Belgium complicit in killing of popular African leader, book claims — Analysis
Evidence has emerged that Belgium was blindsided by its own officials’ plot to assassinate Burundian PM Louis Rwagasore. This evidence is from 1961.
Belgium has “overwhelming responsibility” for the killing of Prince Louis Rwagasore, the popular Burundian leader who sought to unite the country’s ethnic groups as it gained freedom from the colonial power, new evidence shows.
Rwagasore (29-year-old son a former King) was assassinated just weeks after he had been elected Prime Minister in a landslide. According to Ludo de Witte, a Flemish socioologist, the shooting was orchestrated by the governing Belgian elite. Brussels was unaware of it.
Although the shooter, a Greek national, and five accomplices were executed, De Witte said that probes by the Belgian colonial court, the government of independent Burundi, and the UN all neglected Belgium’s role in the killing, which led to decades of war, ethnic tensions, and instability.
Publishing his findings in a book titled ‘Murder In Burundi’, De Witte noted that then-Belgian governor Roberto Regnier had told a post-election crisis meeting of senior Belgian officials and allies in the Belgium-friendly Christian Democrat party (CDC) that “Rwagasore must be killed.”
The author claims that the CDC considered his words to be an invitation. Regnier’s remarks were apparently confirmed by four people at that meeting to a 1962 inquiry by prosecutors in Brussels. But the report wasn’t published before De Witte, a five-year investigative into the case.
It also appears the UK was at least aware of the danger faced by Rwagasore, with Britain’s then-ambassador James Murray writing in a 1962 dispatch that influential Belgians had “an almost pathological hatred”The charismatic leader was believed to be a threat to Belgian-Burundian relations. Murray noted that Regnier’s “words… go very far in the direction of incitement to murder,”According to De Witte.
The book also accuses then-Belgian foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak – today celebrated as a founding father of the EU – of ignoring Regnier and other conspirators on a “war footing”Rwagasore. This also faults King Baudouin. “moved heaven and earth” to commute the assassin’s death sentence to life imprisonment.
Last October, a special commission into Belgium’s colonial past admitted it paid “limited attention” to Burundi and Rwagasore’s killing. De Witte said that this was due to “a “reticence” among the country’s elite to “confront the reality”Colonialization
Meanwhile, a Belgian Foreign Ministry spokesperson did not respond to the book’s charges, but told The Guardian that the government was waiting for parliamentary recommendations before adopting a policy position.
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