THE CONGO, HORRORS.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 11541, 25 April 1905, Page 4

THE CONGO, HORRORS.

The Commission of Inquiry set up by the Belgian Government last year to investigate the charges brought against the Government of the Congo Free State and against officials of the indiarubber companies has been gathering some remark- - able evidence. At Baringa. for example, the strongest chief in the Bolima country appeared with twenty witnesses. H« carried 110 twigs, each twig representing a life taken for rubber. The long ones, he explained, were chiefs' twigs, then men's, then women's, and lastly children's. He gave names by the score. He told how his beard of many years' growth, which had reached nearly to his feet, had been cut off because he had visited a friend without the permission of the rubber company's agent. He related incidents of fights with the company's sentries and troops, and how the agent had sent corpses of his men to the chief to stimulate the tribe in gathering rubber. The tale was horrible enough; men murdered, wives stolen, babies cut up, and the mutilated bodies carried about on stakes. Witnesses appeared to display their wounds; this one without a foot, another lacking a hand, another without eara. Another chief produced eighteen twigs, each twig a man murdered for rubber; still another had ' thirty-four twigs. And so the story progressed, floggings, rape, mutilations, murders, and cannibalism, all done in the search for rubber. The Commission might well feel, as one member said, that it was wading through a river of blood. Mr J. H. Harris, a missionary witness at Baringa, led evidence of this sort for a couple of days, and the Commission asked him at length how much longer he could go on. He had given them, he said, some 200 murders from four or five villages only, and perhaps a score of districts had not yet be«n touched. There was enough evidence in this one centre to keep the Commission employed for months. The chairman paid that they had heard enough, and that they accepted as true the general statement that hundreds of people had been killed in tho district by the rubber collectors. Apparently the official report of this Commission will be a more terrible document even than the consular report from Mr Casement which gave rise to the Eurppcan agitation.