On 16 November, Europe’s migration policymakers gather in Vienna for the Vienna Migration Conference. The occasion will be used to announce Europe’s first “return hub” for rejected asylum seekers, in Rwanda, as RTL Nieuws reported and sources familiar with the negotiations have confirmed to M28 Investigates. Germany, Austria, Denmark, Greece and the Netherlands are behind the plan; diplomatic sources describe a pilot for about 100 people. Belgium is not among the five. But Prime Minister Bart De Wever has told parliament that Belgium wants such hubs.
The announcement comes less than two months after Belgium and Rwanda restored the diplomatic relations that Kigali severed in March 2025. That reconciliation was right. Talking is better than not talking, and an embassy in Kigali gives Belgium a channel it lacked for eighteen months. Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot said at the time that restoring relations does not mean abandoning Belgium’s defence of Congo’s sovereignty.
The question is whether that holds. On the ground, nothing has been normalised. Only the protocol has.
An occupation, not a conflict
In July, the UN Group of Experts reported that Rwanda exercises significant control over the M23 rebels. It estimated Rwandan troops in eastern Congo at the end of 2025 at 8,000 to 10,000 in South Kivu and 6,000 to 8,000 in North Kivu, with no evidence of significant withdrawal. Minerals from Rubaya and other Masisi mines are still smuggled into Rwanda. Human Rights Watch concluded in June that Rwanda’s military presence and its direction of M23 operations meet the legal threshold of belligerent occupation.
The Washington peace agreement was signed; the withdrawal it promised has not happened. Kigali still makes it conditional on first neutralising the FDLR militia, a sequencing that turns a real but diminished threat into a permanent alibi. On 12 October, former president Joseph Kabila launched a political-military front in Goma, bringing together key M23 figures. Belgium called it “deplorable”, and rightly so. But an armed movement unveiled in a city held by Rwandan-backed forces is not a purely Congolese affair.
A message written in violence
On 17 October, Sergeant Major Robert Kabera, a 50-year-old former Rwandan soldier, army musician and outspoken critic of President Paul Kagame, was found beheaded near Kampala. Human Rights Watch reports that he knew his criticism made him a target. He had been arrested in Uganda and said he saw Rwandan officials, including High Commission staff, at the police station. Kigali had sought his deportation. After he fled, Rwanda’s military opened a criminal case against him, which he denied and his family calls a witch hunt. When he was killed, he was in the final stages of resettlement to a third country.
Kigali has not commented, and Ugandan police have named no suspects. I will not make an attribution the evidence does not yet support. But Europe cannot claim to lack context. Human Rights Watch has documented Rwanda’s repression of critics abroad, from threats against relatives to killings. In 2024, the Forbidden Stories consortium, to which I contributed, reported, citing Belgian government sources, that the Rwandan embassy in Belgium supervises a network acting against the diaspora, “from active monitoring to acts of violence.” That embassy is about to reopen.
A beheading is not discreet. It is a message, and as a Rwandan journalist in exile I know to whom it is addressed: exiles, former soldiers who have spoken to investigators about eastern Congo, Rwanda Journalists and critics in exile and Congolese journalists who fled the Kivus. In August, armed men broke into the Ugandan home of exiled Congolese journalist John Zihindula and threatened to kill him, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported. This comes just as the International Court of Justice, where Kinshasa filed its case against Rwanda in June, the International Criminal Court and a UN commission of inquiry depend on precisely these witnesses. Silence the witnesses, and the case is half-won before it is heard.
From the interrogation room to the embassy
On 18 September, Colonel (retired) Jeannot Ruhunga presented his credentials in Warsaw as Rwanda’s ambassador to Poland. His background is not diplomacy. Before 2018 he was acting head of military intelligence; from April 2018 to March 2025 he led the Rwanda Investigation Bureau (RIB), Kigali’s criminal investigation agency.
Those were the years in which RIB became the public face of Kigali’s reach. In August 2020, Paul Rusesabagina, a Belgian citizen and an outspoken Kagame critic, boarded a plane in Dubai believing it was bound for Burundi. He landed in Kigali. For four days his family did not know where he was. On 31 August, RIB paraded him in handcuffs before the press at its headquarters. Ruhunga told local media that Rusesabagina had been arrested on arrival, a version Kagame himself soon undercut by suggesting he had been tricked into coming. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention later concluded that he had been abducted by Rwandan agents and that his detention amounted to an enforced disappearance. His lawyers alleged torture by at least one RIB agent, Amnesty International noted.
Six months earlier, the gospel singer Kizito Mihigo had died in a Kigali police cell, four days after RIB announced his arrest. An RIB spokesperson told local media he had strangled himself before any independent investigation could take place. As Human Rights Watch noted, none ever did.
Why should this matter beyond Poland? Because embassies are where Kigali’s diaspora policy is carried out, as the Belgian case shows, and an envoy accredited in Warsaw moves freely across the Schengen area. Sending the former head of the agency that held a Belgian citizen incommunicado to a European capital is not a neutral appointment. To those of us in exile, the signal is unmistakable: the men who ran the interrogation rooms now host the receptions.
Belgium should draw the lesson. When Kigali proposes its next ambassador to Brussels, the question is not whether the nominee is courteous. It is who stands behind and around him: the counsellors, the attachés, the “community” officers. A soft-spoken head of mission flanked by security men is not reassurance. It is camouflage.
The price of a hundred beds
This is where Vienna matters. Kigali has run this play before. Britain paid Rwanda heavily for a deportation scheme that the UK Supreme Court ruled unlawful in 2023, because of the risk that people would be sent on to persecution. For Kigali, migration is not a humanitarian file. It is leverage. A government that houses Europe’s deportees becomes a partner Europe will hesitate to confront.
Europe’s remaining levers are already weak. The EU sanctioned Rwandan officials in March 2025. The European Parliament voted 443 to 4 to suspend the EU-Rwanda raw materials partnership; member states agreed only to “review” it. Once a return hub opens, every future sanction, renewal and review will be weighed against the risk of Kigali closing its doors. Amnesty International warns that such hubs risk becoming “cruel black holes” for human rights.
The contradiction is stark. A state whose agents are accused of hunting its own refugees abroad is about to be declared a safe place to send everyone else’s. Both cannot be true.
Kinshasa’s anger is not Kigali’s alibi
Belgium’s relations with Kinshasa are also strained. On 14 October, Belgian investigators searched addresses in Brussels and the Brabant provinces linked to President Félix Tshisekedi’s family, reportedly in a money-laundering inquiry. A day later, his cabinet was barred from contact with the Belgian embassy. Kinshasa calls it internal organisation; Prévot said nothing justified the ban.
Belgian justice is right to follow the money, whoever’s it is. No one has been charged, and no guilt is established. But some in Brussels may be tempted to read this friction as a reason to rebalance: Kinshasa is difficult, Kigali is efficient. That would be a strategic error. The rule-of-law argument cuts both ways. If Belgian prosecutors can investigate the Congolese president’s entourage, Belgian services must pursue foreign intelligence networks targeting people on Belgian soil with equal rigour. Consistency is Belgium’s only credible asset in the Great Lakes. It is lost the moment Brussels is seen to pick a favourite.
What Belgium should do
Belgium does not need to choose between dialogue and principle. It needs to attach conditions to the dialogue. That starts with the embassy now reopening in Brussels: Belgium should vet the whole mission, not just the ambassador, and refuse accreditation to any Rwandan official credibly linked to diaspora surveillance, rendition or abuse in custody. It should say so plainly when the new ambassador’s agrément is discussed. The killing of Robert Kabera should become a diplomatic file, with Brussels backing calls for a credible Ugandan investigation and raising the case directly with Kigali. Belgium hosts what is reported to be the largest Rwandan diaspora in the world, as well as a large Congolese community, so it carries a particular duty to fund and coordinate protection for those who testify before international courts and investigators. In Europe, Belgium should stay out of the Rwanda hub and insist that no migration arrangement weakens the sanctions regime or the review of the raw materials partnership. And it should judge Kigali by what happens on the ground, not by its communiqués: verified troop withdrawal, measured against the UN experts’ own figures, is the only real proof of good faith.
Kigali has long understood that Europe’s guilt and Europe’s interests can both be converted into silence: guilt over 1994, an appetite for Congo’s minerals, and now a hunger for deportations. Belgium, of all countries, should recognise the mechanism. Europe saw at once what was at stake when Moscow redrew borders by force and pursued its critics abroad. It should not need a different rulebook because the map is African.
Restoring relations was the easy part. The hard part is making sure that dialogue does not become a discount.
