Belgian Christian Democracy at the bedside of Hutu Power

In the years following the Rwandan genocide, many of the perpetrators or accomplices of these crimes sought refuge in Belgium, where they firmly established themselves and reorganised. The country has since become one of their main bases of operation. African Facts investigates.

Episode 1/7

On 3 April 1997, the long rainy season was about to begin in Mombasa. Swept by a powerful sea breeze, Kenya’s second city was shrouded in muggy heat. A month earlier, Thérèse Mukabideri had arrived illegally in the back of a lorry with her two children, aged nine and ten. That day, she appeared on the airport tarmac with a forged Swiss passport in the name of Katarina Everine and boarded a Kenya Airways flight bound for Paris.

Aged 32, she seemed to have lost everything. In Rwanda, she had held a director’s position at the Ministry of Finance, later taking charge of the administrative and financial department at the African Continental Bank. This subsidiary of a Luxembourgish bank was controlled by Rwanda’s inner circle of business elites who had promoted and financed the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis that claimed a million lives. Her husband was shot dead by rebels in the early days of the genocide while manning one of the countless militia roadblocks where Tutsis were being massacred. She was not only a widow, but her elder brother was also imprisoned in Rwanda. Her children’s godfather was wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and remained behind to continue the armed struggle until his arrest in 2009. He was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment for the murder of six thousand Tutsis in 1994.

Thérèse Mukabideri’s fate would be different. On the morning of 4 April 1997, she arrived at Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle Airport near Paris. She discarded her forged documents and hurried to Gare du Nord, where she boarded a train to Belgium. She had made her way from the tropical coast of the Indian Ocean to Brussels in less than 24 hours. Many Rwandans followed this route, benefiting from the leniency of the French authorities as well as the services of an illegal immigration network set up by Hutu Power sympathisers in the Île-de-France (Paris) region.

The Brussels connection

Thérèse’s cousin welcomed her to the Belgian capital. Marie Goretti Nyirarukundo had been granted refugee status and was working for Cooperation Internationale Belgique-Outremer (Coopibo), an NGO heavily involved with Hutu extremists in the Zairean (now DRC) refugee camps. Having divorced a husband who did not share these radical views, she had been travelling between Belgium and Zaire for the past three years. Two months before Thérèse’s arrival, she registered an association in Brussels to continue publishing Trait d’union, a newspaper to which she contributed, funded by Coopibo in Rwanda and later in the Zairean refugee camps. She was accompanied in this by Belgian Catholic aid workers and a group of Rwandan extremists.

Marie Goretti Nyirarukundo subsequently pursued a career at the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. African Facts contacted her in 2020 while she was serving as a development attaché at the Belgian embassy in Uganda since 2012. At the time, she claimed to have distanced herself from that milieu. Thérèse Mukabideri did not reply to our enquiries.

The many Rwandans who arrived in Belgium following the Tutsi genocide swelled the ranks of the diaspora in Europe. This diaspora is organised and controlled by the Rally for the Return of Refugees and Democracy in Rwanda (RDR), which has brought together perpetrators of the genocide since 1995. The organisation’s aim is to continue the war on all fronts.

In Belgium, the RDR extremists enjoy significant support from the Christian Democrats, who dominate Flemish political life and were active players in Rwandan politics prior to the genocide. In the name of anti-communism and the values of the Catholic faith, Christian Democracy shaped and supported the previous two Rwandan regimes, founded on the persecution of the Tutsis, for 35 years.

Just two months after the genocide, the future president of the RDR travelled to the camps with a delegation from the Christian Democratic International to meet members of the fledgling organisation. Those emissaries sent to Zaire were won over by the RDR’s rhetoric, and their support did not waver when the organisation’s members arrived in Europe. In Belgium, that support proved crucial.

A well-organised exile

In May 1995, the magazine Kangura – the mouthpiece of Hutu Power which was still being printed in Belgium at the time – devoted an edition to the establishment of the RDR. To coincide with this announcement, members of the RDR registered two associations in France. A further two extremist associations were founded in Brussels and Liège.

The RDR’s strategy was set out in a 1996 memorandum. At that time, the organisation planned to “set up associations (NGOs, folkloric groups, etc.) to serve as a cover for the collection or transfer of funds”. Following this logic, the extremist network would expand accordingly. Communities were established in the areas of Brussels, Liège, Charleroi, Ghent, Namur, Louvain-la-Neuve, Dendermonde and Wemmel.

During this investigation, we identified 40 Rwandan extremist organisations that were set up in Belgium between 1994 and 2019. African Facts has collected 160 documents relating to these organisations and identified 471 individuals. All of these entities are interconnected.

The articles of association of the Belgian-Rwandan Association for Solidarity, Fraternity, Dignity, Rights and Hope for Rwandans (SOFRADIE) were drawn up in Brussels as early as December 1994 and signed by four Belgian Catholics, including a priest, a headteacher and a former expatriate. This was just four months after the genocide had ended, and the organisation’s purpose was summed up in a single sentence: “to promote solidarity with the most disadvantaged Rwandans and to defend their rights”.

Contrary to what its name might suggest, the association soon began to welcome certain VIPs from the former regime, including Bibiane Ntengayire. She had held a senior position at the Commercial Bank of Rwanda (BCR), a subsidiary of Banque Bruxelles Lambert that was involved in financing the genocide. She invested in the creation of the private radio station Radiotélévision libre des Mille Collines (RTLM, from which the massacres were coordinated). During the Belgian court proceedings against the militia leader who ran the BCR during the genocide, Bibiane Ntengayire was identified as a militia member by her former Belgian superior. However, the Prosecution did not call her to give evidence, fearing that it would delay the trial.

Bibiane’s brother, who also settled in Belgium, is the son-in-law of Félicien Kabuga, a businessman suspected of being the chief financier of the genocide. Her brother was secretary-general of the genocidal militia and an executive at a company that imported tens of thousands of machetes into the country.

Could the Belgian citizens who co-founded SOFRADIE, of which Bibiane is a member, have been duped by dignitaries of the former Rwandan regime who were far from being among the “most disadvantaged”? The presence of a clergyman and lay Catholics is undoubtedly no coincidence.

Catholic activism at play

Luc Heymans, the director of Caritas International Relief, appears in SOFRADIE’s organisational chart. When contacted by African Facts in 2020, he acknowledged his involvement on a personal level, but explained that he had quickly withdrawn due to the “pro-former regime leanings” he had detected within the association. Yet, his departure did not mean an end to the links between Catholic activists and Rwandan extremists. Until 2015, SOFRADIE’s board included other members, notably a senior figure from the French Confederation of Christian Workers (CFTC) from Pas-de-Calais, France.

However, it is hard to mistake the true nature of SOFRADIE: a bridgehead for the RDR in Belgium. Indeed, it came under the RDR’s firm control as early as 1999 with the arrival of the vice-president in charge of social affairs, Aloys Ngendahimana. He was the Director-General of the Ministry of the Interior in Rwanda during the genocide. Working alongside him was Vénant Musonera, a former colonel in the Rwandan army who became radicalised whilst in exile.

About Vénant Musonera: Having been absent from Rwanda until the end of June 1994, Colonel Musonera was initially among the military officers who remained in post and became compromised, without necessarily being strong supporters of the genocidal government which repaid them in kind. On 6 July, the minister of Family of the genocidal regime described him as an “ibyitso” (“accomplice”) in her diary and recommended that he be “replaced”. A DGSE (French foreign intelligence service) briefing note dated 28 July 1994, which was seen by African Facts, states that he intended to “return to the country in the near future”. Daily situation reports dated 3 and 11 August 1994, as well as a “confidential defence” message from the French army dated 15 August 1994 — also seen by African Facts — detail how he attempted to negotiate his own return to Rwanda, as well as that of the students from the military academy, as part of a “[…] completely marginal initiative”. Having been rebuffed, the former officer subsequently joined the RDR. He became a naturalised Belgian citizen in 2005. In 2009, the United Nations Group of Experts on the Congo found that Musonera had been in telephone contact with the military leaders of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), an armed group formed by perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide who are responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Congo.

“That doesn’t ring a bell. I’ve never heard of it”, Luc Heymans told us when we asked him about the RDR. Yet the Christian Democrat delegation thanked him in 1994 for “the welcome extended by the Caritas team” during the meeting arranged with the RDR – which was still in its infancy – at a refugee camp in Zaire.

The financial, material and moral support that the Vatican-affiliated NGO Caritas provided to the Rwandan authorities before, during and after the genocide has long been documented by various NGOs, journalists and even Catholic publications. “If you look at it the other way round, you’ll find just as many victims who were taken in by Christian circles. The Church is a human endeavour, despite its name”, commented Gilles Cnockaert, communication officer of Caritas, when interviewed by African Facts.

When members of the RDR in Europe met secretly in Namur between 15 and 17 August 1997, it was a priest once again who was pulling the strings. Father Pierre Marc Poncelet had found them a venue. He would go on to play an important role in subsequent events. African Facts contacted him in 2020. “I had contacts with the RDR. I make no secret of that. At the beginning, the CVP [Christian People’s Party, now the Christian Democratic and Flemish party, Ed.] supported the Rwandan Hutus who were trying to return to the country”, he admits. Pierre Marc Poncelet is himself a Christian Democrat.

But what exactly are these Rwandan refugees in Europe doing? “They have organised themselves. There have been – and still are – political movements advocating a return to Rwanda, but not under the current political system”, explains Poncelet, who is openly critical of the Kigali regime, describing it as a “communist dictatorship”. When we contacted Bibiane Ntengayire and Aloys Ngendahimana, they did not respond. We were unable to reach Vénant Musonera.

To be continued…