Rwanda has cast a long shadow over France. Within that darkness lurks a web of lies and deceit. If justice prevails then French ministers and military officers will stand trial at the International Criminal Court.
On Tuesday morning, August 5th, the Mucyo commission publicly released a 337-page report accusing France of complicity and participation in the killing of 800,000 Tutsi during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Commissioned by Kigali, the report compiles extensive research and testimonies from survivors, journalists, French soldiers and the Interahamwe. Thirty-three members of Mitterrand's government, including Dominique de Villipin, Edouard Balladur, and Alain Juppé are indicted.
In June the French senate adopted a law reducing its commitment to uphold the International Criminal Court's penal codes on crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. This law, according to a press release by Amnesty International France, means Paris will not prosecute to the full extent people who have committed egregious crimes in other countries unless they choose to permanently reside in France.
I can still vividly picture Fergal Keane, an Irish journalist, as he describes in his own separate reporting how a young Tutsi girl, Valentina, miraculously survives a butchering at the Nyarubuye church and then lived among the corpses, stunned and disoriented, for over a month.
The truth has a way of manifesting itself. The haunting stories of Rwanda's genocide, the ignored pleas of help, a world that turned its back on humanity, has now arrived exposed and eviscerated on the doorstep of the Elysée.
Going through the Mucyo report is a detailed reading into the face of horror. Page after page of testimonies of French soldiers raping young Tutsi girls at refugee centers and military barracks in Karama (Cyanika), Murambi and SOS Gikongoro. French soldiers supplying weapons and training to the Interahamwe, French soldiers leaving Tutsi civilians to their doom and so on.
Some resisted and helped. These courageous individuals have since come forward. Ordered not to go to Bisesero valley, Sergeant Thierry Prungnaud along with several other French soldiers disobey and find themselves protecting and saving the 800 remaining unarmed Tutsi. The bodies of thousands of Tutsi lay scattered among the survivors.
A year after the genocide, the then French president Francois Mitterrand famously told a reporter that "in country's like that genocide is not so important" writes Andrew Wallis in the Guardian. Mitterrand later blocked EU aid to Rwanda and banned their participation in the November1994 Franco-African meeting in Biarritz. Rwanda may have been a Belgian colony, but it quickly fell under the spell of France in the early 1960s.
Mitterrand feared Rwanda's fall to English speaking Paul Kagame who is an ally Anglophone Ugandan leader Yower Museveni. France's neo-colonial sphere of influence in this part of the world was to be protected at all cost, a contention supported by a 1998 French National Assembly inquiry.
France provided unconditional support to the racist Hutu President Habyarimana who seized power in 1973. By 1993, Habyarimana had driven out over 1 million Tutsi. It was at the time, Africa's largest refugee problem.
France dismissed the report as nonsense and claim it is a politically charged response to their own indictment. In 2006 French judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere issued arrest warrants for nine senior Rwandan officials. The judge also called on Kagame to be tried for allegedly killing Habyarimana whose death helped trigger the genocide. Diplomatic ties between the two nations have since been severed.
It took France 60 years to officially apologize for sending 100,000 Jews to the gas chambers. France cannot ignore these accusations. Human Rights Watch along with investigative journalists like Linda Melvern have independently documented some of the charges. Paris must assert itself and organize a commission to fully investigate the report that also implicates members of the United Nation's Security Council and Belgium for allowing the butchery.
