Belgium - The African Mirror

Nov

2023

Exclusive: Belgium drafting new fuel quality law targeting exports to Africa

BELGIUM is set to shut the door on rising exports of low-quality gasoline and diesel to West Africa as it follows the Netherlands in tightening environmental rules, officials have told Reuters. The Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp (ARA) hub is the world's leading gasoline exporting region, LSEG data shows, and hosts some of Europe's largest oil refineries including plants operated by TotalEnergies and Exxon Mobil. After the Netherlands introduced legislation in April to tighten the specification for its road fuel exports, Belgium's environment and energy ministries are now planning to introduce their own draft rules to tighten the quality of exported fuels. That would further reduce northern…

Jul

2023

By The African Mirror

Belgium’s AfricaMuseum has a dark colonial past – it’s making slow progress in confronting this history

CULTURE

RACIST displays and stories remain on display in several western European museums. They include grotesque objects depicting African people as “savage” and “wild”. Narratives of a “continent without history” and fantasies of European superiority are still told in ethnographic museums, like the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. JULIEN BOBINEAU, Assistant Professor, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena These museums have been criticised by scholars and activists since the 1970s. Their handling of objects looted during the colonial period, especially from Africa, is seen as an indicator of the political relations between Europe and African nations. Criticism ranges…

Mar

2023

By The African Mirror

Belgium says attack to Brussels metro today is ‘unlikely’

WORLD

MARINE STRAUSS BELGIUM'S crisis centre said that an attack on the Brussels metro was unlikely after EU institutions and international embassies warned their employees of bomb threats in central Brussels. Federal body OCAM, which analyses risks to the country, added in a statement that police had carried out a security sweep of the metro as a precaution. While the Brussels prosecutor opened an investigation, the general threat level for Belgium remained at 2 on a scale of 4. Belgian daily Le Soir said the European Commission informed the police on Tuesday afternoon of an email written in Russian and referring…

Jul

2022

By The African Mirror

Patrice Lumumba’s tooth represents plunder, resilience and reparation

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

PATRICE LUMUMBA is the hero of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s truncated bid for complete independence. He was assassinated by local counter-revolutionary forces with the help of the CIA and Belgian authorities in 1961. Since then, all over the developing world, Lumumba’s name has come to stand for defiance against colonialism and imperialism. Author SANYA OSHA, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Humanities in Africa, University of Cape Town The manner of his death was particularly distressing. He was humiliated and tortured before he was murdered. His body was then doused with acid to facilitate decomposition. A Belgian official reportedly kept…

Jul

2022

By The African Mirror

Congo buries murdered independence hero Lumumba’s only remains

NEWS

THE family of Democratic Republic of Congo's murdered independence hero Patrice Lumumba buried his only known remains, a tooth, in the capital Kinshasa on Thursday, 61 years after his death at the hands of Belgian-backed secessionist rebels. Hundreds gathered in a vast square for the occasion, waving flags and looking upon a large photo of Lumumba, with his trademark horn-rimmed glasses and side-swept hair, framed by white flowers. Lumumba was killed by a firing squad on January 16, 1961 in the southeastern province of Katanga after being ousted as prime minister the previous year, all within months of Congo's independence…

Jul

2021

By The African Mirror

Death toll rises to 157 in Germany and Belgium floods

WORLD

PETRA WISCHGOLL and DAVID SAHL RESCUE workers have continued to search flood-ravaged parts of Germany and Belgium for survivors after burst rivers and flash floods this week collapsed houses and claimed at least 157 lives. "We mourn with those that have lost friends, acquaintances, family members," German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said during a visit to Erftstadt in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where the disaster killed at least 43 people "Their fate is ripping our hearts apart." Some 133 people have died in the flooding in western Germany, the country's worst natural disaster in more than half a century. That…

Jul

2021

By The African Mirror

Floodwaters still rising in western Europe with death toll over 110

WORLD

MARTIN SCHLICHT and DAVID SAHL MORE than 1,000 people were missing in flood-stricken regions of western Germany and Belgium on Friday, where waters were still rising with the death toll already well over 100 and communications in some areas cut. Entire communities lay in ruins after swollen rivers swept through towns and villages in the western German states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, Belgium as well as the Netherlands. "It was terrible not to able to help people," Frank Thel, a resident of Schuld in Rhineland-Palatinate, told Reuters in front of a pile of rubble. "They were waving at us…

Oct

2020

By The African Mirror

Belgium arrests three Rwandans in connection with 1994 genocide

NEWS

MARINE STRAUSS BELGIUM’S federal prosecutor's office has announced the arrest of three people of Rwandan origin who were charged with serious violations of international law linked to the 1994 genocide. The arrests come as survivors of the genocide have demanded an acceleration in the pace of international justice, and Belgium, the former colonial power in Burundi and Congo as well as Rwanda, seeks to do more to come to terms with its past. Militants from Rwanda's Hutu ethnic majority killed about 800,000 minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates in 100 days during the genocide in 1994. Felicien Kabuga Belgium's prosecutor said…

Sep

2020

By The African Mirror

Belgium seeks new name for road tunnel as it takes on colonial past

WORLD

BART BIESEMANS and CLEMENT ROSSIGNOL BRUSSELS has asked its residents to pick a new name for the King Leopold II road tunnel in a step aimed at coming to terms with Belgium's colonial past and addressing gender inequality. A statue of Leopold II - whose colonial rule at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries cost millions of lives in central Africa - was removed by activists in Brussels in June amid Black Lives Matter protests. Now Brussels wants to rename part of its traffic ring road after renovations next year. "We know that Leopold II is a very…