OREANDA-NEWS. About 30 thousand people in the light of the protests over the death of African American George Floyd in the United States signed a petition for the demolition of the statues of the Belgian King Leopold II (1835-1909), who at the end of the 19th century conducted a campaign to seize the Congo Basin, accompanied by cruelty to the local to the population. This was reported on Thursday by Reuters.

According to him, the initiators of the petitions demand the demolition of all the monuments in honor of the king in Brussels by the end of June and the dismantling of the bust of the monarch in Halle. According to the agency, unidentified people stained the king’s bust in Ghent with red paint and set fire to the statue of the monarch in Antwerp.

In the 1870s, Belgium participated in the colonial division of Africa. In 1876, under the chairmanship of Leopold II, the "International African Association" was founded (from the 1880s it was called the "International Congo Association"), gradually subordinating the left bank of the Congo River.