Burundi’s Ambassador to Belgium, Thérence Ntahiraja, has triggered a diplomatic storm after making public statements that appeared to endorse the return of the FDLR to power in Kigali by force of arms.
The militia was founded by perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda.
The remarks, made in an interview, have drawn sharp condemnation from Rwanda, regional analysts, and members of the international diplomatic community.
The FDLR, Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda, has operated from bases in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo for three decades.
Its founding membership includes individuals who participated in the genocide that killed over one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a hundred days.
The group has long been designated a terrorist organisation and has been the subject of repeated United Nations sanctions and expert investigations.
Ntahiraja’s comments struck many observers as extraordinary for a serving diplomat. Speaking on camera from his posting in Brussels, he suggested that FDLR elements would find their way back to Rwanda through armed means.
He also said he had been engaging with Rwandans who are either descendants of those convicted of genocide or individuals he described as financing opposition activities against the Rwandan government.
The statement, far from distancing Burundi from the militia, appeared to validate both its grievances and its methods.
Rwanda’s Foreign Affairs Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe responded swiftly and in unusually blunt terms.
“That a Burundian ambassador accredited to the Kingdom of Belgium would allow himself, despite being well aware of diplomatic ethics, to impunely make such an incendiary declaration against a neighboring state, promising to support an attack by the genocidal FDLR against Rwanda, should raise questions,” he said.
The minister stopped short of announcing formal diplomatic measures but the language left little ambiguity about Kigali’s level of anger.
The reaction on social media was immediate and widespread. One post on X that circulated widely described the ambassador as engaging in what it called crude propaganda, accusing him of whitewashing the FDLR while openly stoking ethnic hatred.
“Everyone knows they have rear bases in Burundi and in DRC,” the post read. “He speaks of the macabre plans of the Ndayishimiye regime and the CNDD-FDD. This is utterly unworthy of an ambassador.”
The controversy deepened with claims that the ambassador’s involvement went beyond words. According to sources familiar with the Focode programme, the civil society researcher Pacifique Nininahazwe had previously stated that meetings preparing subversive activities against Rwanda were held inside the Burundian embassy in Brussels itself.
Ntahiraja allegedly hosted Rwandans in closed sessions in his office, with some meetings reported to have run for extended periods.
The claims have not been independently verified, but they have added a more serious dimension to what began as a controversy over an interview.
Burundi has not issued a formal clarification or retraction at the time of publication. The embassy in Brussels could not be reached for comment.
The incident lands at a particularly sensitive moment. Burundian troops are currently deployed in eastern Congo alongside Congolese government forces, an arrangement that Rwanda and the AFC/M23 rebel alliance have criticised as direct military support for operations against Tutsi communities in the region.
The FDLR is also known to be fighting alongside those same forces, a fact documented by UN expert panels, making the ambassador’s apparent sympathy for the militia’s cause more than a matter of diplomatic indiscretion.
For Rwanda, a country whose entire post-genocide identity is built on the promise of never again, statements of this nature from a neighbouring government’s official representative are not received as mere political noise.
They are taken seriously. Rwanda has made clear, in measured but firm language, that the security of its citizens is not a subject it will leave to chance or to the goodwill of others.
A government that lived through the systematic slaughter of over one million of its people in three months, while the world debated the appropriate diplomatic response, does not have the luxury of assuming that threats from abroad are simply rhetorical.
Whether Bujumbura intended the ambassador’s remarks as policy or allowed them as carelessness, the damage to an already strained bilateral relationship is considerable. In diplomacy, words have addresses.
These ones landed squarely in Kigali, and the response is unlikely to end with a statement.
