European Atrocities In Africa Congo Genocide by Belgium King Leopold 1885 – 1908

 


European Atrocities In AfricaC ongo Genocide by Belgium King Leopold 1885 – 1908

After the Berlin Conference of 1884 the 905,000 square miles of the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, became the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium.

His genocidal exploitation of the territory, particularly the rubber trade, caused many deaths and much suffering. Murder and mutilation were common.

Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. The Force Publique were required to provide a hand of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed that they would otherwise use the munitions for hunting food.

As a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid off in chopped-off hands. Sometimes the hands were collected by the soldiers of the Force Publique, sometimes by the villages themselves. There were even small wars where villages attacked neighbouring villages to gather hands, since their rubber quotas were too unrealistic to fill.

Under the control of Leopold II of Belgium numerous crimes against humanity were committed upon the indigenous Africans of Central Africa. Estimated killed: 10,000,000 The Herero and Namaqua Genocide by Germany 1904 – 1907

The Herero and Namaqua Genocide in German South-West Africa (present-day Namibia) occurred between 1904 and 1907. Eighty percent of the Herero population and 50 percent of the Nama population were killed in a brutal scorched earth campaign led by German General Lothar von Trotha. Between 24,000 and 100,000 Herero perished along with 10,000 Nama.

A copy of Trotha’s Extermination Order survives in the Botswana National Archives. The order states “every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot.

I will no longer accept women or children, I will drive them back to their people, to die in the desert, or let them be shot at.” Olusoga and Erichsen write: “It is an almost unique document: an explicit, written declaration of intent to commit genocide”.

These mass killings were named as the first example of a 20th-century genocide in the 1985 Whitaker Report, commissioned but never adopted by the now defunct United Nations subcommittee ECOSOC

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