French President Emmanuel Macron recently appointed a panel of experts to investigate allegations that Paris was partially to blame for the Rwanda genocide, which killed more than 800,000 people over 100 horrific days in 1994.
BY OWN CORRESPONDENT
In a major development coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the genocide, Macron announced in April the creation of a commission of eight historians and civil servants, who would delve into the state’s archives.
They will be tasked with perusing all France’s archives relating to the genocide in order to analyse the role and engagement of France during that period.
Rwanda accused France of having supported the ethnic Hutu extremists and the Interahamwe militias who carried out the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis — including women and children — and moderate Hutus and allowing many perpetrators to escape justice.
On April 6, 1994 a plane carrying Rwanda’s president Juvenal Habyarimana — from the Hutu tribe — and Burundian leader Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down by a missile near the Rwandan capital Kigali.
Hutu extremists blamed the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels and used it as an excuse to launch a genocide against the Tutsi minority.
France had a very close relationship with the Habyarimana government leading up to the genocide.
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He was seen as the ‘darling of France’ because of his support for France’s influence in central Africa.
France saw Habyarimana as key to maintaining Francophone influence and stopping the RPF’s Anglophone aggression.
They saw the RPF as a plot by Britain and the US to expand Anglophone influence in Africa.
The accusation from Rwanda is that France was directly involved in training the Interahamwe militias.
Between 1992 and 1994 France is accused of arming and training these militias and it is said they knew they were going to be used to target Tutsis.
Rwanda is calling for a full acknowledgement by France.
The RPF took power in Rwanda after the genocide and its leader, President Paul Kagame, is still president.
France’s president in 1994 was Francois Mitterrand, whose son Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, an arms dealer, who was also his unofficial adviser on Africa.
Mitterrand’s son had a close relationship with the Rwandans and it was alleged he was personally responsible for the transit of weaponry into Rwanda and this was later covered up.
In 2009 Jean-Christophe Mitterrand was given a suspended prison sentence and a fine for receiving embezzled funds from the illegal arms sales to Angola.
Mitterrand left office in 1995 and died the following year but subsequent French presidents have all refused to admit any wrongdoing on France’s part.
When he was president, Nicolas Sarkozy went to Rwanda and apologised in the vaguest sense but didn’t go any further.
What Macron has done is the most concrete step so far in addressing what France did in 1994 but the response is muted in Rwanda, they’re saying ‘Let’s just see what they do.’ It could just be a public relations move.
But there is some concern in Rwanda and also among genocide campaigners in France about the choice of those on the investigation panel.
Macron has appointed eight commissioners — all of them French — but none are Rwanda specialists.
They are historians or civil servants but not even Africa experts.
Some in Rwanda are wondering if this is going to be a bureaucratic exercise, which will end up with a whitewashed report.
The commission of inquiry would have a tough task in getting to the bottom of what role the French foreign office played in the run up to the Rwanda genocide.
The first thing the French establishment should do is close ranks.
It’s all well and good to commission an inquiry but it has to have some teeth and it has to get its hands on the key documents.
Key people will refuse to speak and some documents will have been shredded.
But there is such a paper trail that even the French establishment will fail to destroy all the documents.
The Rwandans also wanted Paris to get to the bottom of allegations about Operation Turquoise, the deployment of thousands of French troops to Rwanda in June 1994.
While ostensibly the idea was to set up a safe zone, it is alleged that French troops turned a blind eye to some killings and also allowed some of the ringleaders of the genocide to escape into neighbouring Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Macron claimed he is willing to break to break with the past and shed light on France’s colonial and post-colonial past.
Last September he acknowledged France had facilitated torture during Algeria’s 1954-1962.
He threw open the archives on that conflict, which ended when president Charles de Gaulle finally accepted independence.
As yet that trawl has not yet divulged any earthshattering documents.
And the Rwanda genocide commission of inquiry is “potentially explosive”, especially if it led to а full acknowledgement by the French state, but it is too early to say if it would come to anything.
