Free Republic

On the same day that the Netherlands officially apologised for 250 years of slavery, MPs in neighbouring Belgium failed to agree on how to seek atonement for colonial-era abuses. The Belgian parliament set up a commission in 2020 in the wake of protests triggered by the Black Lives Matter movement to examine their country's record in its former central African colonies. But the panel admitted they had failed to reach a consensus on how to formulate an apology for the notoriously bloody excesses of Belgian rule in what is now DR Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. They had been due to...

During the whole month of February, starting this Monday, the people of Brussels are called upon to choose the new name of the longest tunnel in the country, Leopold II, from among 15 names of famous women, Brussels Mobility said in a press release. The renaming procedure “to symbolically reinforce the place of women in the public space” began last year with a call for ideas to citizens and the reflection of a committee of experts. Currently, 43% of the streets in Brussels bear the name of a person. Of these, only 6.1% of the streets are named after a...