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On this day in 1835, one of Europe’s worst monsters, King Leopold II of Belgium🇧🇪, was born. During his rule, he declared Congo as his personal colonial possession and proceeded to commit horrific genocide upon the Congolese people. 8-10 million Congolese died during ‘personal rule’, with violence as a mechanism of organising production. Through mercenaries, prisons, forced starvation, and executions, Leopold II turned Congo into a concentration camp, using Congolese as the labour to extract vast profits from the rubber quotas imposed on the population. The profits were used to build Belgium’s grand buildings and landmarks, while Congolese were exterminated systematically through forced labour, mass killings, and famine. While the metropole of Belgium’s empire flourished, while Congo became an extraction machine. Workers who failed to meet the quotas were mutilated, having their hands cut off. These workers included children. Villages were punished collectively. Women were held hostage until men delivered rubber. Failure meant mutilation, flogging, or execution. Terror was the incentive structure. Pain replaced wages. The Congolese people never saw the profits, only the oppression of being used as slave labour. Belgium has still not offered a formal apology to the Congolese people for the genocidal atrocities committed against them… Because doing so would acknowledge a fundamental truth; that European capitalism was not born from ‘innovation’, ‘free trade’, or ‘liberal values’, but through barbaric destruction of global south nations and the looting of their resources for profit.

This is the only position any leader should take. International waters must be free to transit, for everyone everywhere.