BRUSSELS (AP) – Five mixed-race women who were taken from their black mother as a child and sued the Belgian state for allegedly committing a crime against humanity have lost their cases.

Lawyers and relatives told The Associated Press on Thursday that they would appeal the decision of the Brussels court.

Lea Tavares Mujinga, Monique Bintu Bingi, Noelle Verbeken, Simone Ngalula and Marie-Jose Loshi had hoped that Belgium would recognize responsibility for the suffering of thousands of Métis children. Known as “half-breeds,” the children were torn from families and placed in religious institutions and homes by the Belgian authorities who ruled the Congo from 1908 to 1960.

The Brussels court ruling seen by the Associated Press concluded that the policy, while unacceptable, was not “part of a generalized or systematic, deliberately destructive policy which characterizes a crime against humanity”.

The court added that it was not possible to establish that “the placement of Métis children in religious institutions for racial reasons was considered by the community of States as a crime against humanity and incriminated as such” at the time of the facts. .

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

The five women, all born between 1945 and 1950, filed their lawsuits last year amid growing demands for Belgium to reassess its colonial past.

Following protests against racial inequalities in the United States, several statues of former King Leopold II, who is responsible for the deaths of millions of Africans during Belgian colonial rule, have been vandalized in Belgium, and some have been withdrawn.

In 2019, the Belgian government apologized for the state’s role in removing thousands of babies from their African mothers. And for the first time in the country’s history, a reigning king last year expressed regret for the violence carried out by the former colonial power.

Lawyers said the five plaintiffs were all between 2 and 4 years old when they were taken away at the request of the Belgian colonial administration, in cooperation with local authorities of the Catholic Church.

According to legal documents, in all five cases the fathers did not exercise parental authority and the Belgian administration threatened the Congolese families of the daughters with reprisals if they refused to let them go.

The children were placed in a religious mission in Katende, in the province of Kasai, with the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul. There, they lived with about 20 other Métis girls and native orphans in very difficult conditions.

According to lawyers, the Belgian state’s strategy was aimed at preventing interracial unions and isolating mixed-race children, called “children of shame,” to ensure that they would not claim a link with Belgium later in the day. their life.

Legal documents claim the children were abandoned by both the state and the church after Congo’s independence, and some of them were sexually assaulted by militia fighters.

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