Congolese politicians have demanded Belgium pays the DRC reparations after the Belgian King expressed remorse for the brutal colonial occupation of the African country for the first time. King Philippe offered his “deepest regrets” in a letter to DRC president Felix Tshisekedi on the 60th anniversary of independence on Tuesday and as the Black Lives Matter movement is forcing Belgians to examine the past. Philippe’s great-great-great uncle Leopold II ruled a region containing the whole of the DRC as a private rubber-producing slave state. More than ten million Africans are estimated to have died in a “forgotten Holocaust”. He was forced to surrender direct control of the Congo Free State in 1908 and Belgium formally annexed it, calling it the Belgian Congo until independence in 1960. Pierre Kompany, who is Belgium’s first black mayor and moved to the country from the DRC as a child, praised King Philippe. “In 60 years no one has done what he has done. In the 60 years since independence, he is the first to express his deep regrets,” Mr Kompany, who has faced racist death threats since becoming mayor of Ganshoren in Brussels, said. “We must take that in a positive way and advance forward together,” the father of footballer Vincent Kompany told the Sunday Telegraph.
