BELGIAN CONGO

Belgian Congo

Belgian Congo

Introduction

There is no question that under King Leopold's direct, massacres, hostage-taking, rape, death by starvation as a outcome of state or business activities, and extremes of personal cruelty were widespread occurrences. More debatable is if they should be categorised as genocide. Lindqvist (1998) sees the genocidal practices of the Free State, German South-West Africa and other colonies as antecendent of the implementation in Europe of Kurtz's injunction: 'Exterminate all the brutes!' Hochschild (1998), while endorsing demographic estimates that the community was decreased by round a half—by about ten million people—during Leopold's direct and the directly next period, maintains that this 'was not, firmly talking a genocide. The Congo state was not deliberately seeking to eradicate one specific ethnic assembly from the face of the earth' (1998: 205). As in Stalin's USSR, mass killing was less important than starvation, exhaustion and infection in depleting the population. Such killings drop out-of-doors numerous definitions of genocide (Green and Ward 2004: 166), but inside that suggested by Harff and Gurr (1988: 360): 'the advancement and execution of principles by a state or its agents which outcome in the death of a considerable percentage of a group.' Like other genocidal  regimes, Europeans in the Congo conveyed out mass killing on a large scale, selected their victims on the surrounds of ethnicity and taken up an mind-set to the victims that excluded them from what Fein (1990) calls the 'universe of obligation'—a concept pithily conveyed by the African who notified a agreeable missionary: 'Whether they cut off our heads or that of a pullet it is all the identical to them' (quoted by Hochschild 1998: 126). Like latest rulers of Guatemala and Iraq, the state was arranged to massacre whole villages in alignment to subdue the residual population: 'We should battle them [the people of a certain village] until their unconditional proposal has been got, or their complete extermination', one District Commissioner administered his subordinate (quoted by Hochschild 1998: 228-9). Hochschild furthermore cites clear clues of what Jones (2002) calls 'gendercide': large percentages of the male community in specific localities were killed or worked to death, while women were abducted, held hostage and raped, but more often survived. 

Discussion

Although the notion of genocide was unidentified in Leopold's time, the state clearly violated the lawful and lesson measures of the day. In specific, the Berlin Act of 1885, which identified Leopold's sovereignty, furthermore obliged him 'to watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to look after the enhancement of the situation of their moral and material well-being, and to assist in stifling slavery', as well as to defend free trade for the advantage of other European forces (in Harlow and Carter 2003: 31). As Conrad discerned in an open note to Roger Casement, the illegality of the Free State's conduct assessed it out from previous atrocities for example the slave trade, which 'was an old established pattern of financial activity; it was not the monopoly of one little country established to the detriment of remainder of the civilized world in defiance of international treaties and in bold disregard of humanitarian declarations' (in Harlow and Carter 2003: 740). An early historian of the Congo made a alike point: The principle of ...