Belgian Military Forces in the Congo

Though the dynamics of the Congo Crisis have received, and continue to receive, a good deal of literary and scholarly attention, missing from the canon of work on military forces in the Congo is a study of the Force Publique, a paramilitary police force established by King Léopold II to secure the Congo Free State and to protect a vast geographical swath of Central Africa that had become his own personal possession following the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. In many ways, the absence of any st