By Enyichukwu Enemanna
A court in Belgium has ordered the government to pay reparations to five women with mixed race who were forcibly abducted from their families in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the colonial era.
The women who are now in their 70s, were taken from their mothers when they were young children and placed in orphanages under a state policy.
The government had a “plan to systematically search for and abduct children born to a black mother and a white father”, the court held.
During the ruling on Monday, judges described this as a crime against humanity and said the kidnappings were “an inhumane act of persecution”.
The Belgium government had in 2019 issued a formal apology to about 20,000 victims of forced family separations in DR Congo, Burundi and Rwanda.
Belgium ruled DRC as a colony from 1908 to 1960.
The five women Monique Bitu Bingi, Léa Tavares Mujinga, Noëlle Verbeken, Simone Ngalula and Marie-José Loshi launched a legal case for compensation in 2021.
They were all taken by the state under the age of seven and placed in orphanages mainly managed by the Catholic Church.
“We were destroyed. Apologies are easy, but when you do something you have to take responsibility for it”, Bitu Bingi told AFP news agency earlier.
Their legal fight succeeded on Monday in the Brussels Court of Appeal.
The court voided judgement of a lower court which held that too much time had passed for them to be eligible for compensation.
“The court orders the Belgian State to compensate the appellants for the moral damage resulting from the loss of their connection to their mother and the damage to their identity and their connection to their original environment,” the judges said.
The women had asked for an initial payment of €50,000 (£41,400).
This is the first case in Belgium to have highlighted the estimated 20,000 children born to white settlers and local black women who were forcibly removed from their families during the 1940s and 1950s.
Most white fathers refused to recognise their mixed-race children or acknowledge paternity, and the children also did not automatically receive Belgian nationality.
