Historical Security Council - World Model United Nations

anew; instead there was refinement at the margins of
the overall structure. 73 it is unsurprising that there was
major reform; Belgium had little history as a colonial
power and had to learn quickly to administer an area
80 times its size thousands of miles away. 74 in part to
assuage public anger in Europe, the Belgians adopted
a colonial constitution, crafted by major shareholders
in Belgian and the Catholic Church, which had an
interest in proselytizing. 75 The first Belgian minister
of the colony reduced compulsory labor and stopped
the most significant government-led atrocities. 76 His
appointments of local administrators were typically
young men with little formal education who utilized
the colonial army of white Belgian officers and African
infantry to enforce forced labor and collect taxes. 77
The colonial administrators were, like during
Leopold’s time, focused on economic exploitation
and providing corporations with adequate land to
mine. 78 Belgian domestic politics were not organized
in a way to drastically change colonial affairs, and thus
allowed the minority in the home country with vested
interests in the region to gain disproportionate say
in the governance of the region. 79 The new king
of Belgium could rule by decree after consulting
a purely advisory colonial council of conservative,
business-oriented appointees, but this decree was
constrained by the Belgian minister of colonies. 80
The Belgian minister of colonial affairs wrote in 1921
that the major goal of colonialism was to develop
“the economic action of Belgium,” which means that
the law and order control of the colony is at most as
important as the labor recruitment for companies. 81
In the initial ownership of the Congo by Belgium, the
state’s authority in the countryside was literally a
function of company’s administration and extraction
of a particular region. Companies would use African
chiefs as supplementary workers on behalf of the
company to recruit labor for them. Although the
state eventually established control over most of the
region at local level displacing the rule by companies,
the new requirements for the people were
sometimes more onerous as they needed to provide
extra labor and taxes for public works projects and
adhere to certain regulations governing most parts
of people’s lives. 82 ultimately, companies continued
to have monopolistic powers over vast swaths of
the region, resulting in either no pay or very low pay
for the local workers and their production. 83 Often,
though forced labor was technically frowned upon,
companies and administrators would recruit and hold
locals as workers through the imposition of fines and
imprisonment for breach of contract. 84
However, as time progressed, leaders in the
colonial regime began to understand that in order
This 1922 map illustrates the holdings of African countries by various
European colonial powers.
to have effective control over a population, the
Europeans needed effective local allies. A series
of decrees on colonial administration in 1906,
1910, and 1933 transformed chiefs from outside
powers to intermediary powers with the colonial
administration. 85 if chiefs helped meet export
expectations, signed up tribes for conscription,
provided forced labor, and paid taxes, they were given
14
Melbourne Host Directorate PTY LTD | Office of Media and Design