained by the Belgian state and acts were committed that violated the fundamental rights of peoples,\u201d he said, using the term for mixed-race people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis is why, in the name of the federal government, I recognize the targeted segregation of which m\u00e9tis people were victims\u201d under Belgian colonial rule in Africa, and \u201cthe ensuing policy of forced kidnapping\u201d after independence, he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn the name of the federal government,\u201d Mr. Michel said, \u201cI present our apologies to the m\u00e9tis stemming from the Belgian colonial era and to their families for the injustices and the suffering inflicted upon them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI also wish to express our compassion with the African mothers, from which the children were taken,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The prime minister said that the Belgian government would make resources available to finance additional research on the issue, open up its colonial archives to m\u00e9tis people and offer administrative help to those seeking to gain access to their official records and seeking Belgian nationality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some experts on colonial history noted that Belgium\u2019s apology had came late \u2014 nearly 60 years after the three countries gained independence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Racial segregation was a pillar of Belgian colonial rule, historians say. Until the late 1950s, the colonial authorities discouraged interracial romance and banned interracial marriage before the Catholic Church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many white Belgian men, nevertheless, married black Congolese women according to local customs, producing children sometimes called m\u00e9tis. But in the eyes of Belgium, these children undermined official segregation policies and blemished the white race\u2019s prestige, official documents from that time show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fearing a repeat of the Red River Rebellion in Canada in 1869-1870<\/a>, when m\u00e9tis people revolted and overthrew the local government, the Belgian authorities ordered m\u00e9tis children in Congo to be separated from their families, and from the black population as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An estimated 10,000 to 20,000 children were segregated from their parents \u2014 most often from single African mothers \u2014 and placed in orphanages and schools predominantly run by the Catholic Church, historians said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cChildren born out of parents of mixed color during colonial times were always considered as a threat to the colonial enterprise, to profits and to the prestige and the domination of the white race,\u201d said Assumani Budagwa, 65, a Belgian engineer and amateur historian who was born in colonial Congo and whose family experienced the separation of mixed-race children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mr. Budagwa was a co-author of a Parliamentary resolution<\/a> that was unanimously adopted last year urging the government to apologize and recognizing Belgium\u2019s misdeeds regarding the mixed-race children with the complicity of the Roman Catholic Church.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The resolution also demanded that the government open up its colonial archives and grant administrative help to hundreds of people in Congo and in Belgium who still do not possess their official birth certificates, and to those who wish to reconstitute their true family history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around the time when Belgium\u2019s colonies gained independence, in the early 1960s, thousands of m\u00e9tis children were taken from Burundi, Congo and Rwanda to Belgium, where they were either adopted by white parents or raised in Belgian boarding schools. Many are still alive today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Catholic Church apologized in 2017 for its \u201cparticipation\u201d in the kidnapping and segregation of m\u00e9tis children and in the banning of mixed-race marriages. In a letter<\/a>, the Belgian bishops stated: \u201cMany never knew their mother or their father, and many mothers never saw their children again. For a long time, they couldn\u2019t fully exercise their civic rights, and a large number later found itself on the margins of Belgian society in insecurity and hardship.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The letter said, \u201cWe present our apologies to those people for the part taken by the Catholic Church in these deeds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n M\u00e9tis de Belgique<\/a>, a Belgian group representing mixed-race people affected by the segregation, along with their descendants, counts a few hundred active members and fights for their right to obtain Belgian nationality, which in some cases still has not been granted, and to gain access to their families\u2019 colonial records.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While some historians say Belgium\u2019s apology was not sufficient, Mr. Budagwa, co-author of the resolution that led to Thursday\u2019s official apology, was more optimistic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPeoples rarely and with great difficulty recognize their errors and their responsibility in historical crimes,\u201d he said, calling the prime minister\u2019s declaration both historic \u2014 because it was done in the name of the Belgian people \u2014 and symbolic, because it \u201cdoesn\u2019t efface the aftermath of the colonization.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He added, \u201cAnd it is also, above all, human.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" BRUSSELS \u2014 Belgium apologized on Thursday for the kidnapping, segregation, deportation and forced adoption of thousands of children born to mixed-race couples during its colonial rule of Burundi, Congo and Rwanda. The apology is the first time that Belgium has recognized any responsibility for what historians say was the immense harm the country inflicted on the Central African nations, which it colonized… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":131,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/131"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3542"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3543,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3542\/revisions\/3543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/subsaharanafricablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}