BAKU conference: Participants urge Belgium to acknowledge colonial harms and pay reparations to victims
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Voices from different countries across the world rose in unison in Baku last week as representatives, historians and legal experts demanded that Belgium finally confront the long shadow of its colonial past, and accept responsibility in the form of truth, restitution and financial reparations.
The event, titled “Belgian Colonialism: Acknowledgement and Responsibility”, organized by the Baku Initiative Group (BIG) on October 31, 2025, gathered, in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku, delegates from Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo alongside international lawyers, historians, and civil society activists. For many participants the conference was not an academic exercise but a call for concrete action: public acknowledgement of crimes, the return of looted cultural patrimony, access to archives, and a credible reparations mechanism.
“We will raise the issue of compensation for crimes committed in Central Africa at international organizations,” said Abbas Abbasov, Executive Director of the Baku Initiative Group, during his opening address. “These were not only colonial crimes but serious crimes against humanity, they demand judicial and moral remedies.”
Attendees traced a brutal chain of harms that stretches from King Leopold II’s Congo Free State to policies of ethnic classification and extraction that shaped Rwanda and Burundi in the 20th century. Presenters in Baku highlighted well-documented episodes: the rubber-era atrocities in the Congo Free State that scholars estimate claimed millions of lives, the ethnic identity card system imposed in the Great Lakes region in the 1930s, and the widespread plunder of art and ritual objects now held in European museums. These historical facts were presented not as relics of a closed past but as the roots of present-day inequalities and recurring political crises in the region.
A recurring demand was the restitution and repatriation of cultural property. Belgium’s AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, home to hundreds of thousands of Central African objects collected during colonial times , was cited repeatedly as emblematic of the problem: thousands of items taken under coercive conditions remain in Belgian custody, prompting calls for inventory, provenance research and return. Conference speakers argued that cultural restitution is inseparable from broader reparative justice.
Delegates also pointed to recent international developments that, they argued, strengthen the legal and moral case for reparations. UN experts and human-rights bodies have in recent years urged Belgium to confront its colonial history, to open archives and consider measures of restitution and redress. Conference panels explored how remedies could be framed: truth commissions, bilateral agreements, museum restitutions, and targeted development funds governed by affected communities.
Personal testimony framed the abstract numbers. Speakers recounted families left dispossessed by land reorganization, communities whose languages and rituals were dislocated by missionary schooling and administrative policies, and survivors whose scars, social, cultural, and economic, had been passed down through generations. Conference participants stressed that compensation must be accompanied by institutional reform: access to education, control over natural resources, and reparative cultural programming.
Among the presenters was Rwandan journalist and media leader Peace Hillary Tumwesigire, whose presence underscored how debates about colonial legacies are entering public media spaces across East Africa.
“Belgium’s silence about the human cost of colonial rule is not a neutral gap; it is an injury that still shapes who we are and what we can become. Recognition and reparations are essential for our dignity and our future.”
Concrete cases named in presentations drove the message home. Panelists revisited the Congo Free State’s rubber-extraction horrors, amputations and mass killings used to terrorize communities into meeting impossible quotas , and linked them to the present-day political and economic fragility of parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For Rwanda and Burundi, scholars at the conference highlighted how colonial identity policies and the manipulation of ethnic categories contributed to social cleavages that erupted catastrophically up to genocide against Tusti in Rwanda in later decades. Speakers also flagged ongoing resource extraction by foreign companies, arguing that modern neocolonial dynamics often reproduce older patterns of unequal benefit.
The Baku forum was not only accusatory; it was strategic. Organizers and panelists discussed pathways to put reparations and restitution on the international agenda: coordinated diplomatic initiatives, legal claims in European courts, and multi-stakeholder truth and memory projects. Abbasov told reporters that the BIG plans to carry the issue to international platforms and work with affected communities to design viable claims and remedies. “We will continue to raise awareness of the consequences of Belgium’s colonial policy and its obligations regarding reconstruction and reparations at all relevant international platforms,” he said.
Not everyone welcomed the Baku conference uncritically. Some commentators noted that BIG has previously used high-profile decolonization events to spotlight various colonial legacies beyond a single country, and warned against any politicization that could overshadow victims’ voices. But inside the conference hall the tone was overwhelmingly one of solidarity between African delegations and international experts who argued that moral clarity must be matched with legal and financial remedies.
As the two-day program closed, participants called for a next step: a jointly drafted memorandum to be delivered to Belgian authorities and international human-rights bodies, requests for access to Belgian archives, and a roadmap for phased restitution and reparations agreed with affected States and communities. For many delegates, the Baku meeting marks the start, not the end, of renewed pressure on Europe to make amends. “This is about justice, memory and the possibility of a shared future built on truth,” a law-expert at the conference told audiences during the closing session.
