AfroAmerica Network
Correspondent in Kigali
02.09.01
Unidentified gunmen shot dead a Rwandan military officer and former diplomat in Kigali, the Rwandan capital.
Alphonse Mbayire was killed on Wednesday at a bar in Kicukiro, Kigali. Mbayire was a high-ranking military officer in the Rwandan Patriotic Army (APR). Until recently he served as an intelligence officer at the Rwandan Embassy in Nairobi. Sources in Nairobi say he probably masterminded the assassination of former Rwandan Interior Minister, Seth Sendashonga, who was killed in Nairobi in May 1998. Before he returned to Rwanda he frequently visited the family of one of the suspected killers who were arrested by Kenyan authorities.
Mbayire who hails from Nyamashake graduated from the National Pedagogic Institute (IPN) of Butare with a Bachelor's degree. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) recruited him in 1988 when he was an English teacher at a high school in Nyamasheke. He left Rwanda that year and reappeared in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) of Byumba in 1993 as one of the representatives of the RPF at the Joint Commission that resettled internal displaced persons. He had changed his name from Mbayire to Neretse and was well versed in military matters.
Some sources told AfroAmerica Network that he might have been executed because the RPF wanted to get rid of him before the International Criminal for Rwanda (ICTR) hands down its indictments against Tutsi military officers who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1994. Other sources say Mbayire served in the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) and knew too much about RPF covert operations against Hutu and Tutsi opponents and had to be eliminated. They point out that he knew too much about Sendashonga's death.
After the victory of the RPF, Mbayire married Sebukanga's daughter. AfroAmerica Network has learned that Mbayire could not ensure protection to his brother-in-law, Jean-Baptiste Cyusa who fled to the United States last year.
Cyusa is a Tutsi who grew up in Rwanda and served as a senior government official in the Ministry of Education run by Colonel Karemera, one of the RPF heavy weights. But Karemera wanted him dismissed so that he could replace him with a Tutsi returnee from Uganda. Cyusa was then arrested and jailed. After he was released from prison, he fled the country.
This killing occurred as Rwandan President General Paul Kagame was consulting with World leaders on his military occupation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Policy analysts who followed his visit i n the U. S. say his visit did not achieve anything. He had hoped to obtain from the Bush Administration continued military and diplomatic support enjoyed during the Clinton Administration and to convince the American public that the Rwandan military occupation of the DRC is a preventive measure against "genocide". At the U. S. State Department, the United Nations, the U. S. Institute for Peace, and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Kagame received the same message, one analyst says, "Your human rights record in Rwanda and the DRC is unacceptable. Get out of the Congo."
The same analyst remarks that during questions and answers at the U. S. Institute for Peace, Umuhuza President Marie Rose Malikidogo described to the audience Kagame's human rights record as Kagame watched in dismay. At the Kennedy School of Government, Kagame focused his presentation on genocide and his own role in ending it. When questions from the audience shifted the discussion to the war in the DRC, he told the audience that the Rwandan Patriotic Army was dismantling Interhamwe's military bases. He got a free ride until the representative of the Congolese community in Boston refuted Kagame's arguments and the audience applauded.
(c)AfroAmerica Network, February, 2001.
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