Belgian king reiterates regrets for colonial past in Congo but no apology nbcnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nbcnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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On the same day that Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte officially apologized for the Netherlands’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in neighboring Belgium, a parliamentary committee was unable to garner enough political support to apologize for decades of brutal colonization in central Africa.
The Belgian government is to return a tooth of Patrice Lumumba to his family this week, hoping to draw a line under one of the most brutal and shameful episodes in the country’s bloody exploitation of central Africa.
The relic is all that remains of Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), under its earlier name the Republic of Congo, and an icon of the struggle against colonialism in Africa, who was murdered by separatists and Belgian mercenaries in 1961. His killers dissolved his remains in acid, though some kept teeth as macabre mementoes.
Lumumba’s son