FRANCE 24 report: Mixed-race women from the former Belgian Congo demand justice
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00:00Have we ever been told about birth certificates?
00:02Never.
00:03These five women searched for their birth certificates
00:06for a long time among these old yellow documents.
00:09But as mixed-race women born to Belgian fathers
00:12and Congolese mothers during the colonial era,
00:14they had to make do with fragmentary information.
00:17Here I have my birth certificate.
00:19We marked the father as unknown.
00:22In parentheses, the name.
00:24That's all we had.
00:25We thought that was our birth certificate.
00:28The birth certificate.
00:31As was the rule at the time,
00:32Leia, Marie-José, Noël, Monique and Simone
00:35were taken from their Congolese mother
00:37and placed in a religious institution.
00:40Like thousands of other mixed-race children
00:43at the time called mulatto.
00:45Or worse.
00:47We were mules with braids.
00:50It was an insult.
00:51Because we always had braids.
00:56But the worst was yet to come for these little girls
00:59who were wards of the Belgian state.
01:01When Congo gained independence in 1960,
01:04while other mixed-race children were brought to Belgium,
01:07they were left to fend for themselves
01:08in a particularly unstable environment.
01:12In the war, we were abandoned.
01:14There were militias who took advantage of girls.
01:18We had become militias.
01:20A tragic fate that prompted these five women
01:22to file a complaint against the Belgian state.
01:25Though the case was rejected in 2021,
01:28they now hope to obtain compensation on appeal.
01:31As the hearing approaches,
01:32their lawyer prefers to reserve her new arguments for the court.
01:36Leia, for her part, hopes for more than the apologies
01:40that had been presented in 2019
01:42by the Belgian prime minister at the time.
01:44The Belgian state has admitted its mistake.
01:47So when we admit that we are guilty, we make amends.
01:51So you can't ask for forgiveness and apologize like that.
01:54You have to make amends.
01:56Leia, Marie-José, Noel, Monique and Simone
01:59are each claiming 50,000 euros.
02:02But above all, they hope to obtain concrete recognition
02:06of their suffering.