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In Belgian town, Monuments Expose a Troubled Colonial Legacy

Associated Press

   HALLE, BELGIUM - For a long time, few people in the small Belgian town
   of Halle paid much attention to the monuments. They were just fixtures
   in a local park, tributes to great men of the past.

   But these are very different times, and yesterday's heroes can be
   today's racist villains.

   And so it was that three weeks ago, a bust of Leopold II, the Belgian
   king who has been held responsible for the deaths of millions of
   Congolese, was spattered in red paint, labeled "Murderer," and later
   knocked off its pedestal.

   Nearby, a pale sandstone statue formally known as the "Monument to the
   Colonial Pioneers" has stood for 93 years. It depicts a naked Congolese
   boy offering a bowl of fruit in gratitude to Lt. Gen. Baron Alphonse
   Jacques de Dixmude, a Belgian soldier accused of atrocities in Africa.

   These monuments, and others across Europe, are coming under scrutiny as
   never before, no longer a collective blind spot on the moral conscience
   of the public. Protests sweeping the world that followed the death of
   George Floyd, a Black man killed last month by Minneapolis police, are
   focusing attention on Europe's colonial past and racism of the present.

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