BELGIUM
A Belated Apology
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel officially apologized for his country’s kidnapping of thousands of children born to mixed-race couples during colonial rule in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.
Michel acknowledged that the government took around 20,000 children from their mothers as part of the program, violating their basic human rights, stripping them of their identity, stigmatizing them and separating them from their siblings, the BBC reported.
“I vow that this solemn moment will represent a further step toward awareness and recognition of this part of our national history,” he said in a statement.
Born in the 1940s and 1950s, the children were taken from the former colonies to Belgium in 1959, yet some of them never received Belgian citizenship. Many have no birth records and have thus been unable to track down their birth mothers or their Belgian fathers.
Georges Kamanayo, one of these children taken to Belgium, said Michel’s apology was the “ultimate recognition of an injustice.”
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