CONGO TORTURES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12931, 29 July 1905, Page 2 (Supplement)

CONGO TORTURES.

( SEVENTY-SEVEN NATIVES MURDERED FOR RUBBER,

A HAT!rowing story of the barbarities practised on the natives of the Congo Free State by the Belgian officials is told in a letter from a Congo correspondent to Mr. James Irvine, West African merchant, Castlestreet, Liverpool. The once flourishing village of Nsongo Mboyo, states the writer, has been desolated, and seventy-seven natives murdered, 'because they did not bring in sufficient rubber from the forest to satisfy the Congo Government officials. Many other natives, including three women, were barbarously mutilated. One woman was tied to a forked tree and slowly cut in pieces. A pointed stake was forced into the body of another woman, who was then shot. A third woman's cheek and nose were slit. Her right hand and left foot were then cut oft', and she was left to die. Natives' huts, too, according to the correspondent, are constantly destroyed, and' their inhabitants hounded into the woods in search of rubber, which it is impossible to procure. These facts have come to light, adds the correspondent, since the departure of the Commission sent out by King Leopold to investigate the atrocity charges. Captain Baccari, who was sent by the Italian Government to report 011 the Congo Free State, states that officers have to be mere slave-drivers, and that it they refuse they are treated as rebels. Every ojlicer is obliged to take an oath that after he leaves the Congo service he will never divulge what he saw- there.