The effect on anyone who read those stories could be only that of overwhelming horror

And so the statements [on the atrocities in the Congo] continue, story after story, by the hundreds. Here at last was something the rest of the world had seldom heard from the Congo: the voices of the Congolese themselves. On few other occasions in the entire European Scramble for Africa did anyone gather such a searing collection of firsthand African testimony. The effect on anyone who read those stories could be only that of overwhelming horror.

However, no one read them.

Despite the report's conclusions, the statements by African witnesses were never directly quoted. The commission's report was expressed in generalities. The stories were not published separately, not was anyone allowed to see them. They ended up in the closed section of a state archive in Brussels. Not till the 1980s were people at last allowed to see them.

A. Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (1998, 2006 edition), 255