leopold ii statue

On Monday, a petition was launched to remove all statues in his honour from the City of Brussels. Leopold II statue defaced again in Africa Museum Petitions launched for their removal garnering thousands of signatures, with several being taken down, including in Mons, Antwerp and Leuven.The scale of the protests, which came just ahead of the 60th anniversary of Congolese independence from Belgium, saw the government give the go-ahead to a parliamentary commission tasked with studying Belgium’s colonial occupation of the Congo.“The Congo parliamentary committee, which will look at our colonial history and consider whether Belgium should apologise, will start in October,’ Gryseels said. That meant if the troops shot and missed, they would sometimes cut the hand off a living person. Leopold then used the treaties to stake a claim to an enormous chunk of central Africa -- more or less the territory that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Who was he? All Rights Reserved. Statue of Leopold II Is Removed in Antwerp The statue of Leopold II, a Belgian king who brutalized Congo, was vandalized by recent protests against racism in …

By Richard Allen Greene, CNN. entfernt.

transcript. Historians estimate that under Leopold's misrule, 10 million people died.Other colonial empires such as Portugal, France and Germany copied Leopold's methods, but by the end of his life, Leopold was seen as a villain and forced to relinquish control of the so-called Free State. A statue of Belgium’s colonial king, Leopold II, in the Africa Museum in Brussels, has been daubed in red paint in the third act of defacement so far this year.The Leopold bust in the Africa Museum in Tervueren, in the outskirts of Brussels, was smeared in red aerosol paint at the weekend.The message “BLM II” was also spraypainted at the base of the bust, in reference to the US-originated Black Lives Matter movement that saw anti-racism protests branch out throughout the world.“It’s already the third time this year that the museum’s statue of Leopold II is defaced,” director Guido Gryseels told “This action is part of a general protest movement against Leopold II and the violent regime he led in the Congo Free State,” he said. He made Belgium buy it from him a year before his death, and it was renamed the Belgian Congo. Copyright © 2019 The Brussels Times. All Rights Reserved.

It gained independence in 1960 and was first renamed Zaire, then the Democratic Republic of Congo after its long-time dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was toppled in 1997.Leopold's name may not be widely remembered today, but a phrase first used to describe his actions lives on: Crime against humanity. Thursday, 06 August 2020 Chat with us in … “With what we know today about Leopold II’s regime in the Congo, I also understand these actions.”Anarchists symbols and messages reading “millions died” were also visible on a strip of concrete encircling the statue, which features the bust of Leopold in military clothing surrounded by three Congolese men.The men are placed above Leopold’s head and are bearing shields and spears and are also standing on stick-legs, a reference to the routine use of limb amputation as a form of punishment in Leopold’s Congo, from which not even children were spared.Gryseels said that the museum had no information on the perpetrators of this defacement act, the second since June, when the BLM protests galvanised anti-racism, anti-police violence and anti-colonialism movements in Belgium.The scale of the protests, including one which drew some 10,000 people to the Belgian capital in the midst of the lockdown, revived the debate on Leopold’s legacy in both Belgium and the Congo.Dozens of statues of the brutal colonial king were repeatedly defaced in all corners of Belgium.

Leopold was responsible for a particularly cruel part of that conquest, during the so-called "Scramble for Africa. The statues of Leopold II throughout Belgium have been the subject of scrutiny several times before, with many opponents wanting them all removed. The inauguration was on 19 July 1931. Monday, 03 August 2020 Under Leopold II’s colonial regime, millions of Congolese people died. Als Reaktion auf die Proteste tausender Belgier gegen Rassismus haben die Behörden in Antwerpen eine Statue des früheren Königs Leopold II.