This article analyses the documents produced by the International Commission of Inquiry set up by Leopold ii in 1904 to investigate the “Congo atrocities.” In Europe, Edmund D. Morel (1904, 1906) had launched a humanitarian campaign, based on the testimonies of the missionaries of the Congo Balolo Mission in Baringa (Vangroenweghe 2010), to denounce the abuses committed in the État indépendant du Congo (éic). Subsequently, the campaign would gain further impetus following the allegations contained in the report (Casement 1985; Siochain & O’Sullivan 2003) that the British consul, Roger Casement, wrote after his mission in Equateur district, in the territories that form the Lopori and Maringa basins, where the Anglo-Belgian Indian Rubber Company (abir) had been granted large concessions and power, and where the rubber regime had become most violent and predatory.
Casement’s account parallels the less known but equally significant reports by an Italian magistrate, deputy public prosecut...