Original subtitles

[Music]

BOKANGU, Chief- killed with blows with butt of gun

MAGUNDWA, Chief- killed with blows with butt of gun

EKUNJA, Chief-

MONJANGU, Man- killed by the gun EKUMBA, Man- killed by the gun

GILI, Woman... killed by the gun EKAYA, Man- killed by the gun

LEKOKA, Man, imprisoned and hung himself

UMPOLOKO, Girl... killed by the gun

VONTEMBE, Man- killed by the gun

[Continues listing names of victims, voices overlapping]

"Persons who are tempted to commit

unspeakable crimes must be deterred by the

knowledge that one day,

they will be individually called on to account..."

"It's been a long and brutal war in the Congo..."

"There are old scores that have been settled here,

creating new ones to be avenged

tomorrow, or the day after..."

"The wrongs which we seek to condemn

and punish have been so calculated, so malignant,

and so devastating,

that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored..."

"It seems unlikely that the people of

Zaire will ever see the money that

Mobutu stole and kept in Switzerland

and other countries..."

"The United States has supported and will

continue to support the United Nations presence

in the Congo..."

[Music swells]

In the heart of Africa lies a country called The Democratic

Republic of the Congo.

The land is vast... lush ...

full of life... and riches: Ivory, Rubber, Timber; Copper,

Gold, Uranium; Coffee, Diamonds, Coltan.

Natural resources,

which have inspired a most unnatural history

of greed and violence.

[Music swells]

For decades it was called Zaire,

ruled by the notorious dictator Mobutu Sese Seko,

who some remember as host to the Rumble in the Jungle.

Others remember him as a ruthless criminal,

who subverted the hopes of his own nation.

The Congo should have been the pride of Africa.

Over three times the size of Texas,

with a river capable of producing enough power

to light up the entire African continent.

[Rushing water]

Instead, its people are among the poorest in the world,

and many are likely to die an unnatural death.

[Gunshots]

They have been the victims of more

than 100 years of greed, plunder, and terror.

The legacy of a man who had never even gone "up river":

King Leopold II of Belgium.

For somebody like me having gone through school in the Congo,

what we learned in the textbooks

was that Leopold was the greatest

benefactor Congo ever had,

because he sacrificed his fortune...

for the Congolese.

I was in school from '49 to '69 and

I never heard a word related to the

injustices and constraints of colonization.

This type of colonization is part of

human history everywhere and forever.

That doesn't excuse it, of course...

Leopold ascended the throne of Belgium in 1865.

He inherited a country not much bigger than New Hampshire,

wedged between the old world power of France,

and the rising might of a new and unified Germany.

While across the English Channel, Leopold's cousin,

Queen Victoria, a constitutional monarch like himself,

reigned over Great Britain,

the most powerful empire of the period.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, King Leopold was

beleaguered by a Europe that was confidently entering

the modern age.

A time of intense industrial growth and personal enrichment,

for one in the appropriate position...

King Leopold felt anxious when monarchs and

profiteers had cut their deals for colonies and fortunes.

What was left for Leopold to cut?

Leopold II has a primary obsession,

which is to provide Belgium with a colony.

He wants grandiose cities with large avenues, with London,

Paris and the other major capitals

of Europe serving as a model,

and it's obvious that a colony would

provide the means to develop major cities.

But it's interesting to dig deeper and to see -

at what price?

By 1838,

Great Britain had severed the long chains of slavery

throughout her empire, and by 1870,

most of the "unclaimed territories"

around the world had been colonized

by Leopold's European rivals.

It seemed only Africa was "up for grabs."

At the start of the 1870s,

80 percent of Africa was still under indigenous rule.

It was ripe for conquest, or "Protection",

as Leopold learned to put it.

The event that captured Leopold's

attention was Stanley's crossing of

Africa from 1874 to 1877.

He followed Stanley's activities in

the newspapers which he had delivered every day.

Henry Morton Stanley, the most famous explorer of his day,

became the first white man to chart the Congo River's course.

The brutal expedition took the lives of

his three white companions,

along with 246 of his African porters,

who died of disease and exhaustion.

We have attacked and destroyed 28 large towns

and three or four score villages.

I desire some generous and opulent philanthropist,

who shall permit me to lead

a force for commerce with Central Africa."

The "opulent philanthropist" was waiting.

A colonial grab by Leopold

would require a cunning "humanitarian" veneer.

To engineer a charade of philanthropy,

he recruited Stanley, and financed what,

to the world, was promoted as a scientific expedition.

Stanley's contract ran for five years,

at an annual salary equal to a quarter

of a million in today's dollars.

Leopold had begun to cut his deal.

Stanley's job was to create

at key points along the Congo River a

series of stations that would connect the east coast with the

west coast.

He built not only a chain of trading stations but also a road

around the dangerous rapids of the Congo River -

precursor to a railway line.

If you look at the map of Congo today,

if you look at the structure of transport,

it hasn't changed since colonial rule.

You can see that it's sort of heading

toward either the east coast...

and then the west, Matadi.

So the entire infrastructure was built, in a way,

to ship out things,

not to make the Congo a first rate industrial power.

Stanley has been glamorized in books and by Hollywood as

"an intrepid explorer", "a great adventurer", "a great builder",

but he was no builder.

He arrived uninvited and laid the foundation

for really what was the destruction

of the societies that were there.

Stanley was sent by King Leopold to discover the Congo.

It's him that discovered us!

Our brothers that saw him first also saw his soldiers...

How do you make people into forced laborers?

Very easily. By force!

"The best punishment is that of irons.

Because without wounding,

disfiguring or torturing the body,

it inflicts shame and discomfort on the workers."

Centuries of slave-hunting raids had weakened

the indigenous tribal groups,

and there was no powerful state or military obstacle to stop

Leopold.

[Elephant noise]

Ivory.

The coveted treasure of the era. Exotic and expensive.

Leopold smelled profit and demanded quantities of it.

I am desirous to see you purchase

all the ivory which is to be found in the Congo.

By now, Stanley had organized a powerful private army;

the beginnings of the notorious Force Publique,

equipped with a thousand rifles and Krupp cannons.

The army swept through the country, shooting elephants,

buying tusks from villagers...

or just taking them.

You should purchase as much land as you will be able to obtain

without losing one minute, from all the chiefs from the mouth of

the Congo to Stanley Falls.

I will send you more people and more material...

perhaps Chinese Coolies?

Leopold was adamant that his colony-making

be perceived as philanthropic.

Leopold - the redeemer of a savage people.

He organized his interests under the

guise of charity and benefactions.

Often employing deceptive and misleading Association names.

He asks of Stanley:

"You will advance step by step and every time

you run into an indigenous chief you sign a treaty with him.

You'll be under the flag of the Independent State.

Not the flag of Belgium."

To sign over one's land was unthinkable.

But the Congo Chiefs,

with no written language, had no idea what they were signing.

In return for cloth, trinkets, beads and gin,

the Chiefs gave up rights to all land,

waterways, game, fishing, forestry, mining;

essentially everything.

And Stanley signed hundreds...

and hundreds... and hundreds of treaties.

We have constituted entire territories,

ceded by sovereign Chiefs, into independent states.

The new Congo flag with the gold star,

symbolizing the light of civilization

in the darkness of Africa,

held sway over the lands of 450 Congo Basin Chiefs,

a territory 76 times the size of Belgium.

Over 900,000 square miles had become

the private estate of King Leopold.

There is no question of granting the

slightest political power to Negroes.

That would be absurd.

The white men, heads of the stations,

retain all the powers.

[African drum music]

Leopold maintained a complete monopoly -

even as he insisted that he was opening up Africa to free trade,

and that his venture had no commercial interest.

The 1880s, in general, were prosperous times for

the United States.

A time of accelerated productivity

and national industrialization.

America was moving toward an economic

ascendancy that would exceed the greatest of the European powers,

and launch America's own colonial ambitions.

Leopold looked across the Atlantic,

and extended the tactical range of his public relations.

He developed a dazzling campaign of misinformation.

It's called spin. And Leopold was a master of spin control.

He could have taught today's American tobacco

companies a thing or two about public relations.

Leopold convinced a number of American

politicians that what he was really

doing in Africa was stopping the slave trade!

And he convinced one of the more forgettable American presidents.

The King's aim is to found a chain of hospices,

both hospitable and scientific,

which should serve as a means of

information and aid to travelers.

Sufficiently deluded,

by April 1884 the United States was the first country

to recognize King Leopold's claim on the Congo.

At a conference in Berlin the following year,

other nations followed suit.

The delegates, outwitted by effective public relations,

thought they were endorsing an international free trade zone,

but ended up granting Leopold virtually everything he wanted.

Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck called it: "A swindle"

In May of 1885, Leopold named his new private country:

"the Congo Free State." No African was consulted.

Everything in the Congo Free State

was the property of the King.

[Tree crashes to the ground]

The forests.

The animals.

The villagers' vegetables harvested to feed his soldiers.

He held title to life, to liberty.

Still, lacking the resources to

fully exploit the entire territory,

Leopold was compelled to create concessions

which attracted private investment.

Leopold retained 50 percent ownership and profited

even more from taxes and processing fees.

Leopold II is very cunning.

And is always going to find a way to

quickly summon his banker friends,

various firms, the Rothschilds,

future large corporations, UNILEVERS...

And he will grant them concessions...

In other words,

land on which they will carry out

their own economic exploitation.

Leopold II, meanwhile, kept the central part for himself,

which became the infamous Crown Fund, property of the crown.

The Berlin Conference members helped promote a fund for a

railroad system that would transport Leopold's

troops to fight the 'slave traders".

And Leopold struck a deal with his parliament

for an enormous development loan.

In return, he agreed to leave the Congo

to Belgium at the time of his death,

though he would ultimately sell it back

to Belgium at an inspirational profit.

He got his loan interest-free.

After Stanley arrived they started the railway line -

Our ancestors died.

They died because they were forced to

break the stones by hand.

They had to make holes in the rocks.

They had to break it in order to place explosives inside.

Stanley himself, using a sledgehammer,

smashed boulders, causing the natives to call him

"Bula Matadi," or "Breaker of Rocks"...

a name which came to imply something more sinister,

with time.

The construction of the railway was very difficult.

Many people died, especially the Congolese.

There were also a few whites who died.

It is out of that experience that Bula Matadi, which means

'rockbreaking', was used to refer to the state,

but also to refer to the breaking of all resistance.

On learning of the benevolence of King Leopold,

George Washington Williams, an American minister, lawyer,

and enterprising journalist,

proposed to recruit other black Americans to work in the Congo.

He spent six months on foot and by

steamer going up the Congo River.

To his horror, he did not find a colony under benign rule,

as described by Stanley and King Leopold,

but a hell-hole of torture, abuse, and murder.

In protest, he wrote a milestone of investigative journalism:

I accuse Leopold's officials of tyranny.

I accuse Leopold's government of excessive cruelty.

Ox-chains eat into the necks of prisoners

and produce sores about which flies circle.

The courts are abortive, unjust and delinquent.

Not one State official knows the language of the natives.

Your Majesty's Government is engaged

in slave trade wholesale and retail.

The New York Herald devoted a column to Williams' open letter,

causing a furor in Europe where other newspapers picked up

Williams' accusations.

The United States has a special responsibility,

because it introduced this African

government to the international arena.

Williams was the first person to speak

out about what others had witnessed,

but refused to admit.

In describing Leopold's Congo State in action,

Williams used a phrase which prefigures the

Nuremberg trials by more than half a century:

Leopold's Congo State is guilty of crimes against humanity.

Leopold dismissed the charges with little difficulty.

[Music]

The Congo State is certainly not a business.

If it gathers ivory on certain of its lands,

that is only to lessen its deficit.

In dealing with a race composed of

cannibals for thousands of years,

it is necessary to use methods which

will best shake their idleness,

and make them realize the sanctity of work.

I could never reconcile to myself that...

Belgians came to civilize, right?

To teach the Congolese how to work

was part of the civilizing mission.

Never mind the fact that, you know, this was slave labor.

there was this notion that, and it continues today:

"Africans are lazy"

People would make jokes -

if somebody wanted to say that some

other white was really working hard,

he would say well "that guy is really working like a nigger."

Which means to say, that in fact,

it was known down deep that, you know,

the Africans were really pushed to work like slaves.

Pitiful walking beasts of burden with thin monkey legs,

eyes fixed and round from preoccupation with keeping

their balance and from the daze of exhaustion.

What made it possible for officials

to deal out all this pain and terror?

Race. They saw the Africans as less than human.

[Crack of a whip]

The tool of this sanctioned terror was called the Chicotte -

a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide cut into long,

sharp-edged, corkscrew strips.

Its blows left scars, but worse,

twenty-five lashes could render the victim unconscious,

and a hundred blows could be fatal.

The Chicotte became a symbol of Leopold's white rule,

along with the steamboat and the rifle.

That colonial system was basically organized

and maintained through military rule,

which the king was trying to impose on the Congolese.

Leopold's army, the Force Publique,

was nineteen-thousand strong by the turn-of-the-century.

How could Congolese be made to enforce this

brutal system against their own people?

Leopold's private army would take soldiers and

send them 500-600 miles away from their own homes.

Nonetheless,

there were a lot of mutinies inside this private army,

and there was a lot of local resistance to the army.

Well, I still remembered today, orally,

names of people who led the rebellions.

Because people were literally being driven like animals.

A local chief named Nzansu led an uprising,

ambushing and killing state agents

and destroying their posts.

Nzansu spared a benevolent Swedish Baptist mission,

and even returned some supplies his men had taken.

To control the population,

and suppress such rebellions,

Leopold would raise an army of orphans,

devoid of loyalty to anything but the state.

I believe we must set up three children's colonies.

The aim of these colonies is, above all,

to furnish us with soldiers.

It was unusual in tightly knit African tribes for parentless

children to be sent away.

but many were orphaned because the Force Publique

had killed their parents.

These were the only state-funded schools

for children in Leopold's Africa.

Disease was rife, and the death rate high.

Several of the little girls were so sickly on their arrival,

that our good sisters couldn't save them,

but all had the happiness of receiving Holy Baptism.

They are now little angels in Heaven

who are praying for our great king.

At the turn of the century,

the worldwide rubber boom exploded.

This is the time when electricity

spreads throughout the western world,

so rubber is essential, not just for automobile tires but for

anything and everything that had to do with electric wires,

and that explains why rubber prices were so high.

Nowhere did the boom have a greater impact

than in the Congo,

where rubber vines snaked high into the rain forests,

that covered half of Leopold's colony.

The king had gone into debt with his Congo investments,

but the return on rubber would surpass all his expectations.

Rubber was not the most valuable product;

ivory was much more valuable - but rubber was what mattered.

Leopold financed his colony on the back of rubber.

We passed a man on the road who had broken his back

by falling from a tree while tapping some vines.

Rubber is a sap, which must be congealed to be carried.

The only method the workers typically had in the forest

was to spread it over their bodies as they worked.

It caused excruciating pain when it was peeled away.

People were afraid of this work.

Nobody would agree to take this work on his own, no,

they were rather arresting them,

chasing them up to their home and they would tie their

hands with chains and send them on the rubber job.

The Red Rubber Terror began in the 1890s.

Two horrifying decades followed of murder and madness,

in return for profit.

Villages were assigned exact rubber quotas.

Forced to meet accelerating demands,

tappers scattered widely through the jungle,

often climbing trees a hundred feet off the ground.

They could make a small incision

at the base of the vine to tap it,

or,

whack through the vine entirely.

This produced rubber quickly, but killed the vine.

In a perverse reversal of production management,

tappers were severely punished for not making their quotas,

as well as for making their quotas, but killing the vine.

The native doesn't like making rubber,

he must be compelled to do it.

Soldiers arrive in a village, start looting,

take all the chickens, grain,

goats and finally they seize the women.

These women are kept hostages until

the Chief brings in the required number of kilograms of rubber.

Sometimes women were held hostage, sometimes children...

Sometimes elders or chiefs.

The wives of villagers who resisted were killed,

but often died anyway in the stockades,

where food was scarce and conditions harsh.

The women taken during the last raid

are causing me no end of trouble.

All the soldiers want one.

The sentries, who are supposed to watch them,

unchain the prettiest ones and rape them.

Luebo was the site of the first Presbyterian mission,

started by Sheppard and Lapsley,

who were the first American missionaries

to arrive here in Kasai.

Sheppard was a model of courage.

Sheppard loved the Congolese people,

and especially the Kuba people.

He even learned their language.

They thought he was the spirit of their chief's children,

come back from the dead.

Our parents were living in suffering;

our parents were living in death.

By the time the Sheppard party arrived,

our parents did not have wives, they did not have children.

The torments time came, they tortured people,

others were killed.

But when Sheppard showed up,

our parents could at last take wives and make children.

So if this village has been able to prosper this way,

it is thanks to Sheppard.

He especially focused on the notion of human rights.

He discovered that these people were weakening,

because the men were being taken and sent

into the forest to extract the rubber.

And in the event the men did not come

back with the required amount of rubber,

they were beaten,

whipped, and sometimes their hands were cut off.

[Music]

The chief conducted us to a framework of sticks,

under which was burning a slow fire and there they were,

the right hands, I counted them, 81 in all.

Hands were smoked to preserve them

until they could be tallied.

Sheppard learned that if a village

refused to gather rubber,

the state troops would shoot everyone in sight.

Some white officers demanded proof that the

bullet had not been wasted in hunting,

or worse, saved for a mutiny.

Occasionally the soldiers would hunt.

And as a cover up,

they would cut a hand from an innocent adult or child.

Sheppard responded to the atrocities being committed by

King Leopold's agents, by writing articles

to denounce these crimes to the world.

Sheppard's horrifying findings were reprinted widely -

in Europe, and in the United States.

A Belgian parliamentarian referred to

Leopold's Cinquantenaire monument,

then being constructed in Brussels from

Congo rubber profits,

as The Arch of Severed Hands.

28 miles north of the capital,

Antwerp serves as the center of the world's diamond industry.

All the ivory, rubber, and other riches

flowing into Belgium from Leopold's Congo were,

stored in warehouses on its docks.

Medieval tradition has it that a giant

once controlled Antwerp's harbor,

and demanded exorbitant tolls

from the ships needing anchorage.

If a captain refused to pay,

the giant cut off his hand and flung it in the water.

One day a brave Roman soldier fought and killed the giant,

cutting off his hand, and throwing it in the river.

So the city's name came from the phrase "Hantwerpen",

meaning "hand tossing".

Hands are still in evidence everywhere.

[Intense drumming music]

Like most people in Europe,

the writer Joseph Conrad also believed

Leopold's mission in the Congo was a noble and civilizing one.

But after six months as a steamboat

captain on the Congo River,

Conrad returned to Europe so horrified

by the brutality he witnessed,

that his view of human nature was permanently changed.

He later transformed his experience into the most

widely reprinted short novel in the English language.

Marlow, Joseph Conrad's alter ego,

is hired by an ivory trading company

to sail a steamboat upriver.

His destination is a post where the company's brilliant,

ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed.

[Thunder]

The most talked about exhibit at the 1897 World's Fair

that Leopold secured for Belgium was a Living Tableau.

267 black men, women and children

imported from the Congo 'Free State'

were placed in villages constructed in a park.

Here, one could see replications of a river village,

a forest village,

and a 'civilized' village,

which included ninety Force Publique soldiers.

When Leopold heard that some of them were getting sick

because of candy they were eating

that was tossed them by the crowd,

he put up the equivalent of a

"Don't Feed the Animals" sign at a zoo,

saying:

"The blacks are fed by the organizing committee"

The Scramble for Africa included looting of great quantities of

Congolese art that ended up in private collections and museums

around the world.

Also on exhibit at the Fair were samples of

products streaming in from the Congo.

By the end of the 19th century,

the Belgian port of Antwerp was one of

the busiest ports in Europe.

Edmund Dene Morel was a clerk

working in Liverpool for an British Shipping Line,

which had a major shipping contract to and from the Congo.

On the docks of Antwerp,

Morel discovered a stunning fraud:

Rich loads of ivory and rubber came

from the Congo and into Belgium,

but very few trade goods were shipped back -

except for huge amounts of weapons and military goods.

And someone was skimming huge profits off the top.

The figures told their own story.

Forced labor of a terrible and

continuous kind could alone explain such profits...

It must be bad enough to stumble upon a murder -

I stumbled upon a secret society of murderers!

With a flash of insight from a modest shipping clerk,

King Leopold had attracted, in Edmund Morel,

his most dangerous opponent.

Once he began to unravel Leopold's web of deceptions,

Morel would become one of the great investigative journalists

of his day.

I was filled with determination -

to do my best to expose and destroy

what I then knew to be a legalized infamy...

responsible for a vast destruction of human life.

One of the rubber concessions, ABIR,

the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber and Exploration Company,

sold raw rubber at a 700-precent profit.

Harvesting wild rubber required virtually no investment,

except backbreaking labor.

Their books listed forty-seven thousand gatherers.

When they were beating them,

they received up to twenty lashes.

They had no right to eat,

and they were not allowed to drink water.

Many people died following this treatment.

Their words when they were lashing people,

they were explaining that they came to put an end to our

suffering and that they brought us better civilization.

That's what the Belgians were saying.

In high-rubber districts,

villagers were forced to wear numbered metal tags

so company agents could keep track of their quotas.

At just one collection point,

a missionary counted four hundred people with baskets.

The state, or concession companies,

paid villagers with a piece of cloth, a few spoonfuls of salt,

a knife, or nothing at all.

In 1903, the British Parliament passed a protest resolution

condemning Belgium's failure to live up to Leopold's promises

about fair trade and his treatment of the natives.

The British Government orders His Majesty's Britannic Consul

in the Congo, Roger Casement, who happened to be Irish,

to investigate and report back immediately.

Even though he was employed by the

leading colonial power of the day,

Casement developed an eye for injustice,

and witnessed more brutality in Africa than most.

On Sunday evening,

natives brought me a mutilated lad whose right hand

had been hacked off quite recently.

The culprit was a sentry of Lalu Langa,

a Belgian "trading" Society.

When I asked why they had not appealed to their Commissaire,

I heard from them; "Why it is the Commissaire -

it is the Bula Matadi who does these things to us."

One of the rare testimonies recorded,

was documented by an American Swahili-speaking State Agent,

Edgar Canisius,

who was moved by a "woman of great intelligence,"

named Ilanga.

We were all busy in the fields,

for it was the rainy season and all

the weeds sprang up quickly...

a large band of soldiers came into the village.

We were dragged into the road and tied together with

cords about our necks.

The soldiers beat us and compelled us to march to

the camp where the soldiers brought

baskets of food for us to carry,

some of which was smoked, human flesh.

Katinga had her baby in her arms,

and was not compelled to carry a basket;

but my husband was made to carry a goat.

We marched until the afternoon,

when we camped near a stream where we were glad to drink,

for we were much athirst.

The soldiers took my sister's baby and threw it in the grass,

leaving it to die.

On the sixth day,

we became very weak from lack of food,

and my husband with the goat could not

stand up longer.

And so he sat down and refused to walk more.

Then,

one of them struck him on the head with the end of his gun.

One of the soldiers caught the goat,

while two others stuck their long knives they

put on the ends of their guns into my husband.

I saw the blood spurt out,

then saw him no more...

for we passed over the brow of the hill,

and he was out of sight.

After marching ten days we came to the great water,

and were taken in canoes across to the white man's

slave town of Nyangwe.

Leopold pronounced himself shocked at reports

of misdeeds in his domain.

Again,

he put to work an early example of public relations expertise.

In a cunning counter campaign, he used the newspapers to

plant shocking stories of abuses by other colonialist countries,

and news of peace and prosperity in the Congo.

Those in power don't react much, they cover-up,

so there's little talk about the fact that behind all that money,

how was it obtained?

All that stays quiet.

Leopold II has sole power over the

Independent State of the Congo.

The practice of forced labor will continue,

the colony will continue to be pumped dry.

Leopold continued his lavish lifestyle,

accumulating properties in Belgium and

villas in the south of France where,

it was rumoured,

he entertained pretty young girls,

preferably virgins, between ten and fifteen years of age.

And Morel continued to write,

combining controlled fury with meticulous accuracy.

The more he published,

the more insiders came forward with stories of horror.

Force Publique officers, missionaries,

concession company employees -

all sent reports.

Secret crown orders,

confidential memoranda, casualty lists, journals...

And most important,

photographs were delivered to Morel's doorstep.

[Music]

In 1887,

I spent several months on the Upper Congo,

and traveled over some of the ground I am now

revisiting after an absence of ten years.

The country was thickly populated...

Frequent and populous towns.

But many of the inhabitants have been killed by the Government,

men and women...

Casement put the official report together

on his return to England.

But the British Ambassador urged suppression of the report,

and its' graphic detail was watered down.

Leopold's staff attacked Casement

by saying he had really only seen "individuals"

suffering from cancer of the hands,

which had to be cut off in simple surgical procedures.

I saw those hunted women,

the blood flowing as the whip struck and struck again,

the savage soldiers amid burning villages.

Casement told me he had been amazed to find that I,

five thousand miles away,

had come to conclusions identical

with his in every respect.

An immense weight passed from me.

[Music]

Of the persistent mutilation by Government soldiers,

there can be no shadow of doubt.

Should the system maintain forced labor on this scale,

I believe the entire population will be extinct in thirty years!

Infamous! Infamous, shameful system!

Finally, after years of conspiracy and silence,

public opinion was galvanized throughout Europe.

The 'Congo Question' was debated in the British House of Commons,

and in 1904, the Congo Reform Association was formed.

At each protest meeting,

a lantern slide show of photographs,

taken by missionaries,

presented grisly evidence

that public relations could not refute.

In response to all the bad press,

Leopold sent to the Congo a sham commission of judges to "clear"

allegations against him. But this time, his plan backfired.

The commission heard many native

witnesses offer horrifying testimonies.

One judge broke down and wept...

Chief Lontulu of Bolima laid 100 twigs on the table,

each representing one of his people

killed in the quest for rubber.

Tribal nobles, men, women, and children.

It is in the pages of this unedited record of testimony,

and other documents still not authorized for public viewing,

that King Leopold's rule of terror is truly exposed.

This international explosion of bad

publicity was a turning point.

Leopold needed to rid himself of the trouble of the Congo.

But he would not give it away. He would sell it.

And Belgium, the buyer, would pay dearly for it!

Leopold demanded that the nation assume

110 million francs worth of debt,

much of it in the form of bonds.

Additionally,

Belgium had to pay 45 and a half million francs toward

the king's building projects.

And Leopold himself was to receive fifty million francs

"as a mark of gratitude for his great sacrifices

for the Congo."

When the king made public his will,

it was backdated so that his bequest of the Congo to Belgium

looked like an act of generosity instead of a financial deal.

His Congo fortune was hidden in anonymous foundations,

in secret corporations, in shares of concessions in Africa,

in fifty eight pieces of real estate in Brussels alone,

and in multiple properties on the French Riviera.

In return,

his legacy to Belgium would be to erase from memory the

horrors perpetrated in the Congo.

He burned the entire Congo State Archives in Belgian furnaces...

and in fires throughout the Congo.

I will give them my Congo.

But they have no right to know what I did there.

In December 1909,

a year after negotiations of the Congo were completed,

King Leopold II of Belgium died of an intestinal blockage.

Ironically, Leopold's open disdain for his wife,

his dislike of his daughters and sexual practices,

cost him more popularity in Belgium than any

of the cruelties he perpetrated in Africa.

He died possessing one of Europe's largest fortunes.

The wealth he stole from the Congo

that investigators could uncover,

was estimated at more than 1.1 billion dollars

in today's currency.

Leopold never set foot in the Congo.

Savagery against the workers subsided somewhat

with the Belgian takeover in 1908,

but the taxes imposed by Brussels forced the

Congolese back into grinding work on a land

they could never own.

There was a new kind of enslavement

of the Congolese people.

It was impossible to be independent,

in no domain: political, economical or religious.

Everything must be controlled by Europeans,

and by preference, by Belgians.

History is complicated.

It's never one single thing.

But what Leopold did was to establish government as

a system of organized plunder.

This was continued after him by the

Belgian colonial government, and it is still continued today.

The vast Congo state

was proving to be one of the richest in Africa.

The different resources of each province

promised immense wealth to those who could extract it.

During the World Wars,

western demand for rubber and other minerals increased.

Laborers were recruited with the

same tactics used in Leopold's time.

A recruiter went around with soldiers

or police to the village chiefs,

assigned them a quota of recruits,

usually double what was actually needed because half

of them would run away the first chance they got,

and then the chief would round up those whom he liked

the least and send them off roped together

or in chains to the district capital,

and from there they would be

eventually transported to the mines.

For this the chief received ten francs for each recruit.

In 1920 it was still legal for management to use the Chicotte

And it was in use as late as 1959.

Every morning,

we called the people in the village,

and then the prisoners came before me.

These people got whipped in front of everybody.

The whip was being used to tell these people;

"Look, if you do not do what I say,

if you will not pick the cotton,

if you will not do maintenance on the roads,

you will be whipped as well, do you understand?"

That was the system that is based on fear.

One could say that Congo was made with the whip.

How many people died during the Leopold

period and its immediate aftermath?

Nobody was counting.

But, in 1919,

an official body of the Belgian colonial government,

the Permanent Commission for the Protection of the Natives,

estimated that in a 40-year period,

half the territory's population had been lost.

The question is what that half of the population meant.

I mean it is an estimate.

The count of the population in 1921 was about ten million.

So half of the total would have been ten million, too.

A large part of it is due to the beginning of the colonial state,

and especially to the rubber regime.

Father Edmond Boelaert arrived in the Congo in 1931.

He was shocked by the consequences of colonization.

He recorded the names of people who

were victims of the Red Rubber.

Some of these groups were completely exterminated.

So, the following people from the Ikansa clan were killed:

Bagonso, who was killed by an arrow, killed in this war,

Lekoka, imprisoned and subsequently hung himself;

Efoloko, Etale, killed in this war;

Dua, his daughter, taken away at gunpoint...

Even though he had worked for years

as a colonial official in the Congo,

Jules Marchal did not learn of the

rubber terror until the 1970s,

when he stumbled on it in a Liberian newspaper.

There I read about the ten million black people that

we had killed in the time of Leopold the Second.

I was scandalized.

I asked for documentation from the Foreign Office

in order to defend the honor of my country.

And I get no documentation.

Then I started to think about it all...

because I never knew about these things back then,

just as much as the Belgian people now.

There was a rule in the archives.

They were not obliged to show every piece

that was bad for the reputation of Belgium.

Every piece was bad for the reputation of Belgium.

So they showed nothing.

In 1983,

Marchal was finally allowed to see a revealing judicial

record that had escaped King Leopold's fires.

Like Morel before him, Marchal published his discoveries,

which were met with denial and disbelief in Belgium.

[African music]

The Congo was, at the end of the fifties,

very much dependent on the international economic market.

You had no important improvements in

political life inside the colony.

Belgium didn't introduce reforms,

didn't introduce political space for

the Congolese themselves to take over.

So there was no Congolese partner who

was there to take over political power.

As the Congo neared Independence in the 1960s,

Patrice Lumumba was a leading voice of Congo outrage.

A charismatic nationalist, Lumumba

advocated for a unified Congo.

He battled the ghosts of Leopold's legacy,

which continued to take the form of concessions and

corporations owned by outsiders.

It was for them very clear that if Lumumba could manage to get a

complete decolonization of his country,

this would be a powerful example for people,

from Katanga up to South Africa and that's why hardcore

colonialists in Belgium establishment,

they didn't want to give up the Congo.

The Belgians imposed a five-year

plan leading toward independence,

which militant Congolese denounced as a stalling tactic.

Anger consumed the country.

The demand for self-rule placed pressure on Belgium.

[Dramatic music]

In 1960, Lumumba, who had been imprisoned

for his anti-colonialist activity,

was released and sent to Brussels,

where he joined negotiations for Congo independence,

at the Brussels Roundtable Conference.

The resulting democratic election was

the only one the Congo had ever had.

Lumumba was elected Coalition Prime Minister

of the new government.

In June of 1960 King Baudouin of Belgium

arrived in Leopoldville to grant the Congo its freedom.

Can you imagine?

Here are thousands of Congolese celebrating

their long awaited independence,

and they are listening to the King of Belgium

making this insulting,

condescending, patronizing speech.

The independence of the Congo is the crowning of the

work conceived by the genius of King Leopold II.

Undertaken by him with courage,

and continued by Belgium with perseverance....

On that Lumumba reacted,

he was outraged by the paternalistic tone

of that speech and he decided to put the record straight.

Men and women of the Congo.

Victorious fighters for independence, today victorious.

I greet you in the name of the Congolese Government.

We have known ironies, insults...

blows to the head that we endured morning,

noon and evening,

because we are Negroes...

In his speech he was explaining what was the essence of

Belgian Colonialism, and this was certainly something

which the Belgians didn't want to hear.

We have seen that the law was not the same

for a white and for a black,

accommodating for the first,

cruel and inhuman for the other.

In his reply, Lumumba alarmed Western capitals.

He believed that it was not enough to

free Africa from its colonial past;

it must cease to be an economic colony as well.

My father was a man who was a Nationalist,

who loved his country,

and who became a martyr when very young.

Although Lumumba understood that he

had to accommodate Belgian interests,

he did not understand that his nationalism,

in the Cold War, was perceived as, close to,

you know, Communism.

No, he was not a Communist.

I am not a Communist.

It is plainly a matter of information.

This certainly confirmed their fears that Lumumba would be a

guy who was thinking and speaking for his people and

wouldn't be manipulated into some kind of neo-colonial sheep.

Lumumba was a guy who wasn't prepared

to sell the interests of his people.

When he said for example;

"I want to work with everybody,

with everybody who is prepared to accept

the real independence of the country,

and if it is the United States, OK.

But if it is the Soviet Union, that's for me also OK."

And that was, of course, something for which

Eisenhower was much afraid.

No single country, even one so powerful as ours,

can alone defend the liberty of all nations

threatened by communist aggression from without,

or subversion within.

Mutual security means effective mutual cooperation.

When Eisenhower ordered killing Lumumba,

the Belgian Prime Minister gave an order

to organize a coup against Lumumba,

so in a sense the two came to the same conclusion.

Western powers worried that Lumumba would not allow

them to continue exploiting the Congo's resources.

I do not subscribe to the thesis that it is Lumumba's speech at

Independence which sealed his fate.

I think his fate was decided before that.

It was decided that he should not stay in power.

And sure enough, within a few days of Independence,

there was a mutiny of the army.

By then Mobutu had already been working for some time

with Belgian and U.S. Security.

The CIA was trying to kill Lumumba but in an indirect way.

The Americans were much afraid of being

linked to an assassination attempt of Lumumba

and that's why they tried to organize some Congolese of

doing the dirty job for them.

The CIA found an accomplice in Lumumba's one-time supporter,

the Congo Army's Chief Joseph Désiré Mobutu,

who built an alliance with the west

in order to gain and hold power.

The Belgian and the American Secret Services who worked

closely together in tracking down Lumumba,

and he was captured by Mobutu's soldiers.

It is important to know that the UN played a heavy role

into this capture of Lumumba.

The UN presence in the Congo was also due to the threat

of secession by the province of Katanga,

rich in resources vital to the West.

A threat instigated by the Belgians

and endorsed by the United States.

But Lumumba's troops and nationalists in Katanga were

winning that civil tug of war.

The blue helmets were sent to the Congo

to protect law and order,

and Lumumba was the legal prime minister of the country,

had parliamentary majority,

but it was the United Nations who closed the

airport so that Lumumba couldn't appeal to soldiers loyal

to him to come to his aid,

and secondly it was the UN who closed the radio station,

so that Lumumba couldn't appeal to

the population to come to his help.

Lumumba was sent to Katanga together with two other

leaders of the nationalist movement,

and after several hours of being

beaten and tortured they were executed.

It were two Belgian Police officers who got the

task of eliminating the bodies altogether.

They cut the bodies into pieces and

got them dissolved in sulphuric acid.

I can only have a vision of what would

have happened if he had not died.

He fought for democracy, for social justice,

for the real political and economic development

of the country.

And it must not be forgotten that

it was the only elected government until today,

43 years later.

Thus we lived with the consequences.

Democracy was assassinated in this country.

Lumumba's death sparked demonstrations

in countries around the world.

In Belgium, there were hundreds of arrests.

But the outrage had little effect in the Congo,

where the new ruler was busy imitating

those who had preceded him.

Mobutu seized power and used ruthless violence,

employing deadly mercenaries,

with the aid of the United States,

to counter rebellions.

We have no choice - we must forge ahead,

even bargain with the devil,

to rebuild the Congo.

The Congo will remain one and indivisible!

The period from 1960 to 1968 and later,

concentrated basically on how to really

make sure that Mobutu stays in power.

That period coincided with a period of incredible massacres.

[Music]

Mobutu and his entourage helped themselves to state revenues so

freely that the Congolese government ceased to function.

For thirty years,

Mobutu was funded by the US with catastrophic

consequences for the Congo and the rest of Africa.

For well over a billion dollars,

the US got a reliably anti-communist regime

during the Cold War,

and a staging area for CIA and French military operations.

All that Mobutu gave the Congo was a new name.

Zaire is among America's oldest friends, and its President,

President Mobutu,

one of our most valued friends...

in the entire continent of Africa.

And we are proud and very,

very pleased to have you with us today.

Thank you, Sir.

The assassination of Lumumba was

basically the western powers doing

away with independent civil alternative

to the military rule of Leopold II.

Now once this had been done,

they had to look for a military

dictator to keep the country together

and go on with the exploitation of

the country like they did before,

and this is what happened up until '97

when Mobutu was deposed of and the

consequences of this tragedy are going on until today.

In 1997,

the rebel leader Laurent Kabila swept into Kinshasa

and declared himself head of state.

Mobutu's palaces were looted,

and his soldiers were executed.

Mobutu escaped with stolen riches,

large overseas bank accounts,

and title to many of his 33 known properties all

around the world.

When he died in Morocco of prostate cancer,

his personal wealth, accounting for inflation,

was estimated at 4 billion dollars.

His villa in the South of France is only

half a mile from Leopold's chateau.

From one cape, you can see the other.

We are in Shinkolobwe.

This is the plant that manufactured the first

atomic bombs used by Americans during World War II.

Just after World War II, it was shut down.

Today, no one is permitted to come here,

because of the radiation from the uranium.

That mine, when it was started,

the concentration of uranium was so big,

that literally the ore was taken out of the ground and shipped

without hardly any processing.

More than 80 percent of the world's supply of uranium

used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki

atomic bombs came from the Congo.

As military power was now derived from nuclear weapons,

Shinkolobwe's value increased.

Just before the Congo was declared formally independent,

the Belgians poured cement into the mine and flooded it -

the Congolese would have no access to it.

Officially,

Shinkolobwe is closed but undercover,

it is still exploited.

You've got all these VIP rich people,

buying products coming from Shinkolobwe.

Even if they don't exploit it directly they are

encouraging young people to the exploitation.

Thousands of illegal miners swarm

over the radioactive zone,

packing sacks with soil called heterogenite,

rich in uranium 235.

The material is smuggled over the borders,

and sold on the world market,

particularly to China and North Korea.

I see trucks and trucks going through Zambia

with these materials to South Africa.

We have guys claiming to be from the presidential family.

They can pass through the border anything without being searched.

These are the ones mostly involved in the uranium traffic.

We ask ourselves:

if the President's family stand for the construction

of the Congo or the destruction of the Congo.

In order to understand this conflict,

that some people say has now come to an end, but it hasn't,

it's important to understand the role of

commercial activity in the Congo.

This is a war over loot.

It's a mercenaries' war.

Although Laurent Kabila had pledged

changes when he took power,

he failed his people, growing secretive and distant.

Elections he had promised, never took place.

Rwanda and Uganda attempted to depose him,

triggering what became known as the African World War,

when neighboring countries came to his aid.

At some point there were about six different national armies

roaming around the Congo.

They're not so sure who they were fighting, I don't think.

Everyone knew that Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia

and the Congo were fighting Rwanda, Burundi and so on.

But I don't think that the soldiers

were very concerned about it either

because, in brief, they began to pillage and plunder.

In the 1980s and '90s,

local Congolese began to have to fend their own way,

setting up basically their own local governments.

They began by smuggling, they began by exploiting gold,

exploiting coffee even,

crossing the boundaries to Uganda or to Rwanda with it...

These ragtag armies began to maraud the countryside.

Villages were then displaced,

these displaced villages escaped and formed their own militias,

and by 2002 every little guy over 12 years old had a gun.

It was the most remarkable example that I've ever seen,

and I've seen a bit,

of the complete militarization of a society.

Laurent Kabila was assassinated by

one of his bodyguards in January, 2001.

The ensuing chaos provided cover for the world's ruling powers.

You see, in sense this is again like Leopold's time!

It is again exploiting without any control!

Today,

nothing fuels pillage more than the scramble for Coltan,

short for columbite-tantalite,

a metallic ore found mainly in the eastern Congo.

Increasingly vital to all aspects of modern life,

coltan is a key component in cell phones and computer chips,

and absolutely essential to global communications,

transportation and defense.

Seventy-three percent of the world's reserves

are in the Congo.

From 1994 onwards

Coltan became quite important in the west.

This led to an unbridled rush for Coltan by all armed groups

on all sides but mainly by the Ugandans and Rwandans.

Ironically,

miners are collecting a mineral they have no use for.

Officially, it is moderately radioactive.

Local workers are warned against carrying a day's collection

in their pockets lest it result in sterility or cancers.

Birth defects appear in children of

miners who store sack loads of the mineral in their homes.

In the west,

most people remain indifferent to the effects that

modern economic exploitation has on global populations.

[music]

One knows that about three million people died

in Kivu and in Equateur,

either directly from military operations or indirectly

from famine and malnutrition, plus famine combined.

We are dealing with the mortality

that is associated with a system of

exploitation that is based on unbridled capitalism.

Whatever happens, the only thing that counts are the profits.

In June of 2003,

the UN appointed a panel to investigate

the growing abuses underway in the Congo.

I did serve as a member of the

United Nations' Panel of Experts:

The Expert Panel on the Exploitation

of Natural Resources and other Forms of Wealth

in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

It did imply by the name that it was this issue,

the issue of inappropriate commercial

activity with dire consequences

that was responsible for the

conflict for this war essentially.

And I would like to stress that the roots

of civil wars is in economic issues.

I think there is some sort of limit to greed and profit

and I think that is what the UN panel report has shown.

You don't use war to make profit when people suffer like,

in a country like the Congo.

Now, who are these companies?

Some are, of course,

criminal operations and we find this everywhere.

But there are also terrorist organizations that are involved,

in business and the line between...

Hezbollah,

and Hezbollah's political and its

business operations is pretty slim.

And then there are the military regimes of neighboring

countries,

who have come to realize that this is a much better way to

make money than through taxes and through foreign aid.

And then finally, there are the transnational corporations.

Who claim that they're doing a great

deal of good for the Congolese.

But, on closer inspection their role is nefarious.

And I'm delighted that the Panel took the decision as it did,

to name the companies.

It named a hundred and fifty seven of them;

and it started the ball rolling.

[dramatic music]

All these companies that helped are

complicit in what's happening in the Congo.

Banks may be among them.

The lowering of costs of production...

came by the use of violence,

and that's getting diamonds and gold

much easier than paying the cost of

labor of their production.

Its the economics that drive so many of the conflicts with which

we're grappling today.

These are not going to be settled by peace

accords and by political reconciliation.

These are going to be settled by some

mechanism which is able to hold businesses,

international corporations, mining companies,

trading companies, to account.

Joseph Kabila, in command of the Congo's military,

succeeded his father immediately after

Laurent Kabila was assassinated.

The new president is young but embattled;

faced with a country suffering from 32 years of war.

Unlike his father, he has attempted to negotiate with

some of his father's enemies.

And each of them has some personal particular

strongholds or relationships with power in this country.

Jean Pierre Bemba is Congolese,

comes from the Mobutu clan,

but he was also a warlord and he may be accused

by the International Court at some point.

It's no secret, that the rich resources of this country have

never benefited the Congolese people,

instead they have benefited either those in power

or foreign political and financial groups...

In January 1999, Jean-Pierre Bemba,

leader of the Movement for the Liberation of the Congo,

along with the Ugandan Major General James Kazini,

organized a looting of coffee beans so vast,

that it bankrupted the Congolaise Société Du Café,

the largest owner of coffee stocks in the northeast.

[Singing]

There was little to profit from in the area I controlled

because it was in the forest.

There were no resources from which we could profit.

The UN Panel Report reveals that in Equateur Province,

where Bemba is in control,

he instructed his soldiers to systematically

empty banks once a town was captured.

It was in the United Nations' report, actually.

It mentions 5 billion dollars that were embezzled.

[Singing, drumming]

In an effort to stabilize his country,

Joseph Kabila has sought debt cancellation from

the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,

the U.S., France, and Belgium.

Four main rebel leaders now serve as vice presidents

in a powersharing government designed

to end the country's civil war.

I think the situation here is so terrible,

that people don't really...

give a lot of importance to the legitimacy of these different

political leaders.

What people want now is just some sort of economic

development, some sort of peace so they are ready to

to support Joseph Kabila if he provides this.

Joseph Kabila promised elections for 2005,

which did not take place.

The four Vice Presidents will

compete with Kabila for the presidency.

I think it's also in the hands of the local people to

fight for their rights.

People haven't really yet realized that it's perhaps the

right time for them to march and take to the streets.

The Congo is simply too rich to be left alone,

to be left by itself and to be

governed by the Congolese themselves.

There are too many forces who have big stakes

into getting their hands onto those huge

wealths which are there into the Congo.

And this was so during the time of

Leopold the II and it is the same today.

Armed conflict, disease, forced labor, starvation:

the legacy of Leopold's time still haunts the Congo today.

The 3.4 million to 4 million people who died as a result

of the conflict errs on the low side.

And I think it's probably worth making the same point for

King Leopold's time because the causes of high

mortality rates are pretty much the same.

The people who are the victims are forced to bear the

provisioning of the armies who are their victimizers.

A child who was born in some of these areas

has about a seventy percent chance of dying.

There's been so much violence that the newly created

International Criminal Court in the Hague has chosen

to focus on the Congo as its first investigation.

I was heading to the bathroom around 5 pm.

I met Shabani.

He sent a boy to catch me and bring me to him.

He forced me into a room. I was screaming.

He pulled my clothes off after taking off his own.

He bound my hands. And then he...

he...raped me.

More than 65 percent of our population

is younger than 15 years old,

so even those who are 30 today were not around in the '60s,

did not study it in school.

Most people know the names,

but when you ask them what happened,

most people do not know.

I do not know if Belgium has offered

apologies for the rubber tragedy but,

I know they apologized concerning

the assassination of Lumumba to the

people of the Congo, and to my family.

The royal family is a strange subject in Belgium,

quite untouchable;

one that hides and protects itself and that never

appears in public debate.

I believe that it's really up to the democratic system,

and up to the parliament to shed some light - it's much stronger.

But it must be done with a balanced approach,

so as not to give the impression that there were only injustices,

that there was only killing.

There were many other things as well.

And that is often forgotten in debates that are sometimes

partisan to one side or another.

It has been very difficult,

and has been very long and laborious

to put the country back on track.

But if we, the Congolese,

ourselves do not believe in it, I do not know who will.

And I believe that in this country there is not only wealth

- right it does exist -

but there are especially people,

there are human resources that are

extraordinary and I believe in that.

And we know, we have to work to make it come true.

[Water splashing]

[music]

Biembaka, killed by the gun.

Etaleaoso, his brother- killed by the gun.

Efolokozambeyo, Man- killed by the gun.

Lekoka, Boy- killed by the gun.

Majangu, Man- killed by the gun.

Ifeka, Girl- killed by the gun.

Akaba, Man- killed by the gun.