In a message dated 06/07/2004 11:21:40 GMT Standard Time,
[email protected]_ (mailto:R.B.M.deBakker@xxxxxx) writes:
Jud,
i was more worried by your army mate killing Egyptian boys, for stealing
tobacco. He shot them, and you just let him. (like Anthony would shoot his son)
Why don't you think of that instead of sinking deeper into that bloody
rationalism?
Jud:
Rene old sausage - Firstly I wasn't there to stop him shooting the child,
[which I much regret} and neither were the overwhelming majority of the British
people who were AGAINST the attack on Iraq. Without the Islamic religion
the boy wouldn't be stealing tobacco, without the monsterous perfidy of the
Judaic/Christian/Islamic religions there would be no soldiers there from
'Christian' countries shooting Moslems. The religious perverts Bush and Blair
should be arraigned court alongside the Moslem Saddam Hussain being tried for
war-crimes and so should the Christian British and American politicians who
backed their action. In fact it would be a lot better if religion in general were
to be outlawed as a crime against humanity. As you know the Christian
Belgians were guilty of one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history in
the Belgian Congo under the monster King Leopold II. Strange that I have never
seen you mention it in all the time I have been on this list? Perhaps the
following will act as a gentle reminder regarding your [convenient]
forgetfullness?
You are always [justifyably] attacking the USA and Britain for their crimes,
so let's put the spotlight on the dear busy little chocolate makers of
Belgium for a change, and consider its holocaust..
Belgian fury at film on Leopold's Congo terror
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Brussels
(Filed: 07/04/2004)
The Belgian government has denounced a BBC Four documentary as a
"tendentious diatribe" for depicting King Leopold II as the moral forebear of Adolf
Hitler, responsible for the death of 10 million people in his rapacious
exploitation of the Congo.
White King, Red Rubber, Black Death is to be broadcast tomorrow on Belgium's
French-speaking channel after being shown in Britain in February. It brands
Leopold's private colony between 1885 and 1908 as a gulag labour camp of
shocking brutality.
The spectacle of chopped hands carried away by the basket-load prompted a
furious reaction from Belgium's foreign minister, Louis Michel. "This is a
partisan work and its thesis is completely one-sided," he said.
"It totally ignores the historical, intellectual and cultural context, and
amounts to a tendentious diatribe. Normally, I'd prefer to leave it to
historians to deal with events that happened more than a century ago, but I object
to the way in which this film presents our country."
At Laeken Palace, the Belgian royal family was reported to be scandalised by
the portrayal of their ancestor as "one of Europe's cruellest men".
Most Belgians still believe the carefully nurtured image of King Leopold as
a reformer who brought civilised order to Africa. The Belgian state has gone
to great lengths to cover up the full scale of the atrocities, chiefly in
order to protect the monarchy - the glue holding together Belgium's quarrelling
Flemings and Walloons.
The foreign ministry still refuses to release a report by Leopold's own
investigators in 1905, which confirmed allegations of systematic mutilation and
killings - richly tapped by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness.
Leopold posed as the protector of Africans fleeing Arab slave-traders but,
in reality, he carved out an empire based on terror to harvest rubber.
Families were held as hostages, starving to death if the men failed to produce
enough wild rubber. Children's hands were chopped off as punishment for late
deliveries.
Though the 1905 report was suppressed, the damage was enough to force
Leopold to hand over his private farm to the Belgian state three years later.
Once in government hands, the Congo was run to a much higher standard as a
conventional colony.
It was not until a Belgian ambassador gained access to the secret report in
the government archives in the 1980s that the official version began to leak
out.
The findings formed the basis of Adam Hochschild's haunting best-seller,
King Leopold's Ghost.
"We can't keep quiet any longer about this flagrant lacuna in our teaching
of history," said Bernard Balteau, the head of documentaries at the
French-speaking channel RTBF.
Also take a look at this:
Report of the British Consul, Roger Casement, on the Administration of the
Congo Free State The colonial regime of the Belgian King Leopold II--the Congo
Free State-- became one of the more infamous international scandals of the
turn of the century. Leopold had acquired the vast Congo region through
considerable investment of his own fortune in setting up his administration there
and by cajoling the great powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 to award
his International Congo Association title to what was to become the Congo Free
State. By the mid-1890s the Congo Basin and its products became a source of
great wealth to Leopold who used his riches to beautify his Belgian capital
Brussels while using his agents in Africa to establish a brutal exploitative
regime for the extraction of rubber in the interior forest regions of the Free
State [Note: the term 'Free' signified the free trade that the Berlin Act
obliged Leopold to establish for the benefit of all nations who wished to trade
there; a condition that the King managed to flout through awarding
territorial concessions for rubber extraction to a number of private companies, some
of which were mere disguises for Leopold's own aggrandizement]. Leopold's
ability to administer the Congo government coupled with his gift for
self-promotion and dissimulation, kept knowledge of what was taking place there to a
minimum. Inevitably the truth leaked out as it became known through missionary
reports and the like that the natives were being willfully exploited and
brutally treated in the interests of amassing revenue for the King and his agents.
Foremost in the campaign to expose the regime--based on forced labor and
various forms of terror--was E. D. Morel whose ceaseless pursuit of Leopold's
regime resulted in questions being raised in the British House of Commons, for
Britain, after all, had been a signatory to the Berlin Act which bound the
Congo Government "to bind themselves to watch over the preservation of the native
tribes and to care for their moral and material welfare." The Report (below)
of the British consul sent to investigate the accumulating reports of
torture, murder and virtual enslavement was published to the world in 1904 and from
that point on the pressure for reform mounted until, finally, Leopold was
forced to yield up his private African preserve to the Belgian government which
formally took over the 'Belgian Congo' by an act of annexation in August
1908.
Leopold II has not fared well by historians. As one English historian has
bitterly commented: "(Leopold) was an Attila in modern dress, and it would have
been better for the world if he had never been born."
I have the honor to submit my Report on my recent journey on the Upper
Congo.
. . . the region visited was one of the most central in the Congo State . .
Moreover, I was enabled, by visiting this district, to contrast its present
state with the condition in which I had known it some sixteen years ago . .
and I was thus able to institute a comparison between a sate of affairs I had
myself seen when the natives loved their own savage lives in anarchic and
disorderly communities, uncontrolled by Europeans, and that created by more than
a decade of very energetic European intervention . . by Belgian officials in
introducing their methods of rule over one of the most savage regions of
Africa.
. . . a fleet of steamers . . navigate the main river and its principal
affluents at fixed intervals. Regular means of communication are thus afforded to
some of the most inaccessible parts of Central Africa.
A railway, excellently constructed in view of the difficulties to be
encountered, now connects the ocean ports with Stanley Pool, over a tract of
difficult country, which formerly offered to the weary traveler on foot many
obstacles to be overcome and many days of great bodily fatigue. . . The cataract
region, through which the railway passes . . . is . . the home, or birthplace of
the sleeping sickness--a terrible disease, which is, all too rapidly, eating
its way into the heart of Africa . . . The population of the Lower Congo has
been gradually reduced by the unchecked ravages of this, as yet undiagnosed
and incurable disease, and as one cause of the seemingly wholesale diminution
of human life which I everywhere observed in the regions revisited, a
prominent place must be assigned to this malady . . . . Communities I had formerly
known as large and flourishing centers of population are to-day entirely gone
. . .
On the whole the Government workmen (Congolese natives) . . struck me as
being well cared for . . The chief difficulty in dealing with so large a staff
[3,000 in number] arises from the want of a sufficiency of food supply in the
surrounding country. . . . The natives of the districts are forced to provide
a fixed quantity each week . . which is levied by requisitions on all the
surrounding villages . . . This, however necessary, is not a welcome task to
the native suppliers who complain that their numbers are yearly decreasing,
while the demands made upon them remain fixed, or tend even to increase. . . .
The (official in charge)is forced to exercise continuous pressure on the local
population, and within recent times that pressure has not always taken the
form of mere requisition. Armed expeditions have been necessary and a more
forcible method of levying supplies [e. g., goats, fowl, etc.] adopted than the
law either contemplated or justifies. The result of an expedition, which took
place towards the end of 1900, was that in fourteen small villages traversed
seventeen persons disappeared. Sixteen of these whose names were given to me
were killed by the soldiers, and their bodies recovered by their friends . .
Ten persons were tied up and taken away as prisoners, but were released on
payment of sixteen goats by their friends . . .
A hospital for Europeans and an establishment designed as a native hospital
are in charge of a European doctor. . . When I visited the three mud huts
which serve (as the native hospital), all of them dilapidated . . I found
seventeen sleeping sickness patients, male and female, lying about in the utmost
dirt. The structures I had visited . . had endured for many years as the only
form of hospital accommodation for the numerous native staff of the district.
. . . The people have not easily accommodated themselves to the altered
condition of life brought about by European government in their midst. Where
formerly they were accustomed to take long voyages down to Stanley Pool to sell
slaves, ivory, dried fish, or other local products . . they find themselves
today debarred from all such activity . . . The open selling of slaves and the
canoe convoys, which navigated the Upper Congo (River), have everywhere
disappeared. . . . (but) much that was not reprehensible in native life has
disappeared along with it. The trade in ivory has today entirely passed from the
hands of the natives of the Upper Congo . .
Complaints as to the manner of exacting service are . . frequent . . . If
the local official has to go on a sudden journey men are summoned on the
instant to paddle his canoe, and a refusal entails imprisonment or a beating. If
the Government plantation or the kitchen garden require weeding, a soldier will
be sent to call in the women from some of the neighboring towns. . .; to the
women suddenly forced to leave their household tasks and to tramp off, hoe
in hand, baby on back, with possibly a hungry and angry husband at home, the
task is not a welcome one.
I visited two large villages in the interior . . wherein I found that fully
half the population now consisted of refugees . . I saw and questioned
several groups of these people . . . They went on to declare, when asked why they
had fled (their district), that they had endured such ill-treatment at the
hands of the government soldiers in their own (district) that life had become
intolerable; that nothing had remained for them at home but to be killed for
failure to bring in a certain amount of rubber or to die from starvation or
exposure in their attempts to satisfy the demands made upon them. . . . I
subsequently found other (members of the tribe) who confirmed the truth of the
statements made to me.
. . . on the 25th of July (1903) we reached Lukolela, where I spent two
days. This district had, when I visited it in 1887, numbered fully 5,000 people;
today the population is given, after a careful enumeration, at less than 600.
The reasons given me for their decline in numbers were similar to those
furnished elsewhere, namely, sleeping-sickness, general ill-health, insufficiency
of food, and the methods employed to obtain labor from them by local
officials and the exactions levied on them.
At other villages which I visited, I found the tax to consist of baskets,
which the inhabitants had to make and deliver weekly as well as, always, a
certain amount of foodstuffs.
(The natives) were frequently flogged for delay or inability to complete the
tally of these baskets, or the weekly supply of food. Several men, including
a Chief of one town, showed broad weals across their buttocks, which were
evidently recent. One, a lad of 15 o so, removing his cloth, showed several
scars across his thighs, which he and others around him said had formed part of a
weekly payment for a recent shortage in their supply of food.
. . . A careful investigation of the conditions of native life around (Lake
Mantumba) confirmed the truth of the statements made to me--that the great
decrease in population, the dirty and ill-kept towns, and the complete absence
of goats, sheep, or fowls--once very plentiful in this country--were to be
attributed above all else to the continued effort made during many years to
compel the natives to work india-rubber. Large bodies of native troops had
formerly been quartered in the district, and the punitive measures undertaken to
his end had endured for a considerable period. During the course of these
operations there had been much loss of life, accompanied, I fear, by a somewhat
general mutilation of the dead, as proof that the soldiers had done their
duty.
. . . Two cases (of mutilation) came to my actual notice while I was in the
lake district. One, a young man, both of whose hands had been beaten off with
the butt ends of rifles against a tree; the other a young lad of 11 or 12
years of age, whose right hand was cut off at the wrist. . . . I both these
cases the Government soldiers had been accompanied by white officers whose names
were given to me. Of six natives (one a girl, three little boys, one youth,
and one old woman) who had been mutilated in this way during the rubber
regime, all except one were dead at the date of my visit.
[A sentry in the employ of one of the concessionary private companies] said
he had caught and was detaining as prisoners (eleven women) to compel their
husbands to bring in the right amount of rubber required of them on the next
market day. . . . When I asked what would become of these women if their
husbands failed to bring in the right quantity of rubber . . , he said at once
that then they would be kept there until their husbands had redeemed them.
(Signed) R. Casement.
The full Report runs for forty pages of the Parliamentary Papers to which is
appended another twenty pages of individual statements gathered by the
Consul, including several detailing the grim tales of killings, mutilation,
kidnapping and cruel beatings of men, women and children by soldiers of Bula Matadi
(i. e., the name used by the natives for the Congo Administration of King
Leopold). Copies of the Report and enclosures were transmitted by the British
government to the Belgian government as well as to governments (Germany,
France, Russia, et al.) who were signatories to the Berlin Act in 1885. The Congo
administration was thus forced to initiate an investigation into the
atrocities detailed in the Report which led to the arrest and punishment of white
officials who had been responsible for cold-blooded killings during a
rubber-collecting expedition in 1903 (including one Belgian national who was given five
years' penal servitude for causing the shooting of at least 122 Congolese
natives.
[Ref.: British Parliamentary Papers, 1904, LXII, Cd. 1933]
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[email protected]_ (mailto:R.B.M.deBakker@xxxxxx) writes:
Jud,
i was more worried by your army mate killing Egyptian boys, for stealing
tobacco. He shot them, and you just let him. (like Anthony would shoot his son)
Why don't you think of that instead of sinking deeper into that bloody
rationalism?
Jud:
Rene old sausage - Firstly I wasn't there to stop him shooting the child,
[which I much regret} and neither were the overwhelming majority of the British
people who were AGAINST the attack on Iraq. Without the Islamic religion
the boy wouldn't be stealing tobacco, without the monsterous perfidy of the
Judaic/Christian/Islamic religions there would be no soldiers there from
'Christian' countries shooting Moslems. The religious perverts Bush and Blair
should be arraigned court alongside the Moslem Saddam Hussain being tried for
war-crimes and so should the Christian British and American politicians who
backed their action. In fact it would be a lot better if religion in general were
to be outlawed as a crime against humanity. As you know the Christian
Belgians were guilty of one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history in
the Belgian Congo under the monster King Leopold II. Strange that I have never
seen you mention it in all the time I have been on this list? Perhaps the
following will act as a gentle reminder regarding your [convenient]
forgetfullness?
You are always [justifyably] attacking the USA and Britain for their crimes,
so let's put the spotlight on the dear busy little chocolate makers of
Belgium for a change, and consider its holocaust..
Belgian fury at film on Leopold's Congo terror
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Brussels
(Filed: 07/04/2004)
The Belgian government has denounced a BBC Four documentary as a
"tendentious diatribe" for depicting King Leopold II as the moral forebear of Adolf
Hitler, responsible for the death of 10 million people in his rapacious
exploitation of the Congo.
White King, Red Rubber, Black Death is to be broadcast tomorrow on Belgium's
French-speaking channel after being shown in Britain in February. It brands
Leopold's private colony between 1885 and 1908 as a gulag labour camp of
shocking brutality.
The spectacle of chopped hands carried away by the basket-load prompted a
furious reaction from Belgium's foreign minister, Louis Michel. "This is a
partisan work and its thesis is completely one-sided," he said.
"It totally ignores the historical, intellectual and cultural context, and
amounts to a tendentious diatribe. Normally, I'd prefer to leave it to
historians to deal with events that happened more than a century ago, but I object
to the way in which this film presents our country."
At Laeken Palace, the Belgian royal family was reported to be scandalised by
the portrayal of their ancestor as "one of Europe's cruellest men".
Most Belgians still believe the carefully nurtured image of King Leopold as
a reformer who brought civilised order to Africa. The Belgian state has gone
to great lengths to cover up the full scale of the atrocities, chiefly in
order to protect the monarchy - the glue holding together Belgium's quarrelling
Flemings and Walloons.
The foreign ministry still refuses to release a report by Leopold's own
investigators in 1905, which confirmed allegations of systematic mutilation and
killings - richly tapped by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness.
Leopold posed as the protector of Africans fleeing Arab slave-traders but,
in reality, he carved out an empire based on terror to harvest rubber.
Families were held as hostages, starving to death if the men failed to produce
enough wild rubber. Children's hands were chopped off as punishment for late
deliveries.
Though the 1905 report was suppressed, the damage was enough to force
Leopold to hand over his private farm to the Belgian state three years later.
Once in government hands, the Congo was run to a much higher standard as a
conventional colony.
It was not until a Belgian ambassador gained access to the secret report in
the government archives in the 1980s that the official version began to leak
out.
The findings formed the basis of Adam Hochschild's haunting best-seller,
King Leopold's Ghost.
"We can't keep quiet any longer about this flagrant lacuna in our teaching
of history," said Bernard Balteau, the head of documentaries at the
French-speaking channel RTBF.
Also take a look at this:
Report of the British Consul, Roger Casement, on the Administration of the
Congo Free State The colonial regime of the Belgian King Leopold II--the Congo
Free State-- became one of the more infamous international scandals of the
turn of the century. Leopold had acquired the vast Congo region through
considerable investment of his own fortune in setting up his administration there
and by cajoling the great powers at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 to award
his International Congo Association title to what was to become the Congo Free
State. By the mid-1890s the Congo Basin and its products became a source of
great wealth to Leopold who used his riches to beautify his Belgian capital
Brussels while using his agents in Africa to establish a brutal exploitative
regime for the extraction of rubber in the interior forest regions of the Free
State [Note: the term 'Free' signified the free trade that the Berlin Act
obliged Leopold to establish for the benefit of all nations who wished to trade
there; a condition that the King managed to flout through awarding
territorial concessions for rubber extraction to a number of private companies, some
of which were mere disguises for Leopold's own aggrandizement]. Leopold's
ability to administer the Congo government coupled with his gift for
self-promotion and dissimulation, kept knowledge of what was taking place there to a
minimum. Inevitably the truth leaked out as it became known through missionary
reports and the like that the natives were being willfully exploited and
brutally treated in the interests of amassing revenue for the King and his agents.
Foremost in the campaign to expose the regime--based on forced labor and
various forms of terror--was E. D. Morel whose ceaseless pursuit of Leopold's
regime resulted in questions being raised in the British House of Commons, for
Britain, after all, had been a signatory to the Berlin Act which bound the
Congo Government "to bind themselves to watch over the preservation of the native
tribes and to care for their moral and material welfare." The Report (below)
of the British consul sent to investigate the accumulating reports of
torture, murder and virtual enslavement was published to the world in 1904 and from
that point on the pressure for reform mounted until, finally, Leopold was
forced to yield up his private African preserve to the Belgian government which
formally took over the 'Belgian Congo' by an act of annexation in August
1908.
Leopold II has not fared well by historians. As one English historian has
bitterly commented: "(Leopold) was an Attila in modern dress, and it would have
been better for the world if he had never been born."
I have the honor to submit my Report on my recent journey on the Upper
Congo.
. . . the region visited was one of the most central in the Congo State . .
Moreover, I was enabled, by visiting this district, to contrast its present
state with the condition in which I had known it some sixteen years ago . .
and I was thus able to institute a comparison between a sate of affairs I had
myself seen when the natives loved their own savage lives in anarchic and
disorderly communities, uncontrolled by Europeans, and that created by more than
a decade of very energetic European intervention . . by Belgian officials in
introducing their methods of rule over one of the most savage regions of
Africa.
. . . a fleet of steamers . . navigate the main river and its principal
affluents at fixed intervals. Regular means of communication are thus afforded to
some of the most inaccessible parts of Central Africa.
A railway, excellently constructed in view of the difficulties to be
encountered, now connects the ocean ports with Stanley Pool, over a tract of
difficult country, which formerly offered to the weary traveler on foot many
obstacles to be overcome and many days of great bodily fatigue. . . The cataract
region, through which the railway passes . . . is . . the home, or birthplace of
the sleeping sickness--a terrible disease, which is, all too rapidly, eating
its way into the heart of Africa . . . The population of the Lower Congo has
been gradually reduced by the unchecked ravages of this, as yet undiagnosed
and incurable disease, and as one cause of the seemingly wholesale diminution
of human life which I everywhere observed in the regions revisited, a
prominent place must be assigned to this malady . . . . Communities I had formerly
known as large and flourishing centers of population are to-day entirely gone
. . .
On the whole the Government workmen (Congolese natives) . . struck me as
being well cared for . . The chief difficulty in dealing with so large a staff
[3,000 in number] arises from the want of a sufficiency of food supply in the
surrounding country. . . . The natives of the districts are forced to provide
a fixed quantity each week . . which is levied by requisitions on all the
surrounding villages . . . This, however necessary, is not a welcome task to
the native suppliers who complain that their numbers are yearly decreasing,
while the demands made upon them remain fixed, or tend even to increase. . . .
The (official in charge)is forced to exercise continuous pressure on the local
population, and within recent times that pressure has not always taken the
form of mere requisition. Armed expeditions have been necessary and a more
forcible method of levying supplies [e. g., goats, fowl, etc.] adopted than the
law either contemplated or justifies. The result of an expedition, which took
place towards the end of 1900, was that in fourteen small villages traversed
seventeen persons disappeared. Sixteen of these whose names were given to me
were killed by the soldiers, and their bodies recovered by their friends . .
Ten persons were tied up and taken away as prisoners, but were released on
payment of sixteen goats by their friends . . .
A hospital for Europeans and an establishment designed as a native hospital
are in charge of a European doctor. . . When I visited the three mud huts
which serve (as the native hospital), all of them dilapidated . . I found
seventeen sleeping sickness patients, male and female, lying about in the utmost
dirt. The structures I had visited . . had endured for many years as the only
form of hospital accommodation for the numerous native staff of the district.
. . . The people have not easily accommodated themselves to the altered
condition of life brought about by European government in their midst. Where
formerly they were accustomed to take long voyages down to Stanley Pool to sell
slaves, ivory, dried fish, or other local products . . they find themselves
today debarred from all such activity . . . The open selling of slaves and the
canoe convoys, which navigated the Upper Congo (River), have everywhere
disappeared. . . . (but) much that was not reprehensible in native life has
disappeared along with it. The trade in ivory has today entirely passed from the
hands of the natives of the Upper Congo . .
Complaints as to the manner of exacting service are . . frequent . . . If
the local official has to go on a sudden journey men are summoned on the
instant to paddle his canoe, and a refusal entails imprisonment or a beating. If
the Government plantation or the kitchen garden require weeding, a soldier will
be sent to call in the women from some of the neighboring towns. . .; to the
women suddenly forced to leave their household tasks and to tramp off, hoe
in hand, baby on back, with possibly a hungry and angry husband at home, the
task is not a welcome one.
I visited two large villages in the interior . . wherein I found that fully
half the population now consisted of refugees . . I saw and questioned
several groups of these people . . . They went on to declare, when asked why they
had fled (their district), that they had endured such ill-treatment at the
hands of the government soldiers in their own (district) that life had become
intolerable; that nothing had remained for them at home but to be killed for
failure to bring in a certain amount of rubber or to die from starvation or
exposure in their attempts to satisfy the demands made upon them. . . . I
subsequently found other (members of the tribe) who confirmed the truth of the
statements made to me.
. . . on the 25th of July (1903) we reached Lukolela, where I spent two
days. This district had, when I visited it in 1887, numbered fully 5,000 people;
today the population is given, after a careful enumeration, at less than 600.
The reasons given me for their decline in numbers were similar to those
furnished elsewhere, namely, sleeping-sickness, general ill-health, insufficiency
of food, and the methods employed to obtain labor from them by local
officials and the exactions levied on them.
At other villages which I visited, I found the tax to consist of baskets,
which the inhabitants had to make and deliver weekly as well as, always, a
certain amount of foodstuffs.
(The natives) were frequently flogged for delay or inability to complete the
tally of these baskets, or the weekly supply of food. Several men, including
a Chief of one town, showed broad weals across their buttocks, which were
evidently recent. One, a lad of 15 o so, removing his cloth, showed several
scars across his thighs, which he and others around him said had formed part of a
weekly payment for a recent shortage in their supply of food.
. . . A careful investigation of the conditions of native life around (Lake
Mantumba) confirmed the truth of the statements made to me--that the great
decrease in population, the dirty and ill-kept towns, and the complete absence
of goats, sheep, or fowls--once very plentiful in this country--were to be
attributed above all else to the continued effort made during many years to
compel the natives to work india-rubber. Large bodies of native troops had
formerly been quartered in the district, and the punitive measures undertaken to
his end had endured for a considerable period. During the course of these
operations there had been much loss of life, accompanied, I fear, by a somewhat
general mutilation of the dead, as proof that the soldiers had done their
duty.
. . . Two cases (of mutilation) came to my actual notice while I was in the
lake district. One, a young man, both of whose hands had been beaten off with
the butt ends of rifles against a tree; the other a young lad of 11 or 12
years of age, whose right hand was cut off at the wrist. . . . I both these
cases the Government soldiers had been accompanied by white officers whose names
were given to me. Of six natives (one a girl, three little boys, one youth,
and one old woman) who had been mutilated in this way during the rubber
regime, all except one were dead at the date of my visit.
[A sentry in the employ of one of the concessionary private companies] said
he had caught and was detaining as prisoners (eleven women) to compel their
husbands to bring in the right amount of rubber required of them on the next
market day. . . . When I asked what would become of these women if their
husbands failed to bring in the right quantity of rubber . . , he said at once
that then they would be kept there until their husbands had redeemed them.
(Signed) R. Casement.
The full Report runs for forty pages of the Parliamentary Papers to which is
appended another twenty pages of individual statements gathered by the
Consul, including several detailing the grim tales of killings, mutilation,
kidnapping and cruel beatings of men, women and children by soldiers of Bula Matadi
(i. e., the name used by the natives for the Congo Administration of King
Leopold). Copies of the Report and enclosures were transmitted by the British
government to the Belgian government as well as to governments (Germany,
France, Russia, et al.) who were signatories to the Berlin Act in 1885. The Congo
administration was thus forced to initiate an investigation into the
atrocities detailed in the Report which led to the arrest and punishment of white
officials who had been responsible for cold-blooded killings during a
rubber-collecting expedition in 1903 (including one Belgian national who was given five
years' penal servitude for causing the shooting of at least 122 Congolese
natives.
[Ref.: British Parliamentary Papers, 1904, LXII, Cd. 1933]
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