The story of King Leopold II of Belgium's brutal colonisation of central Africa, turning it into a vast rubber-harvesting labour camp in which millions died.
Belgian television will show the BBC documentary "White King, Red Rubber, Black Death," about Belgian King Leopold II's reign of terror in his private Congo colony in 1885-1908. The documentary, hardly the stuff of controversy anywhere else, almost didn't make it onto the airwaves here.
Louis Michel, the Belgian foreign minister, and the Royal Palace both pressured state television not to broadcast "White King." The Royal Palace expressed its "concern" about the documentary's "historical accuracy." "This is a partisan work and its thesis is completely one-sided," Mr. Michel said. "The film is a biased diatribe."
As a compromise the state television documentary was "put into the right context" by Belgian "specialists." Jan Van den Berghe of Belgian television says: "We have had the facts qualified by Belgian specialists such as the curator of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren."
The blood-stained history of the former Congo Free State isn't much in dispute anywhere except in Belgium, where it is seldom mentioned. The CFS was a private colony of Leopold II's until 1908 when he sold it to Belgium. He turned the CFS into a labor camp, laying the foundation of his immense personal fortune. His managers on the ground -- the king never set foot in the Congo himself -- used mutilation and killing to get the natives to bring in the rubber. Often, wives and children were taken hostage without food or water to speed up the work. In the 23 years of CFS rule, about half the Congo's 20 million inhabitants perished.