Historical Security Council - World Model United Nations

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which controlled by King Leopold) forced native peoples to work through coercion and violence. 46 Punishments for African natives included floggings, beatings, and executions were handed out for crimes from desertion to dropping a pack. 47 When labor taxes and quotas were not fulfilled in certain villages, these floggings and executions were the norm, often carried out by neighboring ethnic groups employed by Belgian administrators. Entire villages were often razed in response to failure to fulfill labor quotas. 48 The king created a standard of declaring indigenous land ownership as “vacant land” and declared land his by eminent domain. The end result in the Congo was that huge swaths of the country were declared the “Crown domain” or the “private domain of the state.” 49 The end result in Belgium was a huge inflow of capital, which was used for public works projects and urban improvement. 50 the rationalization of this exploitation came from an ideology that asserted the “white man’s burden” to bring Christianity and capitalism to “inferior races.” Leopold paid vast sums of money to public relations agencies to depict the venture in the Congo as essentially a humanitarian campaign seeking to bring an end to poverty and ignorance in native populations. 51 The political impacts of King Leopold’s regime were interrelated with the economic policies he purported. As administrative stations were built throughout the region, the integration of the country into a capitalist and exploitive system occurred. This led to all the major African political systems in the area being brought under the control of the colonial administrative state, which implemented new taxes in labor and money. 52 The End to Leopold’s Congo An international reform movement, led by E.D. Morel, sought to drastically change Leopold’s stranglehold on the Congo. in a letter in 1905, Morel wrote that: “A system has been introduced…imitated in some respect by others, which is turning its servants into brute beasts, disgracing European prestige, befouling civilization, and jeopardizing the whole future of European effort in the Dark Continent.” 53 Drawing from reports about atrocities that came from foreign missionaries, Morel focused Western attention on Leopold’s rule. 54 Leopold attempted to stop the turning of public opinion against him and his colony by hiring spies and double agent to infiltrate foreign government and tried to flood the newspapers with positive coverage and depress negative coverage by bribing editors. 55 Leopold was further able to stem the outrage by portraying Morel’s campaign success as a British and American plot to take away the king’s prized possession. 56 However, Morel was able to cast Leopold and Belgium in an extremely negative light, given the discursive tendencies of the time; his campaign promoted the view of Leopold and his actions as “barbaric” and “uncivilized.” 57 Morel’s claims about the brutality in the Congo were confirmed by outside sources, including an international Commission of Enquiry of lawyers that, after a five-month tour, confirmed all the claims of brutality and coercion that had been circulating in the media. 58 The ability to appeal to the humanitarian impulses of elites in Western europe and the <strong>United</strong> States, along with the inability of foreign powers to access and penetrate the Congo’s vast wealth at the time, proved to be an extremely potent mix of forces that had the ultimate impact of forcing Leopold out of the region. 59 Thus, the movement overcame Leopold’s stronghold on the Congo and forced him to transfer the colony to the Belgian state in 1908 60 by selling his personal estate to the government of Belgium. 61 The Belgian parliament voted to annex the region in August 1908 after a divisive debate and in a hardly resounding vote of 88 in favor and 54 opposed. 62 the result of the colonial project was tragic: an official Belgian inquiry from 1919 reported that the population of the Congo had diminished by half, which equals about 10 million deaths from murder, disease, starvation, and exposure. 63 Resistance Through the beginning of Belgian colonial history, there were certainly pockets of resistance, which had the potential of snowballing into a larger movement. the root reason why resistance generally failed is that by the time of the Berlin Conference and the annexation by European powers, there was no centralized Congo kingdom. The tribes in Congo were much too weak 12 Melbourne Host Directorate PTY LTD | Office of Media and Design
and disorganized to be effective against an armed European imperial conquest. 64 Resistance against the europeans was ultimately most successful from within colony-established institutions—the colonial army, forced labor camps, and agricultural workers. Discontent over taxes, conscription, and forced labor was able to spread and strengthen in these contexts. 65 the 1900 to 1916 Shi rebellion and 1907-1917 Luba- Katanga of Kasongo Nyembo rebellion were longstanding affairs against the Leopold empire and the Belgian colonial government. 66 the former leaders of the Luba empire used their former power to rise up against Leopold’s empire in 1895, and it put up effective resistance against forced labor policies. 67 However, as the colony centralized and consolidated its powers as will be described in the next section, it was able to quash these insurrections. 68 The revolts in the internal colonial army illustrate much of the underlying dynamics of the colony. White officers steeped in racist ideology were brutal in their disciplinary measures of soldiers, military workers, who maintained, supplied, and grew food, and porters, who transported equipment and supplies. 69 cities of the country. Revolts during Leopold’s reign arose in these garrisons—the Kananga mutiny in 1895, the Ndirfi mutiny in 1897 and the Shinkakasa mutiny in 1900. These revolts were called upon later as memories of resistance against the Belgian. it is generally agreed that what motivated rebels was the oppression of the colonial administrators, and they were able to succeed in their resistance in pockets of the region for years because they recruited volunteers from surrounding areas to replenish their ranks. The multi-ethnic make-up of the mutinies fostered and developed a national identity—one at odds with the ruling Belgian class. 70 After Leopold: More of the Same? As the transition of the Congo from Leopold’s to Belgium’s control occurred and completed in 1908, there was hope that all the excessive force of the past would be eliminated. the general scheme of governance worked such that while the Belgian parliament and colonial affairs ministers in Brussels supervised the colony, the actual governance of the colony was done on the ground by the colonial bureaucracy in alliance with representatives of the Belgian bourgeoisie, business leaders, and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. 71 The new governance scheme did not radically alter from the previous one and utilized the pre-existing economic and administrative institutions to operate the colony. the inherited colony had a particular structure: a huge region of land with a sparse population under a system of economic exploitation with no tradition of positive policy aimed at benefiting the general population. 72 This colonial map shows the regional break-up of the colony and the major the longstanding institutions did not merely dissolve to be developed 13 Melbourne Host Directorate PTY LTD | Office of Media and Design
Page 1 and 2: Historical Security Council World M
Page 3 and 4: Letters Melbourne Host Directorate
Page 5 and 6: Letter from the Under-Secretary-Gen
Page 7 and 8: Introduction The most important bod
Page 9 and 10: Judges of the international Court o
Page 11: international du Congo (AIC), which
Page 15 and 16: economic and political rewards, whi
Page 17 and 18: strike in Matadi. These mutinies ha
Page 19 and 20: Current Situation: Where We Stand N
Page 21 and 22: Past uN Actions The course of actio
Page 23 and 24: in different terms, as a package to
Page 25 and 26: in the government structure) when C
Page 27 and 28: political pressure by British settl
Page 29 and 30: 19 edgerton 164 20 Chatterjee 48 21
Page 31 and 32: 149 Nzongola-Ntalaja 89 150 Nzongol

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