France's role in the Rwandan genocide (6)

October 2007

For decades before the 1994 genocide, Rwanda, the tiny central African country only slightly larger than Gauteng, was famous only for its mountain gorillas that drew millions of tourists for short visits. But all this changed when nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred in what the West readily declared was an ethnic war.
For 13 years after the genocide, organisations and countries came forward to apologise for sitting back while the massacre unfolded; the UN was the first to admit liability for failing to send in enough peace-keepers to protect women, children and the weak.
One prevailing conception has been that the genocide was triggered by the downing of a plane flying former president Juvenal Habyarimana from peace talks in Dar es Salaam, but new evidence proves otherwise

For decades before the 1994 genocide, Rwanda, the tiny central African country only slightly larger than Gauteng, was famous only for its mountain gorillas that drew millions of tourists for short visits. But all this changed when nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred in what the West readily declared was an ethnic war.
For 13 years after the genocide, organisations and countries came forward to apologise for sitting back while the massacre unfolded; the UN was the first to admit liability for failing to send in enough peace-keepers to protect women, children and the weak.
One prevailing conception has been that the genocide was triggered by the downing of a plane flying former president Juvenal Habyarimana from peace talks in Dar es Salaam, but new evidence proves otherwise.
In his book, Silent Accomplice: The Untold Story of France’s Role in the Rwandan Genocide, Andrew Wallis, a freelance journalist and a researcher at the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, exposes the darkest secrets of the genocide.
In his preface Wallis comments: “My interest was heightened when I discovered that behind this Rwandan government (of Habyarimana), with its increasing catalogue of human rights abuses, lay the unconditional support of a permanent member of the Security Council and a nation (France) that prided itself on democracy and the ‘rights of man’.

“While in France individuals and pressure groups such as Survie have worked tirelessly to bring the truth to light, the English-speaking world has largely ignored the collusion of ‘one of its own’ in this shameful matter.”
The shameful matter Wallis is referring to is the revelation that between 1990 and 1994, France sent more than $24m worth of arms to Habyarimana’s government. And, in the same period, President François Mitterrand, in his quest to see France reestablish itself in central Africa, offered specialized training to Habyarimana’s Interahamwe militia – which later committed most of the killings.
Despite having been a Belgian colony, by 1990 Rwanda was a fully fledged member of “La Francafrique”. The attacks mounted by English-speaking Paul Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Front, mainly from Uganda, were thus feared as involving a possible takeover by Anglophone influences.
“It is no longer excusable for Western nations to write off African conflicts as ‘ethnic wars’, and to rekindle the usual racist arguments that such violence is to be expected from ‘uncivilized’ and ‘black’ peoples,” writes Wallis.

One man who has suffered enormous trauma as a result of the genocide is the Canadian General Romeo Dallaire. The general, who was in charge of the small UN Force in Rwanda, has repeatedly and publicly admitted to his own failure to save those who were killed.
Wallis quotes from the general’s 2004 speech made when he returned to Rwanda to mark the tenth anniversary of the genocide, “The world is ruled by a belief that will permit other genocides. The superpowers had no interest in you; they were only interested in Yugoslavia. Thousands upon thousands of soldiers were sent there, and here I barely had 450. The guiding principle was that in Rwanda it’s tribalism, it’s history repeating itself.
“In Yugoslavia, it’s different. It’s ethnic cleansing.It’s European security. It’s white. Rwanda is black. It’s in the middle of Africa. It has no strategic value. And all that’s there, they told me, are people, and there are too many anyway.”

What the general was never told was that among the Interahamwe militia were highly trained French Special Forces who were providing logistical support (channelling the arms, including the machetes used in the killings and training). Wallis reveals that it all began in 1981 when Mitterrand was elected to the Elysee Palace.
He writes: “For his son Jean-Christophe, his father’s election to the Elysee in 1981 was like winning the lottery. Within five years, this little-known journalist was parachuted into one of the top jobs in France. Six years later, he ignominiously left the post as head of the presidential Africa Cell after insinuations of corruption and malpractice. By the end of the decade, he was under investigation for illegal arms trafficking and money laundering; he spent Christmas 2000 in a prison cell.”

After dropping out of university at 23, Wallis reveals, Jean-Christophe (nicknamed Papa m’a dit – Daddy told me) worked briefly on a kibbutz before trying a career in journalism with Agence France-Presse (AFP) before his father appointed him to head the African Cell at the Elysée, where part of his work was advising his father on the so-called “black continent”.
The book shows pretty clearly why Kofi Annan, as UN Under-Secretary General in charge of humanitarian affairs, could do nothing. It further explains why the other members of the Security Council took their time before declaring that what had happened was genocide.

In his conclusion, Wallis quotes from President Jacques Chirac’s 16 July 1995 speech to mark the first annual memorial day for the Jews deported and murdered under the Vichy regime: “On this day [in 1942] France, the country of light, and the rights of man, land of welcome and refuge, carried out an irreparable act. Abandoning its word, it delivered its protected people to their torturers. These dark hours have sullied our history forever and are an insult to our past and traditions... we must recognise the fault of the past and the faults committed by the state.”

Says Wallis: “It remains to be seen when a president of the French Republic will ever have the courage to make the same speech about Rwanda.”