Leopold’s ghost looms large as Belgian EU Commissioner Louis Michel is mobbed by Congolese protestors at the LSE

The history of Belgian involvement in the Congo - as documented in Adam Hochschild’s excellent book “King Leopold’s Ghost”, is not a happy one. Of the three colonies run by Belgium until the mid part of the 20th Century - Congo, Rwanda and Burundi - it is perhaps the Congo that came off worst of all. Hochschild and others have estimated that upwards of 10 million people died as a result of the Belgian occupation. Millions more were enslaved, and tasked with delivering their country’s fabulous mineral wealth into the hands of their colonial overlords.

The Congolese finally gained independence in 1960, and elected the charismatic anti-colonial leader Patrice Lumumba as their country’s first President, with a mandate to nationalise Congo’s mining companies and ensure that the wealth was used to develop the nation. But within months Lumumba had been assassinated - 40 years later Belgium admitted involvement.

From the 1960s to the early 1990s, successive Belgian governments helped prop up Lumumba’s famously kleptocratic successor, Mobuto Sese Seko. Mobutu curried favour with western countries by allowing them to maintain lucrative mineral concessions - while his country sank progressively deeper into poverty. After independence, as before, much of Congo’s wealth continued to be syphoned off to Belgium.

When, in the late 1990s, a brutal conflict began in the mineral-rich East of the country, drawing in armies from as far afield as Zimbabwe and Namibia - and fuelled, as ever, by competition over access to the country’s mineral wealth (gold, diamonds and particularly “coltan”) - a UN report found that many of the international companies engaged in illegal racketeering - largely with impunity - were Belgian.

Given this history, it might seem surprising that the UN should see fit to award the job of overseeing the 2006 Congolese elections - the country’s first democratic contest since Lumumba’s victory in the early 1960s - to a man who was, until recently, Belgium’s foreign minister. Among the Congolese, Louis Michel certainly seems to have been a controversial choice, amid accusations of apparent favouritism towards the encumbent candidate, the western-leaning Joseph Kabila, who went on to take the Presidency.  

An intriguing rumour circulating among Congolese critics of the former Belgian foreign minister is that he is the great-grandson of the original Congo kleptocrat, the infamous King Leopold II  himself. While wholly untrue, it surely says something about the way that many Congolese perceive the nature of international involvement in their country, and goes some way to explaining the shouts of “Louis Michel, voleur!” at the LSE a few months ago.

Two things seem particularly striking in the video above - the first is that those overseeing the meeting appear to make no attempt to engage with the protestors. The second is the somewhat surreal juxtaposition between the chaotic scenes in the auditorium, and the grandiose message being projected onto the wall - “Europe-Africa: the indispensible partnership”.

Tags: Congo