King Philippe is a reserved, suspicious, slightly awkward and terribly smooth man. However, he has just brought Belgium to a boil by choosing to open the inglorious page of the colonial past of his country in which one of his ancestors, his great great great great uncle, the builder king Léopold II, played a good wrong role. On June 30, on the occasion of the sixty years of independence of the Belgian Congo, in a letter addressed to Félix Tshisekedi, president of the DRC, the king expressed his " deep regrets for the wounds of the past ".
Read also: "Regrets" of the Belgian king on colonization: in Kinshasa, between satisfaction and requests for reparations
Certainly, no excuse is made in the missive but the words are strong. “ At the time of the independent state of Congo, acts of violence and cruelty were committed, which still weigh on our collective memory. The colonial period that followed also caused suffering and humiliation, ”wrote the king. Admittedly, his position is part of the anti-racist movements that shook the United States and Europe after
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