<P> Thus, the half million square kilometers of Katanga came into Leopold's possession and brought his African realm up to 2,300,000 square kilometres (890,000 sq mi), about 75 times larger than Belgium . The Congo Free State imposed such a terror regime on the colonised people, including mass killings and forced labour, that Belgium, under pressure from the Congo Reform Association, ended Leopold II's rule and annexed it in 1908 as a colony of Belgium, known as the Belgian Congo . </P> <P> The brutality of King Leopold II of Belgium in his former colony of the Congo Free State, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was well documented; up to 8 million of the estimated 16 million native inhabitants died between 1885 and 1908 . According to the former British diplomat Roger Casement, this depopulation had four main causes: "indiscriminate war", starvation, reduction of births and diseases . Sleeping sickness ravaged the country and must also be taken into account for the dramatic decrease in population; it has been estimated that sleeping sickness and smallpox killed nearly half the population in the areas surrounding the lower Congo River . </P> <P> Estimates of the total death toll vary considerably . As the first census did not take place until 1924, it is difficult to quantify the population loss of the period . Casement's report set it at three million . William Rubinstein wrote: "More basically, it appears almost certain that the population figures given by Hochschild are inaccurate . There is, of course, no way of ascertaining the population of the Congo before the twentieth century, and estimates like 20 million are purely guesses . Most of the interior of the Congo was literally unexplored if not inaccessible ." See Congo Free State for further details including numbers of victims . </P> <P> A similar situation occurred in the neighbouring French Congo . Most of the resource extraction was run by concession companies, whose brutal methods, along with the introduction of disease, resulted in the loss of up to 50 percent of the indigenous population . The French government appointed a commission, headed by de Brazza, in 1905 to investigate the rumoured abuses in the colony . However, de Brazza died on the return trip, and his "searingly critical" report was neither acted upon nor released to the public . In the 1920s, about 20,000 forced labourers died building a railroad through the French territory . </P>

How did the influence of western powers in africa change in the period from 1880 to 1914