© STRINGER
Patrice Lumumba (R), Congolese Prime Minister, and Joseph Okito (L), Vice-President of the Senate, under the guard of soldiers who had just arrested them in December 1960 in Leopoldville, present-day Kinshasa
Belgian justice has had 200 boxes of documents from the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba placed under seal in the Federal Parliament, to which it wishes to have access, the federal prosecutor’s office said on Thursday.
These are the reports of hearings conducted behind closed doors by Belgian deputies more than 20 years ago, within the framework of this committee. These are documents that Parliament never wanted to make public.
According to the daily Le Soir, they relate to “88 hours of meetings behind closed doors”.
This sealing, Tuesday, “was done in good agreement between justice and parliament”, assured AFP Eric Van Duyse, spokesperson for the federal prosecution.
It aims to allow these documents to be added to the court file, which will still have to be validated by a decision of the investigating court of the Brussels Court of Appeal, said the spokesperson.
Patrice Lumumba, short-lived Prime Minister of the current Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) following the independence of the former Belgian Congo in 1960, was assassinated by Katangese separatists helped by Belgian mercenaries on January 17, 1961 in the South- Is from his country. He was 35 years old. His body, dissolved in acid, was never found.
He was eliminated with the alleged support of senior Belgian state officials and his assassination was the subject of a parliamentary inquiry in Belgium in 2000-2001, then a judicial inquiry following the complaint was filed in Brussels in 2011 by the eldest son of Patrice Lumumba.
At the independence of his country, this nationalist leader was perceived as pro-Soviet, representing a threat to Belgian interests, particularly in Katanga, a province rich in copper. Until he was called a “Devil”, a man to be “eliminated”, according to telexes exchanged at the end of 1960 between Brussels and the former colony.
The family’s complaint, which gave rise to the investigation for “war crime”, accuses “various administrations of the Belgian State” of having “participated in a vast plot for the political and physical elimination of Patrice Lumumba”.
Without commenting on a possible trial date in Belgium, the federal prosecutor’s office assures that “the investigation is continuing by all means allowing a better understanding of what happened”.
Today only two of the ten people initially targeted by the complaint are still alive. They are former diplomat Etienne Davignon, 89, and former senior official Jacques Brassinne de la Buissière, 92, according to sources familiar with the matter.
In 2001, the parliamentary commission of inquiry – the majority of whose hearings were conducted behind closed doors – concluded that Belgium had “moral responsibility” in the assassination. The following year the Belgian government presented the country’s “apologies”.
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