Belgian ex-diplomat to stand trial over Patrice Lumumba death

A 93-year-old former Belgian diplomat was ordered on Tuesday to stand trial over the 1961 killing of Congolese independence icon Patrice Lumumba, in a decision hailed as a major step towards confronting the country’s colonial past.

Etienne Davignon, a one-time European commissioner and the only person still alive among 10 Belgians accused by the Congolese leader’s family of complicity in his murder, stands accused of participation in “war crimes.”

The former prime minister’s grandson, Mehdi Lumumba, welcomed the Brussels court decision — which remains subject to appeal — as “historic.”

“We are all relieved,” he told AFP. “Belgium is finally confronting its history.”

If the trial goes ahead, Davignon would be the first Belgian official to face justice in the 65 years since Lumumba was executed and his body dissolved in acid.

In its decision, the court went beyond prosecutors’ submissions and extended the scope of the trial to cover Lumumba’s political allies, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito — who were murdered alongside him.

Lawyers for Davignon, who denies all charges, argued in a closed-door hearing in January that too much time had passed since the events, according to multiple sources.

Lumumba’s relatives, conversely, have maintained the time is ripe for a long-overdue legal reckoning.

“It’s a gigantic victory,” the family’s lawyer, Christophe Marchand, told AFP on Tuesday.

“No-one believed when we first brought the case in 2011 that Belgium would prove capable of seriously investigating this,” he said, adding: “It’s very hard for a country to judge its own colonial crimes.”

Prosecutors accused Davignon of “participation in war crimes” over his role in the “unlawful detention and transfer” of Lumumba, as well as “humiliating and degrading treatment.”

A fiery critic of Belgium’s colonial rule, Lumumba became his country’s first prime minister after it gained independence from Belgium in 1960.

But he fell out with the former colonial power and with the United States and was ousted in a coup a few months after taking office.

He was executed on January 17, 1961, aged just 35, in the southern region of Katanga, with the support of Belgian mercenaries.

His body was never recovered.

‘Criminal enterprise’

Davignon, who went on to become a vice president of the European Commission in the 1980s, was a novice diplomat at the time of the assassination.

After entering the diplomatic service in 1959, Davignon rose through the ranks after his early involvement in Congolese independence talks.

Family lawyer Marchand had described the accused as “a link in the chain” of a “disastrous state-sponsored criminal enterprise.”

The case — the latest step in Belgium’s decades-long reckoning with the role it played in Lumumba’s killing — had already led to one macabre discovery: one of Lumumba’s teeth.

The only known remains of the assassinated leader was seized from the daughter of a deceased Belgian police officer who had been involved in the disappearance of the body.

It was returned in a coffin to the authorities in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, during an official ceremony in 2022 that aimed to turn a page on the grim chapter of its colonial past.

During the handover, then Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo reiterated the government’s “apologies” for its “moral responsibility” in Lumumba’s disappearance.

De Croo pointed the finger at Belgian officials who at the time “chose not to see” and “not to act.”