King Leopold's legacy of DR Congo
violence
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Instead, as the makers of BBC Four documentary White King, Red Rubber, Black Death powerfully argue, the king unleashed new horrors on the African continent. Torment and rape He turned his "Congo Free State" into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people.
Meanwhile Congo's soldiers have never moved away from the role allocated to them by Leopold - as a force to coerce, torment and rape an unarmed civilian population. Chopping hands As the BBC's reporter in DR Congo, I covered stories that were loud echoes of what was happening 100 years earlier.
This rule was seldom observed as soldiers kept shooting monkeys and then later chopping off human hands to provide their alibis. 'Foreign correspondents' Director Peter Bate uses documented accounts of such atrocities to present an imaginary court case against the monarch who he compares to a subsequent European tyrant, Adolf Hitler. He has an actor play the bearded, heavily-set Leopold, fidgeting nervously as damning testimonies are read out, compiled by the foreign correspondents of the day, the missionaries. John Harris of Baringa, for example, was so shocked by what he had come across that he felt moved to write a letter to Leopold's chief agent in the Congo. "I have just returned from a journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit." Positive legacy In the film's most powerful sequences we see reconstructions of the terror caused by Leopold's enforcers and agents. We see a village burnt without warning and its people rounded up; its men sent off into the forests, and its women tied up as hostages and helpless targets of abuse until their husbands return with enough wild rubber to satisfy the agent. This, we are told, was the "moment of truth" for the whole community. If the men did not bring back enough and the agent lost his commission, he would order the deaths of everyone.
Its successors like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Kinshasa-based Voix des Sans Voix and Journaliste En Danger mean abuses in modern day DR Congo can never be hidden for long. Congo: White king, red rubber, black death will be shown on BBC Four in the UK on Tuesday, 24 February at 2100 |
lundi 12 mars 2012
Les violences du roi Leopold's II au Congo avant l'indépendance
Ce Roi qui fasait coupé les mains de tout congolais homme, femme, enfant, qui hésitais d'éxecuter ses ordres
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