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A Belgian aristocrat who served as diplomat and European commissioner will have to face trial regarding his possible involvement in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese prime minister and independence leader assassinated in 1961.
Count Étienne Davignon, 93, the only remaining survivor among the 10 Belgians accused of involvement in the murder, was on Tuesday ordered to appear before a court over his potential participation in war crimes.
Lumumba was the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo after it gained independence from Belgium in 1960, following about 75 years of brutal colonial rule.
He was murdered in Katanga on January 17 1961, an act that occurred with the support of the Belgian government, according to the findings of a parliamentary commission in 2001.
In 2011, Lumumba’s son filed a criminal complaint against 10 Belgian nationals, accusing them of complicity in his father’s murder. Other family members later joined the claim.
The assassination of Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister was a defining moment of the cold war. It cemented western influence over Congo and contributed, according to historians, to preventing the vast nation at the heart of Africa from emerging as an independent nation in the years afterwards. In martyrdom, Lumumba became one of the most enduring symbols of Africa’s struggle against colonial rule.
The circumstances of his capture, torture and death have been the subject of countless films and books.
According to the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office, Davignon faces charges “for participation in war crimes related to the unlawful detention or unlawful transfer of a person protected by the Geneva Conventions; for having deprived prisoners of war or an occupied population of the right to a fair and impartial trial; and for humiliating and degrading treatment against Lumumba”.
Davignon, who did not respond to a request for comment, was an intern in the Belgian foreign ministry’s department for African affairs at the time of the murder, working in Belgium and the Congo.
A veteran Belgian dealmaker with deep ties to Europe’s energy and industrial groups, Davignon was born in 1932 and later became head of cabinet of Belgium’s foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak. In the 1970s and 1980s he was EU commissioner for the internal market and industry.
Lumumba’s family called Tuesday’s ruling by the Brussels appeals court “a significant step: one that acknowledges, however belatedly, the weight of decisions made against the life of Patrice Emery Lumumba”.
“The legal system of Belgium begins, at last, to confront its own responsibilities for acts committed in the name of colonial rule. For our family, this is not the end of a long fight, it is the beginning of a reckoning that history has long demanded,” the family added.
“What we ask of this court is simple: the truth, spoken aloud, in the open, on the record of justice and history,” said the Lumumba family.
In January, the family described Davignon as “one of the links in the chain that led to the killing of Patrice Lumumba, following a series of steps during which rights and human dignity were systematically denied”.
“The consequences of this assassination continue to haunt Congolese society, trapped in a vicious cycle of impunity,” Lumumba’s family added at the time.
The trial is expected to begin next year.
Additional reporting by William Wallis in Nairobi