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“All obligatory measures are in place to revive the mausoleum as quickly as attainable,” the ministry added.
Culture Minister Yolande Elebe couldn’t affirm to AFP whether or not the tooth had been stolen. “We have to attend for the police investigation to seek out out extra,” she mentioned.
Lumumba, the primary democratically elected chief of Congo and an icon of the nation’s independence, was assassinated in 1961 and his physique dissolved in acid by separatists and Belgian cops.
His solely stays, a single gold-crowned tooth, was saved in Belgium thereafter till it was handed over to Lumumba’s descendants in 2022 by Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo in an effort to clean relations with the Democratic Republic of Congo, a former Belgian colony.
“In the presence of [Lumumba’s] household, I wish to apologize on behalf of the Belgian authorities,” De Croo mentioned then, including that Belgian ministers within the early Sixties bear “ethical duty” for Lumumba’s torture and homicide.
The tooth was taken on a tour round Congo earlier than it was interred at a mausoleum within the capital, Kinshasa.
Congo was a Belgian colony for greater than half a century, from 1902 till its independence in 1960. Prior to that, King Leopold II of Belgium brutally occupied the nation, finishing up a pressured labor regime and killing as much as 10 million individuals.
Numerous former colonies in Africa and elsewhere have demanded reparations and the return of stolen artifacts from their former occupiers lately, from Namibia to India.
