Biracial Congolese Women Denied Funds in Crimes Against Humanity Suit

By ShaCamree Gowdy Published: December 10, 2021

Biracial Congolese Women Denied Funds in Crimes Against Humanity Suit

FILE - In this Monday, June 29, 2020 file photo, clockwise from top left, Simone Ngalula, Monique Bitu Bingi, Lea Tavares Mujinga, Noelle Verbeeken and Marie-Jose Loshi pose for a group photo during an interview with The Associated Press in Brussels. Five biracial women born in Congo when the country was under Belgian rule who were taken away from their Black mothers and separated from their African roots are suing the Belgian state for crimes against humanity. The case was examined on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2021 by a Brussels court. A Brussels court has since denied the women's reparations request. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco, File)

In Summary

Five mixed-race women taken from their mothers in the Congo during the 1950s have been denied reparations by the court in Brussels.

WARNING: This story contains a mention of rape.

Five mixed-race Congolese women who were taken away from their Black mothers as toddlers intend to appeal the Brussel court’s verdict after being denied reparations in their crimes against humanity lawsuit, per The Associated Press.

BNC previously reported the Belgian government apologized in 2019 for its role in the separation of thousands of newborns from their African mothers, but the Brussel’s court ruled that the removal and subsequent hardships Lea Tavares Mujinga, Monique Bintu Bingi, Noelle Verbeken, Simone Ngalula and Marie-Jose Loshi endured all those years ago does not represent crimes against humanity.

United Nations said it is unclear when the term crimes against humanity was coined, but some claim it was first used in the context of slavery and the slave trade to describe the atrocities associated with European colonialism in Africa and elsewhere, including those committed by Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo Free State.

The prohibition of crimes against humanity, like that of genocide, has been seen as a “peremptory norm of international law” from which no exceptions may be made and which applies to all states.

According to the AP, the court said it couldn’t prove “the placing of mixed-race children in religious institutions for racial reasons was considered by the community of States to be a crime against humanity and incriminated as such” at the time the events took place.

“The judge said that it would have been qualified as a crime against humanity if it happened today. It’s very shocking,” Monique Fernandes, the daughter of Bintu Bingi, told the AP.

The women were born while the country was under Belgian colonial authority, and mixed-race children, or “metis,” were snatched from their families and placed in religious institutions and homes. They were all born between 1945 and 1950 and ranged from 2 to 4 years of age.

In all five cases, the fathers did not exercise parental authority and the Belgian authorities threatened the girls’ Congolese families with retaliation if they refused to let them go. Placed at a religious mission run by the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul in Katende, Kasai province, the children shared a room with more than a dozen other mixed-race girls and Indigenous orphans in deplorable living conditions.

“My clients were abducted, abused, ignored, expelled from the world,” lawyer Michele Hirsch previously said, per AP. “They are living proof of an unconfessed state crime, and soon there will be no one left to testify.”

The children were allegedly abandoned after Congo gained independence and suffered even harsher conditions, which, for some, included being raped by militia combatants, per AP.

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