A Small Token of Justice

A court in Belgium ruled on Monday that the government must pay reparations to five mixed-race women who were forcibly removed from their families and placed into care homes during Belgium’s colonial era 70 years ago, according to the BBC.

Then, in the Belgian Congo, thousands of mixed-race children were taken from their mothers by order of the Belgian state which was concerned they would be a threat to their power in the future. The children were placed into orphanages mainly operated by the Catholic Church, often subject to abuse because they were “children of sin,” the Guardian reported.

All five of the plaintiffs, now in their 70s, were taken by the state when under the age of seven. The women launched their legal case for compensation against the Belgian government in 2021, asking for an initial payment of 50,000 euros ($52,340).

The Belgian government has previously acknowledged its wrongdoings, issuing a formal apology to an estimated 20,000 victims of forced family separations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda during the 1940s and 1950s. The government deemed the apology a “step toward awareness and recognition of this part of our national history.”

In 2017, the Catholic church also apologized for its role in the crimes. However, one of the victims, plaintiff Monique Bitu Bingi, had previously said an apology was insufficient: “We were destroyed. Apologies are easy, but when you do something, you have to take responsibility for it.”

The women’s legal battle succeeded at the Brussels Court of Appeal, which overturned a prior decision that found that too much time had passed for the women to be eligible for reparations. The court said the state’s actions were a crime against humanity and removed the statute of limitations.

The court also said that the colonial government had a “plan to systematically search for and abduct children born to a Black mother and a White father.” At the time, most White fathers refused to acknowledge their mixed-race children. Also, the children did not receive Belgian nationality automatically.