FRANCE 24 report: Mixed-race women from the former Belgian Congo demand justice

FRANCE 24 English

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Transcript

00:00Have we ever been told about birth certificates?

00:02Never.

00:03These five women searched for their birth certificates

00:06for a long time among these old yellow documents.

00:09But as mixed-race women born to Belgian fathers

00:12and Congolese mothers during the colonial era,

00:14they had to make do with fragmentary information.

00:17Here I have my birth certificate.

00:19We marked the father as unknown.

00:22In parentheses, the name.

00:24That's all we had.

00:25We thought that was our birth certificate.

00:28The birth certificate.

00:31As was the rule at the time,

00:32Leia, Marie-José, Noël, Monique and Simone

00:35were taken from their Congolese mother

00:37and placed in a religious institution.

00:40Like thousands of other mixed-race children

00:43at the time called mulatto.

00:45Or worse.

00:47We were mules with braids.

00:50It was an insult.

00:51Because we always had braids.

00:56But the worst was yet to come for these little girls

00:59who were wards of the Belgian state.

01:01When Congo gained independence in 1960,

01:04while other mixed-race children were brought to Belgium,

01:07they were left to fend for themselves

01:08in a particularly unstable environment.

01:12In the war, we were abandoned.

01:14There were militias who took advantage of girls.

01:18We had become militias.

01:20A tragic fate that prompted these five women

01:22to file a complaint against the Belgian state.

01:25Though the case was rejected in 2021,

01:28they now hope to obtain compensation on appeal.

01:31As the hearing approaches,

01:32their lawyer prefers to reserve her new arguments for the court.

01:36Leia, for her part, hopes for more than the apologies

01:40that had been presented in 2019

01:42by the Belgian prime minister at the time.

01:44The Belgian state has admitted its mistake.

01:47So when we admit that we are guilty, we make amends.

01:51So you can't ask for forgiveness and apologize like that.

01:54You have to make amends.

01:56Leia, Marie-José, Noel, Monique and Simone

01:59are each claiming 50,000 euros.

02:02But above all, they hope to obtain concrete recognition

02:06of their suffering.

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