In the world of post-genocide revisionism, denial often wears the guise of defense. This has recently resurfaced through Gustave Mbonyumutwa, known online as @gmbonyumutwa, who publicly insists that his father, Shingiro Mbonyumutwa, was never Chief of Staff to Rwanda’s genocidal interim Prime Minister Jean Kambanda.
But facts, as Minister Jean-Damascène Bizimana, Rwanda’s Minister of National Unity and Civic Engagement, recently reminded the public, are not negotiable.
In a calm but unflinching address, he dismantled Gustave’s claims using documented history, official records, and legal evidence that reveal Shingiro’s active and senior role in the planning and execution of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
One of the most damning pieces of evidence, as revealed by Minister Bizimana, comes from a June 17, 1999 ruling by the Belgian Permanent Refugee Appeals Commission, which rejected Shingiro Mbonyumutwa’s asylum request.
The Commission’s findings were stark: Shingiro was not a man fleeing violence—he was a man fleeing accountability.
“The applicant, in his capacity as CHIEF OFFICER OF THE PRIME MINISTER, was directly involved in the perpetration of the crime of genocide during this period,” the ruling states unequivocally.
But what brings these cold words to life is the broader context Minister Bizimana shared. He described how Shingiro, known by name and lineage across Rwanda, used the prestige of the Mbonyumutwa family—descendants of Dominique Mbonyumutwa, Rwanda’s first post-monarchy president—to rally support for the interim government.
He was not a faceless official. He was a symbol of continuity for a genocidal regime that desperately sought public legitimacy.
At a moment when international condemnation was intensifying, it was Shingiro who was tasked—alongside Donat Murego—with leading ceasefire negotiations on behalf of the genocidal government.
This was not a ceremonial appointment. It was a clear sign that he was trusted by the regime’s highest ranks, including Kambanda himself.
Accepting such a mandate meant something: it meant standing with the government that, at the time, was orchestrating massacres from Kigali to Kibuye, from Bugesera to Bisesero.
Survivors from southern Rwanda still recall how the presence of high-level Hutu officials in meetings with local leaders emboldened militias.
“We were told the government was with them,” one survivor told a commission years later. “And when someone like Shingiro visits and shakes hands with the burgomaster, we knew death was near.”
These were not abstract roles—people’s lives were influenced by these choices, these gestures, these alliances.
Yet Gustave Mbonyumutwa, from the safety of Brussels, continues to refute all of it. He frames his father as an innocent bureaucrat, detached from the bloodshed, wrongly accused by history.
But this too is part of a larger pattern of strategic denial. Gustave, together with his brother Ruhumuza Mbonyumutwa, is a founding member of JAMBO asbl, a Belgium-based nonprofit that presents itself as a civil rights organization but has gained notoriety for minimizing and distorting the facts of the genocide.
Minister Bizimana did not mince words when addressing JAMBO’s activities. He described their efforts as “a dangerous echo of the past,” noting how such platforms allow descendants and ideological heirs of genocide planners to reframe their family’s narrative—not with remorse, but with defiance.
He spoke of the trauma such propaganda inflicts on survivors. “Each time these lies are repeated, it reopens wounds we have spent decades trying to close,” he said.
While Gustave tweets and issues statements denying his father’s documented past, the legal and historical record speaks with clarity.
The 1999 Belgian ruling, cited by Minister Bizimana, outlines the reasons for the asylum refusal: Shingiro’s increasing proximity to the genocidal regime, his acceptance of government mandates, and his senior role as Chief Officer to the Prime Minister, making him not just a witness, but an architect of genocide policy.
“Far from dissociating himself from government policy,” the Commission noted, “he continually drew closer to it and served it at increasingly high levels of responsibility.”
In one chilling anecdote shared by a former government insider now living in exile, Shingiro was described as “the man who brought order to chaos—order in the service of death.”
His office reportedly coordinated high-level communications between Kambanda’s ministers and local administrators implementing killings, making him a vital link in the machinery of genocide.
Today, Gustave’s efforts to sanitize his father’s legacy are not just personal—they are political.
They form part of a broader ideological project to rewrite the history of the genocide, dilute international accountability, and reframe the perpetrators as misunderstood patriots.
But history resists revision. So do survivors. And so does the truth.
In the face of such concrete evidence, denial is not only dishonest—it is dangerous. It undermines the memory of the victims, insults those who lived through the horror, and obstructs Rwanda’s efforts to build a future on truth, justice, and unity.
History cannot—and will not—be rewritten to absolve the guilty.
