Following Stanley's expedition to the Congo, King Leopold II initially ruled Congo as his personal property following the Berlin Conference. On 18 October 1908, the Belgian parliament voted to annex the Congo Free State; on 15 November 1908, Leopold formally relinquished personal control over the state to Belgium, forming the Belgian Congo. During the Free State period, Congo was reputed to have been brutalised by a harsh economic policy that entailed rubber production quotas to be met by forced labour. Other crops were also farmed in the Congo.
Political ties
After fifty years of Congo's independence, a visit by the Belgian King Albert II was met with controversy as the king's brother, Baudouin, was said to have been connected to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, and Lumumba's family sought to bring a case against 12 Belgians claiming Lumumba's torture and murder constituted war crimes. Amidst other controversies, Congo's Minister of Communication, Lambert Mende Omalanga, described an "unacceptable attitude of the Belgian political class to consider the Congolese problems as internal affairs of their country," following such allegations as the "very bizarre case of a purely imaginary invitation of Belgian soldiers to participate in the military parade in Kinshasa," amongst others. He then said "coloniser to colonised relations is over." The Belgian Minister for Development Cooperation, Charles Michel, then expressed surprise at the remarks and demanded respect for Belgium. During a visit by a Belgian cabinet delegation in 2008 to the Congo, President Joseph Kabila said he did not appreciate a message brought by the team in regards to human rights issues. Kabila said: "Belgium must make a choice on the type of relationship it wants to have with the Democratic Republic of Congo. It has a choice between having good relations as partners in a mature relationship with a sovereign and independent state or a master-slave relationship. I will note that every time a Belgian delegation is led by the minister of foreign affairs; it is with a lot of arrogance, as if our visitors are coming here to lecture us. This is unacceptable. The Congo will never accept this, definitely not me." In December 2016, when President Kabila announced the postponement of elections and that he would not be stepping down despite the end of his constitutional mandate, the Belgian government announced that it would "re-examine" its relations with the DRC. The Belgian government also advised its citizens to not visit the DRC due to the political unrest. In April 2017 it was announced that the Congolese government informed the Belgian military attaché in Kinshasa that DR Congo would suspend military cooperation with Belgium, after foreign ministerDidier Reynders criticized President Kabila's choice of the new Prime Minister, Bruno Tshibala. on 30 June 2020, King Philippe of Belgium expressed his "deep regrets" for the atrocities in the Congo Free State in a letter to the Congolese president. Regrets, however, are not as strong as apologies.
There are many monuments in Belgium glorifying the Belgian colonial past. Most of them date from the inter-war period, at the height of patriotic propaganda. There have been several proposals to remove the statues from the public space. These demands for the decolonisation of the public space appear in Belgium as early as 2004 in Ostend, where the hand of one of the 'grateful Congolese' represented on the Leopold II monument is sawn off to denounce the king's exactions in the Congo, and as early as 2008 in Brussels, where an activist named Théophile de Giraud covers the equestrian statue of Leopold II with red paint. These actions intensified during the years 2010 with the emergence of collectives and the publication of carte blanche and finally the affair of the bust of "General Storms". On 4 June 2020, the majority parties in the Brussels-Capital Region tabled a resolution aimed at decolonising the public space in the Brussels region and then began a wave of kidnappings and degradations of statues, such as the statues of Leopold II at the University of Mons, Ekeren, Brussels, Auderghem, Ixelles and Arlon, or the bust of King Baudouin in front of the cathedral of Saints Michel and Gudule in Brussels..
