10 Most Unethical Business Actions

#1 Congo Free State: Horrible Genocide

Congo Free State, founded in 1885, by Leopold II, King of the Belgians, committed genocide for the sake of the industry. It governed the areas now known as the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi through a non-governmental organization, the Association Internationale Africaine. The King had acquired the Congo at the Berlin Conference of 1884, which was to regulate the European colonization of Africa.

Under the pretense of conducting humanitarian efforts such as building churches and educating the people, the organization established an industry of collecting ivory, en masse, using huge amounts of slave labor. Leopold could find that the greatest riches that the tribe’s people could access were ivory. He constituted a force called the Force Publique, a combination of a police force, tax collector and gang of enforcers.

The men trooped along rivers finding villages, separating the men, women and children. This was to send the village men to collect ivory, and if they failed to find a certain amount of ivory they would never see their families again.

Later, collecting ivory became harder as the elephant population had been decimated. Then the FP people, prompted by the King, changed their tactics and made the village slaves to go for rubber.

Leopold wanted the workers to be proficient and highly motivated.  This meant that failing to meet rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. Officers were employed to take charge of each village and theses officers would have to bring the hands of those slaves who didn’t reach their quotas as proof that the officers hadn’t used the bullets to hunt for food. King Leopold’s policy was that for each bullet fired, a hand must be represented as proof it was used to kill a Congolese worker. Some officers “cheated” the higher officials by simply cutting of the hands, and leaving them to die, saving ammunition.

Leopold had severe debts, until the rubber boom of the 1890s, which was needed for telegraph wire and car tyres. When the King started getting a great amount of rubber squeezed from the slaves, it became the country’s main export, and profits amounted.

It is estimated that the number of deaths that King Leopold II and the Congo Free State caused range from 10 million to 22 million; while the entire African population was between 90 and 133 million people.

Soon the Congo Free State ended in 1908 following the Congo Reform movement. The Movement led by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Booker T. Washington and Bertrand Russell resulted in a vigorous international movement against the mistreatment of the Congolese population. The European Nations finally found that the King was abusing the Berlin Treaty.  Thus it got annexed to Belgium, who retained it until 1960.

The degree of tragedy reveals when we get to know the King’s actual intentions. It was his twenty year get-rich-quick scheme, which ultimately worked. Leopold could die as the wealthiest man in Europe after spending his whole life in luxuries: expensive homes, yachts and teenage prostitutes. He built his life on the cries of the Congo people which were rigorously hushed.