Burundi is commemorating 63 years since the brutal assassination of the country’s second Prime Minister Louis Rwagasore, on 13 October 1961.
Rwagasore then aged 29, had just spent 16 days in power. He was assassinated while dining outdoors with friends and his cabinet members at the Hotel Tanganyika in Bujumbura (current commercial city).
In 2022, a researcher refering to previously unseen archive papers relating to Prince Louis Rwagasore’s murder, claimed that Belgium was complicit in the assassination.
According to Ludo De Witte, a Flemish sociologist who said had spent five years investigating the killing, noted that Belgian state has an “overwhelming responsibility” for the assassination of Rwagasore.
Ludo De Witte, in his book ‘Murder in Burundi’, explores unseen documents from archives in Brussels and London that expose Belgium’s hand in Rwagasore’s assassination, an event that shattered peace between ethnic groups, leading to decades of war and instability in the landlocked central African country.
On Friday 13 October 1961, while at a terrace of the restaurant Tanganyika in Bujumbura, Rwagasore was dining with ministers and allies. He was shot.
The killer and his accomplices were quickly caught and tried. The man who pulled the trigger, Jean Kageorgis, a Greek national, was executed on 30 June 1962, the day before Burundi’s independence. Five accomplices were put to death six months later.
De Witte argues that the role of the Belgian state was never properly examined, not by the Belgian colonial court, the newly independent government of Burundi, or the United Nations, which all conducted inquiries into the killing.
Rwagasore’s life was in danger after his Uprona party won a crushing victory over the Christian Democrat party (CDC), which was seen as more friendly to Belgian interests.
Two days after the Uprona landslide, Roberto Régnier, the Belgian resident (governor), convened a crisis meeting of senior Belgian officials and CDC allies, where he delivered a chilling message.
“Rwagasore must be killed,” he said. His words were taken as an invitation by the CDC.
Régnier’s words were confirmed by four participants in a 1962 investigation by the crown prosecutor of Brussels. But that report was never published and was left gathering dust until De Witte came across it.
The first clue of the report’s existence was found in a dispatch from Britain’s then ambassador to Burundi, James Murray.
Writing in 1962, Murray told London that some senior Belgians had had “an almost pathological hatred” of Rwagasore, who they believed would harm Belgian-Burundian relations. He recalled Régnier’s “words which go very far in the direction of incitement to murder”.
Also accused is one of Belgium’s most admired diplomats, Paul-Henri Spaak, the then foreign minister who is now celebrated as a founding father of the European project, who De Witte believes turned a blind eye to what was happening.
“Spaak knew that Régnier and his aides were on a war footing with Rwagasore, that they were rebelling against the United Nations decision to order free elections with the participation of Rwagasore,” he says.
He also describes how King Baudouin, one of Belgium’s most popular monarchs, sought to help the assassins. He “moved heaven and earth” to commute the death sentence of the assassin to imprisonment.
While some might suggest Baudouin was motivated by opposition to the death penalty, De Witte contends that the young king was heavily influenced by the ultra-conservative Catholic circle at the palace that took a pitiless attitude to anyone advocating real independence.
But the picture remains incomplete. When De Witte went to examine Spaak’s archive, he found only a few document relating to Burundi for 1961.
And a document he found in the African Archives in 2013 had disappeared when he went to look at it again a few years later, he says.