A small but significant incident happened this week in Belgium. In fact, it would have gone unnoticed, especially in Rwanda, if one of the key players did not carry an infamous name with a sordid past. Gustave Mbonyumutwa is the grandson of Dominique Mbonyumutwa, Rwanda’s first president and one of the architects of Parmehutu, the extremist party that introduced ethnic cleansing. His father, Shingiro Mbonyumutwa was a key player in MDR-Pawa that played a major role in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. At the height of the Genocide, Shingiro is on record instigating killing of Tutsis. Gustave is the president of an association based in Belgium. Jambo ASBL has unique credentials; its members are all children of notorious genocidaires and are on a mission to sanitise their parents while negating the Genocide. When the Belgian parliament was early this year debating a law that made denying the Genocide against the Tutsi a crime, Jambo tried to block it but failed. So they have changed tack. Gustave Mbonyumutwa had managed to make it to a list of candidates of Defi, a political party vying for the upcoming parliamentary elections. The children of genocidaires want to go legit, continuing their goal of undermining Rwanda and spread genocide denial under legitimate cover. The leadership of Defi having deciphered Gustave and co’s ploy, has dropped his name from their list of candidates. That was only made possible by patriotic Rwandans and a few of their foreign friends who have mastered the art of nipping the Genocide ideology in the bud by taking the war to the doorsteps of deniers. The children and grandchildren of the architects of the Genocide against the Tutsi are coming up with new weapons every day to further their hateful ideology. They should not be given any respite.
