Belgian Envoy Faces Justice for Alleged Role in 1961 Slaying of Congolese Leader Patrice Lumumba

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File: A picture taken in December 1960, shows soldiers guarding Patrice Lumumba (right), Prime Minister of then Congo-Kinshasa, and Joseph Okito (left), vice-president of the Senate, upon their arrest in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). Photo by AFP.

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A Brussels court, on Tuesday, ordered a 93-year-old former Belgian diplomat to stand trial over the 1961 killing of Congolese independence icon Patrice Lumumba, prosecutors said.

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Etienne Davignon, the only person still alive among 10 Belgians accused by the Congolese leader’s family of complicity in the murder, stands accused of “participation in war crimes”.

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The decision is subject to appeal.

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“We are all relieved,” the leader’s grandson, Mehdi Lumumba, told AFP.

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He welcomed as “historic” the decision announced by Belgian prosecutors – which remains subject to appeal.

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“Belgium is finally confronting its history,” he said.

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If the trial goes ahead, Davignon would be the first Belgian official to face justice in the 65 years since Lumumba was executed and his body dissolved in acid.

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Lawyers for the one-time European commissioner, who denies all charges, argued in a closed-door hearing in January that too much time had passed since the events, according to multiple sources.

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Lumumba’s relatives, conversely, have maintained that the time is ripe for a long-overdue legal reckoning.

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Prosecutors accuse Davignon of “participation in war crimes” over his role in the “unlawful detention and transfer” of Lumumba, as well as “humiliating and degrading treatment”.

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A fiery critic of Belgium’s colonial rule, Lumumba became his country’s first prime minister after it gained independence from Belgium in 1960.

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But he fell out with the former colonial power and with the United States and was ousted in a coup a few months after taking office.

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He was executed on January 17, 1961, aged just 35, in the southern region of Katanga, with the support of Belgian mercenaries.

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His body was never recovered.

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‘Criminal enterprise’

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Davignon, who went on to become a vice president of the European Commission in the 1980s, was a novice diplomat at the time of the assassination.

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After entering the diplomatic service in 1959, Davignon rose through the ranks after his early involvement in Congolese independence talks.

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Christophe Marchand, a lawyer for Lumumba’s family, described the accused as “a link in the chain” of a “disastrous state-sponsored criminal enterprise”.

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The case – the latest step in Belgium’s decades-long reckoning with the role it played in Lumumba’s killing – had already led to one macabre discovery: one of Lumumba’s teeth.

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The only known remains of the assassinated leader was seized from the daughter of a deceased Belgian police officer who had been involved in the disappearance of the body.

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It was returned in a coffin to the authorities in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, during an official ceremony in 2022 that aimed to turn a page on the grim chapter of its colonial past.

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During the handover, then Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo reiterated the government’s “apologies” for its “moral responsibility” in Lumumba’s disappearance.

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De Croo pointed the finger at Belgian officials who at the time “chose not to see” and “not to act”.

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