In the heart of Brussels, where the air is perpetually thick with the scent of overpriced waffles and the stale breath of three thousand lobbyists, a ghost has finally been subpoenaed. It only took sixty-five years. One must admire the Belgian sense of punctuality; it is, if nothing else, consistent with their approach to decolonization—glacial, reluctant, and draped in a shroud of bureaucratic amnesia. Etienne Davignon, the ninety-two-year-old grandee of the European project, a man who has graced more boardrooms and secret summits than most people have had hot meals, has found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to explain a very old, very messy murder.

The case, which has resurfaced in the Belgian courts like a piece of flotsam from a shipwreck we all agreed to forget, centers on the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba. For those whose historical education was sanitized by the state, Lumumba was the Congo’s first democratically elected Prime Minister. He was a man with the audacity to believe that Congolese resources belonged to the Congolese, a radical notion that naturally required his immediate removal from the mortal coil. Davignon, then a mere lad in his late twenties and a budding diplomat, is accused of having a hand in the logistical nightmare that ended with Lumumba’s body dissolved in sulfuric acid. One wonders if the diplomatic cables back then included a line about the appropriate acidity levels for liquidating African sovereignty.

To observe Davignon is to observe the quintessential European ‘intellectual’ at rest. He is the grandfather of European integration, a man who helped draft the blueprints for the European Union while the echoes of colonial gunfire were still ringing in the Katanga province. There is a delicious, if sickening, irony in the fact that the same hands that built our current 'rules-based order' are being examined for their role in a regime that operated entirely outside of them. But then, that is the European way, isn’t it? We build the courtrooms, we write the laws, and then we spend the next century ensuring we are never the ones in the dock.

The legal theater currently playing out in Brussels is not just about a single man, however. It is about the collective Belgian psyche, which has spent decades treating its Congolese history like a family secret hidden in a locked attic. The Belgian state’s apology in 2002 was the diplomatic equivalent of a ‘sorry you feel that way’ text message. It lacked the grit of actual restitution. It wasn’t until 2022 that they even returned a tooth—the only physical remains of Lumumba—which had been kept as a macabre trophy by a Belgian police officer. One must ask what kind of 'civilization' keeps a man’s tooth in a drawer for sixty years and calls it order.

Now, Davignon sits in court, a living relic of an era we pretend is over. His defense, one imagines, will be the standard refrain of the high-ranking bureaucrat: he was young, he was following the prevailing geopolitical wisdom, he was merely a cog in a machine that was already in motion. It is the banality of evil updated for the cocktail party set. In the 1960s, the Cold War provided a convenient fog for every atrocity; if you weren’t with the Belgians and the Americans, you were clearly a Soviet puppet. It was a binary world that allowed for the most complex crimes to be simplified into ‘strategic necessities.’

The tragedy of this case is not that it is happening, but that it is happening now. Justice delayed by sixty-five years is not justice; it is an obituary with a legal filing fee. By the time the Belgian courts decide if a ninety-two-year-old was complicit in a 1961 assassination, the witnesses will be dead, the records will be lost, and the defendant will be closer to the grave than the prison cell. It is a performance of accountability designed to satisfy the modern appetite for ‘reckoning’ without actually disturbing the foundations of the institutions Davignon helped build.

We watch this farce with a weary eye because we know how it ends. The lawyers will argue, the historians will testify, and the Belgian public will feel a brief, fleeting sense of moral superiority for ‘confronting their past.’ Meanwhile, the structures of extraction and the patronizing diplomatic frameworks that Lumumba died trying to dismantle remain perfectly intact. We have traded the acid vat for the trade agreement, and the colonial administrator for the debt auditor. The faces change, the vocabulary evolves into something more palatable for a TED Talk, but the underlying disdain remains. Davignon is simply the last man standing from a generation that didn't feel the need to hide its ruthlessness behind a social media manager. For that, at least, his honesty—however involuntary—is almost refreshing.