COUNT Etienne Davignon being ordered to stand trial over his alleged role in the murder of Congolese revolutionary Patrice Lumumba is a long overdue step towards justice — but far more than that.

The fate of the first prime minister of post-colonial Congo — overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the United States and former colonial power Belgium and summarily shot — echoes down the ages.

It dashed hopes across Africa and beyond that formal independence would mean genuine sovereignty, in which countries might control their own resources and choose their own alliances.

These aspirations are still violently denied.

Not least in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the same question that prompted moves to topple Lumumba — ownership of the country’s vast mineral resources — fuels a civil war that rages today.

Again, the price of paper independence is surrender to foreign exploitation. Donald Trump’s “deal” last year offered Congo assistance against the M23 rebels — who are backed by Rwanda, itself a close ally of the United States and Britain — in return for extraction rights to minerals including cobalt, copper and lithium.

“‘Please, please, we would love you to come and take our minerals.’ Which we’ll do,” was Trump’s summary of the negotiations.

It’s an old story of theft and forced labour. The Belgian Congo forced peasants off their land to work the rubber plantations. Cutting off hands became the most infamous symbol of reprisals against any who resisted, but burning villages and mass rape of women were common too.

How much has changed? An Amnesty report in 2023 found “the forced eviction of entire communities” was linked to the expansion of foreign-owned mines in the Congo. The eviction process being accompanied by burning villages and the gang-rape of women.

Lumumba had to be “removed” — the term is Davignon’s, from a 1960 telex advising it — because he threatened nationalisation of key natural resources.

Exactly what he meant by the term will be key to the trial, should the 93-year-old defendant actually end up in court. But whether he was personally involved in the decision to kill Lumumba is secondary.

Davignon’s long career illustrates the overlap between colonial atrocities, “modern” business and state power: he went on to head the International Energy Agency, chaired an investment bank and the pro-capitalist Bilderberg Conference, founded an airline and sat on the European Round Table of Industrialists; served as a European Commissioner.

It was not just a prime minister but a revolution that was murdered 65 years ago, in the interests of capitalist — imperialist — business as usual.

And it is not a cold case but one with urgent ramifications for a world where naked resource grabs are back in fashion, courtesy of a US president who puts guns to the heads of other countries and demands their oil, their minerals and their real estate. One whose determination to personally enrich himself in the process echoes King Leopold, who created the Congo Free State as his private property.

Trump’s gangster imperialism is a response to a world that — through the rise of China, the Brics and global South — sees the prospect of an end to Western domination, of the real sovereignty that Lumumba was cut down for demanding.

As in 1961, it’s a ferocious response, and another great revolution of that era — the Cuban Revolution — is under threat. Trump brags he can do “anything I want” with the island and its people.

Remember the Congo. The decades of repression and war, the plundering of a great country by Western capital, the immiserating policies of the World Bank and IMF in return for loans that only entrench poverty and dependence: the bitter, ongoing legacy of Lumumba’s murder.

And say never again. Solidarity with all peoples resisting imperialism — which means, today, doing everything to stop the gangster in the White House and foil his designs on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and everywhere else.