The Short Version
The claim overstates a real correction. Evidence does show that Congo Free State population decline was not caused only, or even mainly, by direct killings; disease and falling fertility were major factors. But the record does not show these factors were wrongly attributed to Leopold’s rule. Scholarship generally treats them as partly produced or worsened by the wider coercive regime—forced labor, famine, displacement, violence, and social disruption—not as unrelated demographic trends misblamed on murder orders alone.