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Quote by Jozef-Ernest van Roey

“God who distributed the goods of the earth among the regions and peoples of the earth, has therefore made them no less in the service of all mankind. The human groups have no right to assume that the riches offered by the regions inhabited by them are solely for themselves. A fruitful division of labor must therefore be practiced, making these resources available to all members of humanity. The divine plan is disregarded, humanity is robbed of its future, when, through inability the backward peoples fail to exploit the treasures of their soil. As long as nobody has been set up with remedying this disorder, every state, provided it has the means, has the right to assume this task and if necessary to deprive the natives of the rights which it appears to have made common. welfare of all peoples.”

Quote by Jozef-Ernest van Roey

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Jozef-Ernest van Roey

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“The first and biggest deceit at the heart of King Leopold’s Ghost is the attempt to equate Léopold’s “État indépendant du Congo” or EIC (long mistranslated as the Congo Free State) with Western colonialism. Yet the EIC was a short-term solution to the absence of colonial government in the Congo river basin.”

“The deal was simple: Léopold was to open the area to trade and eliminate endemic Arab slave empires and African tribal wars. In return, he hoped to bring glory to the Belgian people for having done what no other European ruler dared (one in three Europeans who traveled to the Congo died, usually of illness). The EIC had nothing to do with the Belgian government. To the extent that limited abuses and misrule occurred in some parts of his domain, this was a direct result of its not being controlled by a European state. As no less than Morel insisted (not quoted by Hochschild), “Let us refrain from referring to the Congo as a Belgian colony, let us avoid writing of ‘Belgian misrule.”

“I make an appeal to the people of the civilized world, whose representatives signed the Berlin Act of 1885, and the Brussels Act of 1890, to unite in putting pressure upon their respective Governments to take the territories known as the independant Congo State out of the hands of King Leopold II, now ruler over a million square miles in Africa, inhabited by twenty million negroes; and by such measures as may be decided upon at a new Conference, to ensure that the provisions of the Berlin and Brussels Acts shall be effectively carried out in those territories.”

“The second, but more visible, untruth is the claim that for 23 years, EIC officials throughout the territory sponsored violent actions such as chopping off hands to force natives to collect rubber, leaving millions dead in a horror that should be directly compared to the Holocaust. There are about a dozen little cheats here, one embedded in the other like Russian nesting dolls.”