One of the politically moderate Hutus in the National Unity Cabinet, he became increasingly disenchanted with the RPF and was eventually forced from office in 1995 after criticizing government policies.
[8] For much of his tenure, Sendashonga had written a barrage of memos to Kagame about killings and forced disappearances that were reported to have been carried out by elements of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA).
On 19 April 1995, Sendashonga rushed to Kibeho in an attempt to calm the situation after RPA soldiers shot several Hutus in an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp.
[9] After his attempt to seek redress for the victims of Kibeho was turned down, Sendashonga came to the conclusion that the 'Ugandan Tutsi' who controlled the RPF would not tolerate any dissent and were willing to carry out mass murder to achieve their goals.
Running for three days, the meeting turned into a conflict between Kagame and Sendashonga, who received the backing of Twagiramungu, Ruganera and, somewhat surprisingly, Aloysia Inyumba, the Tutsi minister of women's affairs.
There he planned to fly to Brussels, Belgium to launch a new opposition movement called the Forces de Résistance pour la Démocratie (FRD) with his old colleague and fellow Hutu moderate Faustin Twagiramungu.
Sendashonga had attracted about 600 soldiers and 40 officers of the old Rwandan Armed Forces, who were willing to fight for him because they saw him as an alternative to the RPF and the Hutu Army for the Liberation of Rwanda, who they felt were motivated by opposing forms of violent racism.
After Tanzania agreed to host Sendashonga's rebel training camps, he used his contacts with Prunier to go to Uganda and talk to Salim Saleh, President Yoweri Museveni's brother, on 3 May 1998.
[17] On 16 May 1998, at about 5 pm, Sendashonga was being driven home in his wife's United Nations Environmental Programme car when he was shot and killed, along with his driver Jean-Bosco Nkurubukeye, by two gunmen firing AK-47s.
The three had been identified, in what Prunier derides as a story "obviously fed by rather untalented Kigali security operatives", by Kenyan taxi driver Ali Abdul Nasser, who claimed that the three men had tried to hire him as a paid killer because Sendashonga had stolen $54 million in a criminal partnership with Kiwanuka's father, who the Nairobi police claimed to have been the Director of Immigration Services in Kigali, and who had subsequently been supposedly killed by Sendasonga so he would not have to share the loot.
[1] In a December 2000 hearing, Sendashonga's widow, Cyriaque Nikuze, claimed that the Rwandan government was behind the assassination and revealed that he had been scheduled to testify before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the French Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry.
Mbayire was recalled by his government in January 2001, immediately after Nikuze's accusation and shortly before a new hearing was to begin, only to be shot dead by unidentified gunmen in a Kigali bar on 7 February 2001.