[Uchronie] La reine Astrid n'est pas morte à Küssnacht

Leopold fervently believed that overseas colonies were the key to a
country's greatness, and he worked tirelessly to acquire colonial
territory for Belgium. Neither the Belgian people nor the Belgian government
was interested, however, and Leopold eventually began trying to acquire
a colony in his private capacity as an ordinary citizen. The Belgian
government lent him money for this venture.

After a number of unsuccessful schemes for colonies in Africa or Asia, in 1876 he organized a private holding company disguised as an international scientific and philanthropic association, which he called the International African Society.

In 1878, under the auspices of the holding company, he hired the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley to establish a colony in the Congo region.^[3] Much diplomatic maneuvering resulted in the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, at which representatives of fourteen European countries and the United States recognized Leopold as sovereign of most of the area he and Stanley had laid claim to. On 5 February 1885, the result was the Congo Free State (later becoming, successively, the Belgian Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Zaire, and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo or DRC (not to be confused with Republic of the Congo
formerly owned by France), an area 76 times larger than Belgium, which
Leopold was free to rule as a personal domain through his private army, the Force Publique.


Mutilated people from Congo Free State





The first economic focus of the colony was ivory, but this did not
yield the expected levels of revenue. When the global demand for rubber
exploded, attention shifted to the labor-intensive collection of sap
from rubber plants. Abandoning the promises of the Berlin Conference in
the late 1890s, the Free State government restricted foreign access and
extorted forced labor from the natives. The abuses suffered were horrific, especially in the rubber industry, and included the effective enslavement of the native population, savage beatings, widespread killing, and frequent mutilation when the unrealistic quotas were not met. Missionary John Harris of Baringa,
for example, was so shocked by what he had come across that he wrote to
Leopold's chief agent in the Congo saying: "I have just returned from a
journey inland to the village of Insongo Mboyo. The abject misery and
utter abandon is positively indescribable. I was so moved, Your
Excellency, by the people's stories that I took the liberty of promising
them that in future you will only kill them for crimes they commit."^[4]

Estimates of the death toll range from two million to fifteen million.^[5][6][7]
Determining precisely how many people died is next to impossible as
accurate records were not kept. Louis and Stengers state that population
figures at the start of Leopold's control are only "wild guesses",
while E.D. Morel's attempt and others at coming to a figure for
population losses were "but figments of the imagination".^[8]

Adam Hochschild devotes a chapter of his book, King Leopold's Ghost,
to the problem of estimating the death toll. He cites several recent
lines of investigation, by anthropologist Jan Vansina and others,
examining local sources from police records, religious records, oral
traditions, genealogies, personal diaries, and "many others", which
generally agree with the assessment of the 1919 Belgian government
commission: roughly half the population perished during the Free State
period. Since the first official census by the Belgian authorities in
1924 put the population at about 10 million, that implies a rough
estimate of 10 million dead.^[9]

Smallpox and sleeping sickness also devastated the disrupted population.^[10] By 1896 the sleeping sickness had killed up to 5,000 Africans in the village of Lukolela on the Congo River. The mortality figures were collected through the efforts of Roger Casement, who found, for example, only 600 survivors of the disease in Lukolela in 1903.^[11]

Reports of outrageous exploitation and widespread human rights abuses led to international outcry in the early 1900s leading to a widespread war of words. The campaign to examine Leopold's regime, led by British diplomat Roger Casement and former shipping clerk E. D. Morel under the auspices of the Congo Reform Association, became the first mass human rights movement.^[12] Supporters included American writer Mark Twain, who wrote a stinging political satire entitled King Leopold's Soliloquy,
in which the King supposedly argues that bringing Christianity to the
country outweighs a little starvation. Rubber gatherers were tortured,
maimed and slaughtered until the turn of the century, when the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt.^[13] Arthur Conan Doyle also blasted the 'rubber regime' in his 1908 work The Crime of the Congo, written to aid the work of the Congo Reform Association. Doyle contrasted Leopold's rule to the British rule of Nigeria,
arguing decency required that those who ruled primitive peoples to be
concerned first with their uplift, not how much could be extracted from
them. It should be noted that, as Hochschild describes in King Leopold's Ghost,
many of Leopold's policies were adopted from Dutch practices in the
East Indies, and similar methods were employed to some degree by
Germany, France and Portugal where natural rubber occurred in their
colonies.

Finally, in 1908, the Belgian parliament compelled the King to cede the Congo Free State to Belgium.

Leopold II is still a controversial figure in the Democratic Republic of Congo. His statue in the capital, Kinshasa,
was removed after independence. Congolese culture minister Christoph
Muzungu decided to reinstate the statue in 2005, pointing out the sense
of liberating progress that had marked the beginning of the Free State
and arguing that people should see the positive aspects of the king as
well as the negative; but just hours after the six-metre (20 ft) statue
was erected in the middle of a roundabout near Kinshasa's central
station, it was taken down again without explanation. The Congo
continues, however, to use a variation of the Free State flag, which it
adopted after dropping the name and flag of Zaire.