new report, in June, of the restitution by Belgium of a “relic” of Lumumba
Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) again reported in June the ceremony for Belgium’s return of a “relic” of the country’s prime minister, Patrice Emery Lumumba, the Congolese presidency announced on Wednesday.
Hero of the independence of the former Belgian Congo in June 1960, who became the prime minister prime minister of the new country of the DRC, Patrice Lumumba was overthrown a few months later in a coup.
He was executed on January 17, 1961 with two brothers in arms by separatists from the Katanga region, with the support of mercenaries from the former Belgian colonial power.
Initially, Belgium was to deliver on June 21, 2021, to the President of the DRC Félix Tshisekedi, a tooth that a Belgian police commissioner claimed to have taken from Lumumba’s body when he helped make it disappear.
This restitution and a series of tributes planned thereafter had already been postponed, due to an “exponential” increase in Covid-19 cases, to January 17, 2022, the 61st anniversary of Lumumba’s death.
“The ceremony for the restitution and repatriation of the remains of former Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba is postponed to next June, to a date around the festivities to celebrate the independence of the DRC, on June 30,” said Wednesday to the ‘AFP an adviser to President Tshisekedi.
“Several reasons justifying this report. But the focus is on restrictions in the fight against the spread of Covid-19”, he added, “an official communication in the coming hours”.
In 2000, the Belgian police commissioner Gérard Soete, told AFP that he had cut up and dissolved in acid the bodies of Lumumba and two of his followers, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo, murdered at the same time as him.
In a documentary broadcast on German channel ARD the same year, Mr. Soete claimed to have kept Lumumba’s teeth, and had shown them.
In September 2020, the Belgian justice responded favorably to a request from the family of Patrice Lumumba to return a tooth attributed to the Congolese leader and seized from the family of Gérard Soete.
In 2001, Belgium had recognized its “moral responsibility” in the death of Lumumba at the end of a parliamentary commission of inquiry.