Juliana Lumumba’s fight for answers: Will Belgium be tried for Congo’s founding Prime Minister’s death?
On June 17, after more than a decade of investigation, the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office requested that the case surrounding the assassination of Patrice Lumumba be referred to a Brussels criminal court.
For over 60 years, Juliana Lumumba has lived with haunting, unanswered questions. Who killed her father, Patrice Lumumba, and why? What role did the Americans play? Did the United Nations look away, even as he sought their protection?
These are not just political questions—they are personal wounds, and Juliana will not rest until the truth is laid bare.
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"You cannot be the child of Patrice Lumumba without this impacting your life," she says.
Her gaze is composed as she looks out of the window of her house in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Lumumba murder case could go to trial
On June 17, the Belgian federal prosecutor's office announced that it has requested that the case in connection with the assassination of Juliana's father be referred to a Brussels criminal court. It follows more than a decade of investigation.
The Belgian state is partly responsible for the murder.
A 2001 parliamentary investigation established that King Baudouin, Belgium's then-monarch, knew about the assassination plan but did nothing to stop it.
Juliana's brother, Francois, the plaintiff in a 2011 complaint, accused the Belgian state of war crimes and torture, and of having been part of a conspiracy aimed at the political and physical elimination of his father.
Patrice Lumumba's children at the ceremony in Brussels, receiving the last remains of their father. (Photo: Nicolas Maeterlinck/Belga/AFP via DW)
Lumumba fought for Congo's independence
On June 30, 1960, Patrice Lumumba freed the Congo from Belgian colonial rule and became the country's first prime minister. He promised democracy, prosperity and an end to the exploitation of Congolese minerals by foreign powers. But that never happened.
The West, in particular Belgium and the US, opposed Lumumba's plans to nationalise Congo's raw materials and his proximity to the Soviet Union amid the Cold War.
On January 17, 1961, half a year after Lumumba was elected the first prime minister of a free Congo, Congolese separatists took him to the hostile province of Katanga, with Belgian and American blessing.
Lumumba and two of his aides were shot in the forest under the command of Belgian officers.
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The facts only came to light thanks to investigations by the likes of Belgian sociologist and writer Ludo De Witte, whose findings were detailed in his 2003 book, The Assassination of Lumumba.
Patrice Lumumba speaks at a press conference in Leopoldville in August 1960, just five months before his death at the age of 35. (Photo: AFP via DW)
Lumumba's two teeth
Another Belgian officer, Gerard Soete, sawed the bodies into pieces and dissolved them in sulfuric acid. Two teeth were all that remained of Lumumba. Soete kept them as a trophy.
Juliana learned about this on television, in a 2000 report on a German broadcaster in which Soete himself recounted the details and held the teeth into the camera.
This gruesome memory still angers Juliana.
"How would you feel if they told you that your father was not only killed, buried, unburied, cut into pieces, but they also took parts of his body?" she asks. "To many, he was the first prime minister of the Congo, a national hero. But for me, he's my father."
Guards of honour carry the coffin containing a tooth, the only known remains of Patrice Lumumba, during his burial ceremony in Kinshasa, DR Congo, on June 30, 2022. (Photo: REUTERS/Justin Makangara)
Still fighting for the truth
Years later, Juliana wrote a letter to the Belgian king demanding that one of the teeth be returned. No one knows where the second one is. Soete had claimed that he had thrown it into the North Sea. He died shortly after, but later his daughter showed the golden tooth to a journalist. Ludo De Witte then sued her, and Belgian authorities confiscated the remains.
In 2022, then Prime Minister Alexander de Croo returned the tooth to Lumumba's children at a ceremony in Brussels and apologised – unlike King Philippe, a direct descendant of King Baudouin, who did not utter the word "sorry." He merely expressed his "deepest regrets" for the violence inflicted on the Congolese people under Belgian rule.
But apologies are not the point for Juliana.
"It's not a problem of apology. It's a problem of truth. Verité," she says. "I need to know the truth."
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