genocide - Rwanda

Rwanda’s report on France – facts or tit-for-tat?

Tuesday 05 August 2008

France has dismissed Rwanda’s report accusing French officials of playing a role in the 1994 genocide, calling the allegations “unacceptable”. Is the report unbiased, or a political response for France’s 2006 indictment of President Kagame?

Rwanda’s report claims that France played an active role in the 1994 genocide. Tell us what you think by clicking “React” below.

 


The 1994 Rwandan genocide saw 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed in a 100-day rampage. Rwanda’s Ministry of Justice released a report Tuesday implicating 13 senior French officials and 20 military members. France’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the allegations as “unacceptable,” and French observers have suggested they are a “tit-for-tat” response for a French judge’s indictment of Rwandan President Paul Kagame in 2006.

Those implicated included late president Francois Mitterrand, then-prime minister Edouard Balladur, as well as Alain Juppe and Dominique de Villepin.

In a 2006 report, French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière implicated Kagame in the downing of then-President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane in 1994 – the event widely seen to have triggered the massacres.

“Judge Bruguière had asked for the appearance of several senior Rwandan officials. One has the impression that this report… is a response to Bruguière’s report”, French MP Bernard Debré said on the French edition of the FRANCE 24 Debate. Debré, a member of Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party, was France’s minister of co-operation just after the genocide of 1994.

“Is it a tit-for-tat game?”, FRANCE 24’s Andrea Sanke asked Louise Mushikiwabo, Rwanda’s information minister, joining the debate from Kigali, the Rwandan capital.

According to the Minister, it is not. “This report is the product of a commission that was set up in April 2006. Judge Bruguière’s indictment came out in November 2006… let’s look at timing here. The alleged role of France… in the implementation of the genocide goes back to 1994,” she said.

Mushikiwabo said people should stop suggesting that the report is politically motivated. The role of French officials was “documented”, in “training murderous militias”, she added. “This evidence was pulled out by a group of… very professional people”, she added.

According to Vincent Hugeux, Africa correspondent for L’Express magazine, the report had “details… dates, locations, hours,… everything” and looked “credible”. But, he said, politically “this kind of report is open to any kind of manipulation”.

While it may not go to courts, France has acknowledged that “mistakes” had been made.

American University professor Georges Kazolias said that “the French played a nasty role” in Rwanda’s genocide, and that “some reckoning had to be done”.

The Hutu government of Rwanda, an ex-Belgian colony, had ties to France, including during the period of the Rwandan civil war starting in 1990.

In June 1994, France started “Operation Turquoise” to protect French citizens and stop the killing. France has been criticized for allowing the Hutu Interahamwe militias, responsible for the massacres, to flee to neighboring Zaire, while blocking the Tutsi rebel army that stopped the genocide.

Daniel Kalinaki, managing editor of Uganda’s Daily Monitor, said “I doubt we will have the final word, the undisputed account of what happened during the genocide”.

Professor Kazolias said, “Mitterand’s obsession with French-speaking Africa being overrun by English-speaking Africa, notably the British and the Americans... that may seem bizarre… (but) I think the French were not too concerned about genocide”.

Many Rwandans speak English today rather than the French of the extremist Hutus, and Kagame has asked for Rwanda to be admitted to the group of Commonwealth countries, even though it was never a British colony, as explored in this article in The Guardian in 2007.

Debré himself indicated that France knew of the Rwandan Hutus’ preparations for the killings. He said, “I sent a message in January 1994, before the genocide… I alerted Alain Juppé, Mitterand. I told them, watch out, this will explode. No-one took account of this”.