Chapter 9
The French ‘humanitarian operation’ left behind more than two million people crammed into refugee camps now blighting the Rwandan border. Piles of unburied bodies lay in heaps throughout Rwanda and the border refugee camps in Tanzania, Zaire and Burundi.1 The genocide was over, the interim government had fled along with the genocidaires, leaving behind a tidal wave of human misery, disease, starvation, ethnic hatred and personal tragedy.
To brand Turquoise a success for posterity, politicians in Paris needed to justify the operation and parade it in the correct humanitarian robes. With the French role before July 1994 glossed over, interested journalists were encouraged to look instead at the human misery now lined up before the cameras in the camps at Goma and Bukavu. Foreign Minister Juppé told an interviewer five weeks after the end of the genocide that in Rwanda, ‘one could not say that good was on the side of the RPF and evil on the other.’2 If organizing the killing of a million people is not ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ what actually is?
The new RPF-based government in Kigali gained political recognition from the anglophone world early on. Within days of its creation in Kigali, the USA and Britain both officially recognized the broad-based regime and sent ambassadors to the Rwandan capital, while former colonial master Belgium also established immediate diplomatic ties. Mitterrand instead showed his antipathy. While anxious to take the credit for Turquoise he was not about to grant any political help to a new government he blamed for unseating one of his favourite francophone regimes. Paris pointedly sent Jacques Courbin to man a mere diplomatic cell in Kigali. No ambassador from France would grace Kigali and its anglophone government.
One month later, on 16 September, the new Rwandan president, Hutu moderate Pasteur Bizimungu, travelled to The Hague for a two-day international conference on ‘Rwanda in a regional context: human rights, reconciliation and rehabilitation’. It was the new government’s first chance to show its credentials to 150 delegates from around the world. When the new Rwandan leader got up to address the audience, the French ambassador to the Netherlands walked out of the event in a clear show of animosity.3
Diplomatic and political snubs aside, Mitterrand was more interested in hitting the new Rwandan government where it hurt – financially. Before fleeing from Kigali and Gisenyi, the interim administration made sure that everything that wasn’t nailed down went with them or was destroyed. Rwanda’s ministries and local government offices were plundered for typewriters, furniture, windows and even pens. Official vehicles were used to ferry the equipment away to Zaire. Any funds left from the Habyarimana and interim regimes were transferred to bank accounts set up in Belgium with the 17 billion Rwandan francs that former government members had taken into exile in Zaire.4 The incoming broad-based government faced total devastation. Trying to run a country with a million dead, a third of the population displaced and the local and central administration in chaos was a nightmare. Many of the judges had been killed or had fled after taking part in the genocide. The story with the police, local mayors and prefects was the same. One former sub-prefect in the Gitarama region reported that when he took over in July 1995, one year after the genocide, things were still appalling. ‘Everything had been looted. I got about on a beaten up ancient motorcycle. It took ages before, eventually, with German aid, we were able to buy some office furniture and even pens and paper to work with.’5
While aid agencies and the media concentrated on the refugee crisis, with cameramen vying with each other to bring the horror of the camps into the homes of Western viewers, the plight of the actual population in Rwanda went mostly unnoticed. New Rwandan vice-president Paul Kagame summed up the outcome of the 100 days of carnage in his country.
The genocidaires not only murdered a million people, they also destroyed our physical and social economic infrastructure, government, legal system, business and the whole economy. They destroyed everything that supported human life. The survivors of the genocide have suffered in silence. … They lost their loved ones, their property, and everything they called theirs; they were tortured, raped and infected with HIV/AIDS and now live in abject poverty. As if all this was not enough, we are over-burdened with the need to forgive, to reconcile and to live with former tormentors.6
A young Tutsi woman, Francine, saw her family being hacked to death around her and spent the genocide hiding in the marshes to escape the killers. But, unlike the French soldiers now returning to their warm beds or the Western leaders in the USA, Britain and the Élysée who had never even let the subject cause them to miss their pre-dinner drink, the genocide survivors were condemned to a life of guilt, regret and fear.
When you have lived through a waking nightmare for real, you can no longer sort your day thoughts from your night ones as before. Ever since the genocide I have felt pursued day and night. In bed, I turn away from the shadows; on the road, I look back at the figures that follow me. I am afraid for my child each time my eyes meet those of a stranger’s. … I feel a sort of shame to have to spend a lifetime feeling hunted, simply for what I am.7
In autumn 1994 Rwanda was about to collapse. Its new government issued moving appeals to the West for aid to help rebuild its battered and burnt infrastructure and for its Hutu population to return from refugee camps now blotting the landscapes of neighbouring Burundi, Zaire and Tanzania. The bankrupt new masters of a half-deserted country were aware that rebuilding Rwanda would cost millions of dollars, and this needed political will from the West and its banks.
The World Bank initially flourished a $35 million dollar cheque in front of the Kagame regime, but then pulled back from handing the amount over, claiming under its regulations that Rwanda had first to repay a $6 million debt run up by the former interim regime since 6 April 1994. Its rules meant this debt could not be repaid from the larger $35 million loan. By contrast, more than $200 million had already been granted to aid the refugees, though the former Rwandan army (FAR) and militia now controlling the camps funnelled off much of this.
The European Union also made noises about giving emergency aid to the Kigali government. Brussels voted for $200 million recovery aid to Rwanda only to see the French government veto the donation. The Paris agenda was simple – if they could not undermine the new Kigali regime by military means, then economic ‘sanctions’ were the next best weapon. The French demanded that no money be given until the refugee problem was resolved and that the new government in Kigali be broadened to include more Hutus and non-Kagame supporters.
Behind the demands was a clear French political agenda. One pro-French European Commission official told journalists:
The French priority is the return of the refugees. The genocide comes second. You can’t reconstruct a country if the people are out of the country. The RPF has strong links with the US. It has lots of arms and lots of money. It is necessary not to forget that the Americans helped the RPF and were the first to give aid. And the British followed on the American side.8
Put simply, France would not tolerate an anglophone regime in Kigali. Reconstruction of Rwanda, justice for those affected by the genocide, and help to those left starving in a country without food were less important to Paris than scoring political points and undermining the new government in Kigali.
British MEP Glenys Kinnock told the Strasbourg Parliament:
The EU is refusing to release funds until the Rwandan government creates satisfactory conditions to enable the return of the refugees. But the government simply has no way of creating those conditions without receiving the aid. There seems to be a French hidden agenda here. Because of their association with the previous government, they are not wanting to do anything to ensure that the present government has a future. I am not saying France wants more bloodshed, but that will be the result.9
The new Rwandan interior minister Seth Sendashonga spoke of the Catch-22 position in which the French had put his country. ‘We are refused both political confidence and material means, and at the same time are being asked to straighten out right away a situation of massive disaster.’10
Bernard Kouchner, who represented the Mitterrand government during the genocide, was equally critical of the French position. ‘I don’t want to malign my own country, only to help the victims. The government in Rwanda has opened up, but nobody has responded positively. I have had enough of people being mealy-mouthed, saying “this is politics”. We need to help the Rwandan government create national reconciliation.’11 The Economist magazine commented:
The European grudgingness is not for lack of money. The EU has a pool of $166 million for long-term development and economic reform set aside for Rwanda, and this is largely unspent. The EU has released only $6.1 million to help restore electricity and water. The biggest finger in the EU dam is the French. … The French argue that Rwanda’s new government is illegitimate and tainted. It took power by force and, being Tutsi-dominated, does not represent the population at large.
As nearly a million Tutsis had been killed, it was not surprising that the Tutsis were now even more of a minority. Even so, the new broadbased government contained members from four other political parties, as well as more Hutus – including the president, prime minister and finance minister – than Tutsis.
The price of isolating Rwanda could be high. A government without western friends may seek them in more dangerous places. A government that cannot pay its (more vengeful) soldiers puts its own political survival in peril. There is an urgent need to transfer power from soldiers to civilians. That means setting up a police force and a judiciary. At a recent count Rwanda only had three lawyers.12
Justin Forsyth, a senior Oxfam representative, spoke to the justice ministry in Kigali about problems in Rwanda, still without electricity and water, where revenge killings were commonplace because there was no machinery of law to punish atrocities. ‘Genocide and civil war have shattered Rwanda’s social fabric. Without substantial aid the country has no possibility of rebuilding its economy and its social structure.’13
However, French minister for cooperation Bernard Debré insisted the new anglophone government ‘from Uganda’, now in place in Kigali, allow refugees back, create a healthy judicial system and set a date for elections before any aid could be forthcoming. It was as if genocide, for Paris, were a purely political phenomenon, with no emotional or physical effects. No French minister had set foot in the country since the genocide to speak to survivors, examine the wrecked infrastructure, or step over the mounds of bodies left to rot in some massacre sites. Prunier commented on Debré’s speech, remarking:
Hey presto, the French magic wand had solved all the problems! It would have been funny if in the meantime half-starving orphans had not kept playing with leg bones for sticks and skulls for balls, if the refugee camps had not turned into social bombs whose fuses were likely to be lit by desperate men whom France kept helping, and if a new and very imperfect regime which was making a modest attempt at improvement had not been systematically starved, as if to see how soon it would break into another bout of homicidal madness. If this happened, one could after all feel justified – these people were all savages, and this new bunch were no better than the ones we had supported earlier.14
Foreign Affairs Minister Juppé went on national television on 26 November to announce, ‘What is the Rwandan nation? It is made up of two ethnic groups, Hutu and Tutsi. Peace cannot return to Rwanda if these two ethnic groups refuse to work and govern together. … This is the solution France, with a few others, is courageously trying to foster.’ One commentator noted, ‘One tends to pity the “few others” who have been welcomed on board this “Titanic” of a policy.’15
The last Franco–African summit of François Mitterrand’s presidency took place in November 1994 with the spectre of Rwanda hanging over it. The place ally and friend President Habyarimana had occupied in the previous decade among other francophone leaders remained empty. Rwanda was pointedly not invited, a clear signal that, with Kagame at the helm, it was no longer considered a francophone country. Mitterrand left any discussion of the tiny African state off the agenda.
The 35 heads of state met at Biarritz on 7 November with the words of the new Rwandan prime minister ringing in their ears when he talked of the snub of not being invited. He had dismissed the francophone summits as ‘picturesque meetings that never produce important decisions affecting our country’.16 As the Independent pointed out, at the beginning of his Élysée tenure in 1981 Mitterrand’s own Socialist Party had singled out three dictators at the summit, Mobutu of Zaire, Bongo of Gabon and Eyadéma of Togo, as men to be removed because of their appalling human rights record. Some 23 years on, Mobutu was rewarded for his recent support for France with a seat next to the French president.
Mitterrand decided that the best form of defence was attack when it came to the volley of criticism aimed at him and his government over their Rwandan record. In his opening address to the conference he told the delegates, ‘One cannot ask the impossible from France, which is so alone, when local chiefs decide to … settle their quarrels with bayonets and machetes. After all, it is their country.’17 If it were ‘their country’ why did France need to get so involved? As for local chiefs, it was politicians and the military that had carefully organized and planned the genocide, not a few savages deciding to settle old scores. With no sense of irony at the French military intervention in Rwanda, Mitterrand announced that now ‘the time has come for Africans themselves to resolve their conflicts and organize their own security’.
Former cooperation minister Michel Roussin told the French newspaper Le Figaro on 10 November, ‘there are still crimes committed whose responsibility has not been clearly established. In this context, to invite representatives of the new [Rwandan] government would not be proper.’ If this were the criterion for exclusion from the franco-phone conference, no country would have come to Biarritz.18 Bruno Delaye, Mitterrand’s African special adviser, no doubt aware that the FAR were rearming and re-forming on Rwanda’s border, added, ‘We won’t invite the new Rwandese authorities to the next Franco–African summit. They are too controversial and besides they are going to collapse any minute.’19
Added to this snub for the new Rwandan regime was the French government’s attempt to further the ‘double genocide’ myth for its own political motives. At the UN, repeated statements from Hutu Power representatives during the summer of 1994 indicated that they saw the events in Rwanda as justified because the massacres were being carried out ‘by both sides’. This theory of ‘double genocide’ was a vital component in reassuring the West that the slaughter was pure interethnic strife, thus implying that any intervention on one side only would be unjust. Hutu extremists alleged they were only defending themselves and that the massacres, while regrettable, were taking place because the population was afraid the RPF would kill them. The reality was that the genocide was a deliberately planned political event, not the result of sudden massive interethnic tension.20
Once the myth of ‘double genocide’ had been advanced, Mitterrand was quick to use it for his own political benefit. Turquoise, he argued, was put in place to ‘stop a second genocide’ – one in which the RPF would presumably kill a million Hutus. In the written version of his speech at Biarritz on 8 November, Mitterrand talked about the ‘genocides’ that had happened in Rwanda. When journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry quizzed him on this, the president replied, ‘would you say that the genocide stopped after the Tutsi victory? I wonder.’21 Prunier reported Mitterrand saying to another journalist, ‘the genocide or the genocides? I don’t know what one should say.’22
Historically, denial theories have always been used to raise doubt and confusion and to justify horrific crimes – witness German defences of the Holocaust that claimed that the Jews were engaged in a war against them or that Allied bombing was itself a ‘holocaust’.23 More recently, in July 2005, during the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide of 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, the Serb government issued a statement deploring war crimes but equating the massacre of the unarmed civilians with the killing of Serbs during the Bosnian war. Ian Traynor, writing in the Guardian, felt ‘the aim was … to relativise and belittle a crime which judges in The Hague have classified as genocide.’24
France is still advancing this appalling ‘double genocide’ theory. In September 2003, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, who made great play to the international community of the French ‘non-interventionist’ stance over Iraq, referred to ‘the Rwandan genocides’ in a broadcast on Radio France Internationale. Nearly a decade after the horror of 1994, de Villepin, who at the time of the genocide had been working as a senior official at the Quai d’Orsay, was still rehearsing this appalling fabrication. Journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, who covered Operation Turquoise and had witnessed the genocide, heard the broadcast while stuck in a Moscow traffic jam. He described de Villepin’s expression as ‘terrible’, with his disgust pushing him to write a book, L’Inavouable (The Shame) about French complicity in the genocide.25
Visitors to churches in Rwanda that now stand as memorials to the thousands who were systematically murdered inside them can see the stark legacy of this lie. A bold, hand-written notice in blood red that hangs above the entrance to the church at Nyamata in which thousands were slaughtered declares ‘non aux revisionnistes, non aux negativists’. Anyone who would deny the genocide ever happened or ‘revise’ it to make it appear purely part of a civil war or ethnic clash is not welcome here. For the survivors, the claims that in some way they are to blame, that the killing was their fault, only adds to their suffering.
Paul Kagame has frequently complained to the UN about France allowing the ex-FAR and Interahamwe to set up new military camps in Goma, Bukavu and neighbouring areas of Zaire, without hindrance and in some cases with a great deal of help. According to UN ambassador Shaharyar Khan, Kagame reported to him on 15 August that his information showed that the militia and FAR had been systematically looting the former French SHZ and stealing vehicles in which to ferry the defeated troops over to Zaire. Reports surfaced in the media soon afterwards that French troops were continuing to arm and train some of the FAR, whose aim, according to Colonel Bagosora, was to return to Rwanda to ‘wage a war that will be long and full of dead people until the minority Tutsi are finished and completely out of the country’.26
A confidential report from an international aid agency put together in Zaire in October pointed to the French continuing to support their former FAR allies. The source in Goma wrote in the report of ‘rumours in existence about F[rance] supporting (training and rearming) former Rw[andan] troops … official source of information (UNAMIR) confirmed later that retraining of former Rw[andan] troops by F[rance] was a fact.’ The source alleged that such training was being carried out in the Zairian capital, Kinshasa.27
François Karera, former prefect of greater Kigali and alleged genocidaire, told US journalists, ‘We do not have any fear regarding lack of arms, as we have countries … prepared to support us financially and with weapons.’28 By mid-November, aid agency MSF had pulled out of the Zairian refugee camps, citing lack of security and Interahamwe leaders being in control of the camps as the reason. The head of MSF-France told a Japanese newspaper, ‘The leaders of the refugees are those who carried out the massacres and they are trying to recapture power.’
It was estimated that the ex-FAR, Habyarimana’s former army, now had up to 50,000 soldiers in a dozen refugee camps, from where it was already launching murderous raids into border villages in Rwanda. A United Nations report suggested that the Bukavu camps alone held around 10,000 ex-FAR and militia – around a third of the former Rwandan army.29 British journalist Christian Jennings tracked down two architects of the genocide, MRND chief Joseph Nzirorera and Matthias Ngirumpatse,30 ensconced in a large house outside Goma, in August 1994. Nzirorera insisted that even if he were tried and condemned to death, his party would return to Rwanda to kill more Tutsis. At the end of the interview he reached over and asked the British producer, who was with Jennings, if she would care to dine with him when next in Paris.31 An investigation by Human Rights Watch detailed the way the FAR had been re-equipped for a renewal of war. According to the investigation, they
continued to receive weapons inside the French-controlled zone via Goma airport … it is unlikely that the French military authorities present in the zone, who conducted regular patrols at the border post between Goma and Gisenyi, and had a continuous presence at Goma airport, were not aware of weapons entering the safe zone. Yet the French authorities neither made an attempt to interdict these shipments nor report them to the Committee set up by the Security Council under Resolution 918.32
The report criticized the fact that weapons confiscated from the Rwandan troops fleeing into Zaire were later given to Mobutu’s authorities. Since France knew that Zaire supported the interim government and its troops, it was ‘hardly appropriate’ to give the arms to these allies of the FAR. The French even left a weapons cache behind for the militia in the Rwandan town of Kamembe in the former SHZ. According to the Human Rights Watch researcher who saw the arms dump, it contained more than 50 assault rifles and several machine guns. Africa Confidential confirmed that Agathe Habyarimana, still residing in her luxury Paris house, accompanied Zairian leader Mobutu on a trip to China, where it alleged she bought arms for Bagosora’s reinvasion of Rwanda.
The Human Rights Watch reported the French military using their helicopters to move Bagosora, militia leader Jean-Baptiste Gatete and ‘crack troops of the ex-FAR and militias out of Goma to unidentified destinations on a series of flights between July and September 1994’.33 Allegations were made that Hutu militants continued to receive training at a French military facility in neighbouring Central African Republic. On at least one occasion members of Hutu militias from
both Rwanda and Burundi travelled on an Air Cameroon flight from Nairobi to Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, via Douala, Cameroon, between October 16 and 18 1994, to receive training from French forces there. The Burundian government, which learned of this independently, requested from the French government as to what kind of ‘education’ such Hutu militants were receiving.34
However involved the French were ‘unofficially’ with rearming and training the FAR, the failure to look to stabilizing a region rather than helping increase tension showed a lack of understanding and concern for the future of the civilians caught up in the strife – the very people its highly trumpeted ‘humanitarian’ operations had boasted they were there to help. There was, it seemed, little attempt to hide the brazen nature of the continued French support.
Colonel Munyakasi [head of the ex-FAR in the Chimanga camp in south Kivu on the Rwandan border] has bragged of French military offers to help train his men. There is no firm evidence of direct French involvement, or of illicit French weapons shipments of the kind that breached the UN arms embargo towards the end of the [civil] war. But contacts are maintained, and French military attachés have flown to Goma and Bukavu from France and Kinshasa in recent weeks.35
The instability that such an organized and well-armed group caused in an already volatile region became apparent in the coming decade. With the Mobutu regime in free fall and the ageing, infirm dictator confined to his grandiose mansion in the jungle around Gbadolite, his poorly paid and ill-disciplined Zairian army took what rich pickings it could from exploiting the Rwandan situation. Kivu, the area where most refugee camps were embedded, became a launch pad for violent cross-border raids into Rwanda by the ex-FAR and Interahamwe, who also took the opportunity to attack Tutsis who had settled in the Zairian border region.
In its 2000 report, the OAU, clearly held French policy responsible for destabilizing the region.
The consequences of French policy can hardly be overestimated. The escape of genocidaire leaders into Zaire led, almost inevitably, to a new, more complex stage in the Rwandan tragedy, expanding it into a conflict that soon engulfed all of central Africa. That the entire Great Lakes Region would suffer destabilization was both tragic and, to a significant extent, foreseeable. Like the genocide itself, the ‘convergent catastrophes’ that followed suffered from no lack of early warnings. What makes these developments doubly depressing is that each led logically, almost inexorably, to the next. What was lacking, once again, was the international will to take any of the steps needed to interrupt the sequence. Almost every major disaster after the genocide was a result of the failure to deal appropriately with the events that preceded it, and what was appropriate was evident enough each step of the way.36
For survivors of the genocide, any attempt to come to terms with the emotional and physical trauma of the events of 1994 and with the loss of their families, homes and livestock rested in seeing the perpetrators brought to justice. Within a year of the genocide more than 100,000 alleged killers were being held in prisons across Rwanda, though the justice system was too overwhelmed to cope with investigating the crimes and putting the accused on trial.
To placate its conscience as much as to bring justice, the West set up a court in Arusha, Tanzania to try leaders of the genocide – those it held responsible for planning, financing and organizing the killing. The ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal Rwanda) was established in November 1994 and the first trial began in January 1997. For the survivors, the hope was that the world community, having turned its back on the actual genocide, would now at least do its duty by financing and helping to organize a court to bring those responsible to justice. It is ironic that the court should be located in the same town as the peace talks and agreement meant to end the ethnic and political tension and bring unity to Rwanda had been held.
According to the ICTR’s own public relations statement, ‘The purpose … was to contribute to the process of national reconciliation in Rwanda and to the maintenance of peace in the region, replacing an existing culture of impunity with one of accountability.’ The court’s remit was to ‘prosecute persons responsible for genocide and other serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of Rwanda between 1 January 1994 and 31 December 1994’. The dates are important because, after pressure from France, all actions before 1994 were deemed outside the court’s mandate. No account of Operation Noroît, French complicity with the Habyarimana regime or other embarrassing findings would be forthcoming. The genocidal massacres at Kibilira in October 1990, Bagogwe in 1990/1 and Bugesera in 1992 would be ignored. France did not want its military put on the witness stand to explain what had taken place while it was in Rwanda on a non-UN mandated mission supporting a government killing its own people. As it began its proceedings in 1997, the president of Human Rights Watch, Ken Roth, attacked ‘the total lack of enthusiasm by France for the work of the ICTR’.
For the small insignificant town of Arusha, the ICTR has become a milch cow – for taxi drivers, bar and restaurant owners, food sellers and even the shabby prostitutes who sidle up to wealthy white UN workers money is abundant. In 2002/3 the UN General Assembly gave the ICTR a budget of $177,739,400, much of which went in wages to its 887 staff. It is authorized to recruit up to 949 people.
Many of the accused have French or French Canadian lawyers. Though French-speaking African lawyers were available, most opted for highly-paid barristers based in Paris and Montreal; 16 of the 49 suspects the ICTR held in May 2003 had French lawyers and 17 had French Canadian ones. The snail’s pace of the proceedings makes for dire viewing. Emotionally traumatized witnesses are flown in from Rwanda to give evidence. Women survivors who were raped and now suffer from HIV and AIDS are then distraught to find that some of the accused, also HIV positive, are on expensive anti-retroviral drugs courtesy of the UN. The women were told that the UN could not afford to provide anti-retrovirals to the victims but nor could the impoverished Kigali regime afford the cost. For the survivors it amounted to a second failure of the UN – first it had ignored their pleas to save them during the genocide in 1994; now they were refused drugs to keep them alive while the rapists and those who ordered the crime are given the life-saving treatments.
Individuals suffering from hangovers are holding their heads at the well-staffed ICTR media centre. It has been another heavy night of partying following the departure of one of their number back to Europe. Today is Friday and by 12 noon what little ‘action’ there has been that morning to seek justice for the genocide survivors has been abandoned for the weekend. No cases are currently being heard – all have, yet again, been suspended to hear legal arguments.
I sit patiently waiting for an answer from the highly-paid ICTR spokesman, Roland Amoussouga. It is rather like waiting for a trial verdict because it seems to take years and when it finally comes it is often less than satisfactory. After four days of waiting, I finally cornered Amoussouga outside his office, but my questions about French involvement with the Habyarimana or interim governments and the genocide are none too subtly rebuffed. ‘I refuse to give any information about French complicity with the accused. I have no comment to make to you, no comment at all. I say it again, no comment – and I advise everyone else in this building to give you the same answer.’37 I had clearly hit a sensitive nerve. However, Amoussouga’s reaction made perfect political sense, leaving aside the fact that his highly paid job was allegedly to give information to waiting journalists and researchers rather than to dismiss them from his esteemed presence with a flea in their ear. Other independent journalists, and one trial prosecution lawyer, asserted that international politics had direct links to the court and its actions. France, like other Security Council members, was a key financial backer of the court and anything that might implicate a donor nation was taboo. Incredible as it seemed, France received no mention during the trials that had taken place. Documents sent to the ITCR from France, gathered during Operation Turquoise, had entire paragraphs blanked out with black ink.38 A US prosecutor commented on the strain such international courts are under given the diplomatic and financial pressures they feel from outside donor nations.
The court also seems to have adopted the unfortunate habit of making some of its key staff ‘unwell’. In May 2004 Judge Andresia Vaz from Senegal became the second judge to withdraw from a trial since the start of that year. Judge Asoka de Zoysa Gunawardana from Sri Lanka had resigned due to ‘ill health’, while judge George Lloyd Williams from St Kitts had pulled out citing personal reasons. The leakage of such top tribunal lawyers alarmed Rwanda, which pointed the finger at pressure on them from non-African countries – one of which was alleged to be France. Rwanda’s representative at the ICTR, Aloys Mutabingwa, said: ‘We are aware that the Tribunal is caught in a web of political crisis, but that should not be the issue.’ After hinting that France was one of the sources of the said pressure, he added that such action was ‘undermining the due process of the court’.39
On 22 October 2004 Bagosora’s defence lawyers asked the ICTR for the French authorities’ permission to meet former ambassador Marlaud and Colonel Jean-Jacques Maurin. Bagosora, accused of masterminding the genocide, obviously believed that these two Frenchmen could assist his defence. Maurin had been appointed as adviser to Habyarimana and the Rwandan military during Operation Noroît in April 1992, helping to advise and liaise at daily meetings with his Rwandan military counterparts. Both Maurin and Marlaud had been present at the French embassy in Kigali on 7 April, the day after Habyarimana’s death, where, according to Maurin, they tried to persuade Bagosora to ‘take control of the situation’. This was despite the fact he was ‘already in control of the violence’.40 Bagosora’s French defence lawyer, Raphael Constant, told the press in January 2005 that he was delighted with the Paris government’s cooperation towards his client and that he hoped to arrange a meeting between Maurin, Marlaud and Bagosora. On 1 December 2006 Grégoire de Saint-Quentin gave testimony in a closed session by video link from the Hague, with France citing security fears should he travel to the ICTR. In addition, after months of wrangling between the ICTR, the defence teams and the French ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs, it was agreed de Saint-Quentin would only have to answer those questions that did not impinge on national security, that he could testify under a pseudonym, and that his answers would not be disclosed to parties other than those who were part of the trial. By contrast, Canadian, Belgian and military from other nationalities serving under the United Nations have repeatedly testified in trials at the ICTR, without any limits imposed on them. In mid January 2007 de Saint-Quentin was followed by generals Lafourcade, Patrice Sartre and Jacques Rosier, testifying on behalf of former FAR general Gratien Kabiligi. Colonel Jean-Jacques Maurin however failed to appear after defence lawyer Constant rejected the elaborate measures France had agreed with the ICTR to ‘protect’ the witness. Were these elaborate measures put in place to protect ‘French security’, or to shield the officers from some highly awkward questions about their role and that of France?41
In March 2003 France became the first Western country to sign an agreement with the ICTR to provide prison accommodation for those found guilty. Several countries have elected to allow the prisoners to serve time in their prisons, including Benin, Swaziland, Mali and Rwanda. ICTR registrar Adama Dieng praised the French, commenting that France, which had ‘previously supported the Tribunal in judicial and technical fields, was again setting an example to other member states by being the first European country to sign such an agreement’. In December 2012 there was renewed controversy when allegations were made that convicted genocidaire prisoners at the UN detention facilities in Bamako, Mali were taking advantage of the lax and corrupted prison regime. Among the charges made were prisoners being able to walk in and out of the facilities at will, running lucrative businesses from inside their cells and using ‘unauthorized helpers’ come in to assist with their needs. Among those serving sentences in Mali are Theoneste Bagosora, Clement Kayishema, former prime minister Jean Kambanda, Interahamwe leader Omar Serushago, and the former mayor of Taba, Jean-Paul Akayesu. The UN promised an urgent inquiry into such a serious breach of its mandate but was unable to comment when approached in April 2013 as to the truth of the allegations or measures to stop the flagrant abuses. Rwanda itself directly approached the Malian government to put a stop to this latest ICTR breech in March 2013, with the foreign affairs minister Tieman Coulibaly promising to ‘get them back in prison where they must stay.’42
For all its obvious flaws, the ICTR has achieved some important results in its decade of existence. It has, for the first time, defined the crime of genocide, as used in the 1948 Genocide Convention, and that of rape as a method of genocide. The trial of Jean Kambanda, the Interim government Prime Minister of Rwanda, marked the first time a head of state has pleaded guilty to genocide, and has been punished for it. The ICTR has faced mounting difficulties in the complexity of bringing witnesses, many suffering from acute trauma and illness, from Rwanda to testify, and to provide witness protection and security given the sensitivity many have in facing their former attackers. Other difficulties that have been overcome successfully include translation of the proceedings into many languages and investigation of crimes that took place several years previously. Not least of the ICTR’s achievements has been making publicly available to researchers and legal experts the immense paper archive and important evidence that has come out of the trials.
The ICTR’s final trial judgement was heard in December 2012 with the sentencing of former Minister of Planning Augustin Ngirabatware to 35 years. In the 18 years of its existence it had indicted 93 people, of whom 83 were arrested and 75 prosecuted to a formal judgement. A total of 65 were found guilty with nine fugitives still at large including suspected genocide financier Felicen Kabuga, former commander of the presidential guard Protais Mpiranya, and former Defence Minister Augustin Bizimana. On 1 July 2012 a new Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT) came into force with a four-year mandate. It is charged with taking over some of the ICTR’s functions, notably victim and witness protection, supervising the implementation of sentences, assisting states investigating Rwandan genocide suspects on their territory, and managing the Tribunal’s archives. The ICTR itself must finish its remaining appeals cases by the end of 2014.
In early April 1994 many of those who had carefully planned the genocide during the preceding months took the opportunity to flee the scene of their crime. It was one thing to decide on the logistics for the ‘final solution’ to the Tutsi problem; it was quite another to be caught with blood on their hands. With chaos descending on Kigali from 7 April, many ringleaders used their political connections to get airlifted to safety and to a comfortable life in France. Some chose to remain in Paris after 1994; others took off to equally compliant or uninterested Western and francophone African countries to enjoy a contented retirement there.
Agathe, after arriving to her warm welcome in Paris, and a stay during summer 1994 at a family-owned apartment, moved to Libreville in Gabon, finding time to fly in and out of Kenya to meet with former members of the government plotting an armed return to re-take Rwanda for the Hutu power clique. With her family mostly settled in France and Canada, Agathe returned to Paris in late 1998 using a false passport, only officially declaring her presence to the authorities in 2003. In July 2004 she officially applied for asylum. Given numerous highly placed connections with the presidencies of Mitterrand and then Chirac she has been able to continue to work behind the scenes with opponents of the new government in Kigali.
In December 1998 she broke a self-imposed silence, telling the French paper Libération that all allegations against her were ‘outrageous’ and alleged that those who had killed her husband wanted to ‘tarnish me or drive me mad.’ She denied she was a controlling influence in Rwanda pre genocide and went as far as to say she would travel to the ICTR to answer any charges against her.
Despite this bravado, for the past decade she and her attorney Philippe Meilhac have been fighting a constant battle in the courts to get official permission to remain in France and to challenge any attempts to get her extradited to Rwanda where an arrest warrant is active. On 4 January 2007 the French Office of Protection for Refugees and the Stateless (OFPRA) refused her refugee status, a decision later upheld by the Commission of Appeals for Refugees on 15 February 2007.43
In their judgement, the commission decided that the Akazu; a ‘hard core’ circle that had held the real power in Rwanda since 1973, was composed of ‘Mme Agathe KANZIGA, widow HABYARIMANA, of her brother Protais ZIGIRANYIRAZO, of her first cousin Séraphin RWABUKUMBA and her cousin Colonel Elie SAGATWA…. that the declarations of Mme Agathe KANZIGA, widow HABYARIMANA relative to her occupations as First Lady between 1973 and 1994 are not credible, are devoid of details and imbued with improbabilities, and should be viewed as expressing her desire to conceal the activities that she in fact indulged in during the period of preparation, planning, and execution of the genocide… her denial of the existence of massacres perpetrated by Hutu extremists on the Tutsi population as well as her denial of all ethnic tension in Rwanda before October 1990 need to be interpreted as the desire to hide her real awareness of the situation in her country; that she was at the heart of the genocidal regime responsible for the preparation and execution of the genocide that occurred in Rwanda during the year 1994; that she cannot therefore validly deny her support for the most extremist Hutu ideas, her direct links with those responsible for the genocide and her real influence on political life in Rwanda; that furthermore, at no time and even in her declarations before the Commission, has she distanced herself from the actions carried out by the government of President HABYARIMANA, nor of those carried out at the instigation of the caretaker government; that her explanations in her different written statements and oral declarations to the Commission, according to which the innumerable analyses on the situation in Rwanda during the 1990s to the present day and the accusations made against her are alleged to be a manoeuvre on the part of the Rwandan government currently in power so as to discredit her are devoid of all plausibility and cannot be considered sincere.’
The damning verdict was reiterated in a further verdict by the Council of State on 16 October 200944 that decided there could be serious reason to suppose she was ‘an instigator or accomplice in the crime of genocide.’ Rwanda followed this judgement with issuing an international arrest warrant in October 2009, and following a visit by President Sarkozy to Rwanda in 2010 Agathe was briefly arrested on 2 March 2010. However, a French court then refused an extradition request citing fears that she would not get a fair trial in Rwanda.
Madame Habyarimana, despite a civil case issued against her by the Collectif des Parties Civiles pour le Rwanda – Collective of Civil Plaintiffs for Rwanda (CPCR), has continued to live with her son Bernard in Courcouronnes, a quiet, expensive suburb of Paris. The politics of French justice have meant she is effectively protected from ever having to answer the most serious charges against her, despite damning verdicts by the asylum boards.
Catholic priest Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, former head of the Sainte Famille church in Kigali, is another alleged genocidaire now residing in France. During the genocide thousands of Tutsi and Hutu civilians fleeing the fighting and genocide happening around them sought refuge in his church. However, witnesses and survivors told African Rights investigators that Munyeshyaka collaborated openly with the militiamen who entered the church on numerous occasions to massacre Tutsis. He was said to have given the killers lists, pointed out Tutsi refugees to be murdered and forced a large number of Tutsi girls and women to sleep with him as a condition for being evacuated to the nearly Hotel des Mille Collines.
One witness, Brother Damescène, spoke of how Munyeshyaka, the militia chaplain, ‘was always with them [the militia] wearing a bulletproof vest and [carrying] a gun.45 On 17 June the priest had entered the church, pistol in hand, accompanied by the Interahamwe. More than 100 Tutsis were massacred while Munyeshyaka looked on with grim satisfaction. Another massacre followed on 19 June. Munyeshyaka told survivor Anastase Karayiga that he should now help him cover up what had happened.
Very early in the morning on 20th June, Fr Wenceslas, together with some gendarmes, forced the men who were staying at St Famille, including me, to take the bodies in St Famille courtyard, people killed the day before, and dispose of them in the garage of St Famille’s office of procurement. He didn’t want the foreign journalists who had come with UNAMIR for the evacuation to find the bodies scattered over the courtyard.46
Numerous witnesses also testified to the priest’s sexual abuse of young girls. One woman, Rose Rwanga, told investigators how her 16-year-old daughter Hyacinthe, who refused to sleep with the priest, was later singled out and killed. Rose later told the BBC that she strongly condemned Munyeshyaka. ‘I’m ready to go to any court anywhere to hear him say why he let my daughter be killed.’47
Munyeshyaka fled from Kigali for the French ‘safe zone’ before slipping across the border into Goma, from where he and 28 other Catholic clergy sent a letter to the Pope that spelled out their hatred of all things Tutsi.
Everyone knows, except those who do not wish to know or understand it, that the massacres which took place in Rwanda are the result of provocation and the harassment of the Rwandese people by the RPF. To speak of genocide and to insinuate that only Hutus killed Tutsis is to be ignorant [of the fact] that Hutus and Tutsis have been each other’s executioners. We dare even to confirm that the number of Hutu civilians killed by the army of the RPF exceeds by far the Tutsi victims of the ethnic troubles.48
It was the ‘double genocide’ myth rolled out again as justification. Mitterrand, Juppé and de Villepin are in good company on that matter. From Goma, Munyeshyaka was flown to France where he was given a visa and, under the protection of the White Fathers, a religious order with close links to the Habyarimana regime, was installed in the parish of Bourg-St-Andéol in the Ardèche department. The Vatican was prepared to make legal help available to the priest and in 1995 the French Catholic Church paid for his lawyers, with Monsignor Jean Bonfils, the bishop of Viviers, saying he would tolerate ‘no attacks on the priest’. Munyeshyaka’s defence to a journalist who interviewed him was that he had acted to help the refugees at St Famille. When asked then why he was hiding in France, he replied, ‘that is none of your business.’
The case against Munyeshyaka has been met with obfuscation, legal technicalities and interference. In 1996 the Nîmes appeals court ruled that France was not in a position to judge crimes committed abroad. When the case was sent back to the Paris Appeals Court in June 1999 it decided that the French justice system was indeed empowered to try him for crimes outside the country. However, having ordered that a rogatory commission travel to Rwanda and collect evidence, nothing happened. In 2004 the European court for Human Rights, acting in response to complaints from survivors, condemned the slowness of the French judicial system in bringing the priest before a court, saying it violated articles 6 and 13 of its charter. In 2007 the priest was arrested twice and released after the ICTR made it clear that it would apply for him to be transferred to Arusha to face trial there. In a deal with the court, that also included the former prefect of Gikongoro Laurent Bucyibaruta, France agreed that it would keep the two suspects, and on 20 February 2008 made a declaration that they would be tried in France.
Given no action was then taken to begin even the initial rogatory inquiries, the ICTR was left in a dilemma. Should it request the cases again, given that French ‘justice’ was clearly affected by political considerations? In fact ICTR prosecutor Hassan Jallow decided it was just too politically painful to risk offending France and no request was made before the trial mandate of the Arusha court ran out in 2012. The case has been a stark reminder of how politics affect justice, and impunity is the result.
Meanwhile the Church authorities moved Munyeshyaka to the pretty little Normandy town of Gisors in June 2001, though without parishioners knowing his background. Some reacted on finding out what he is accused of by staying away. Others have preferred not to delve too deeply and the church has initiated an immense public relations campaign to ‘rubbish’ claims of victims and survivors about what happened in 1994. The priest, who continues work in his parish, is again a subject of a civil action by the CPCR and in 2006 was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment by a court in Rwanda. The Catholic Church authorities in France though continue to stand behind him, and in recent years he has been made chaplain to schools, colleges and the Scout movement. Bishop Jacques David, formerly of Eveaux, while not discounting his protégé could be guilty of horrific crimes, argued it was up to justice to decide and Munyeshyaka’s name should not be ‘muddied’ until he is put on trial and found guilty.49
Yves Dupeux, the lawyer who represented the priest, also defended another fugitive from justice who had fled to France. Dr Sosthène Munyemana, the so-called ‘butcher of Tumba’, had a string of allegations from genocide survivors hanging over him. He fled to France just before the RPF took Butare, and settled in Talence. Witnesses claimed he killed with his own hands, stockpiled ammunition for the militia and compiled lists of Tutsis in Tumba to be killed while he was working with the Interahamwe to encourage and organize the genocide. One survivor said he saw Sosthène take a bayonet from the ‘trouser of a soldier next to him’ before driving it into the stomach of a Tutsi. When Operation Turquoise came, ‘he wore banana leaves [a symbol of belonging to the Interahamwe] … while parading with the militia’ to welcome the Gallic troops. ‘Sosthène waved a large French flag.’50
In France it was not just lawyers who hastened to defend the alleged killer. Journalist Claire Gabillat, writing in a medical journal, presented both Munyeshyaka and Munyemana, despite not having talked to any witnesses in Kigali or Tumba, as ‘martyrs’ who had tried to bring ‘peace’. The accusations against them were, she alleged, due to the RPF. As African Rights has pointed out, Ms Gabillat provided no evidence to support her allegations, and it is not the RPF but civilian survivors who are accusing them of their killing. ‘To dismiss their grief and their evidence as an RPF plot is inhuman and smacks of cheap politics.’51
Laurent Bucyibaruta, former prefect of Gikongoro, scene of some of the most devastating Tutsi killings, fled to France after the genocide to become a resident of the tranquil and scenic town of Bar-sur-Aube. An MRND loyalist, Bucyibaruta had, along with Deputy Damien Biniga, seen the Tutsi population in their region almost totally wiped out during the second quarter of 1994. While the latter wholeheartedly threw his energy into organizing the massacres, Bucyibaruta made no attempt to stop the killers in their ‘work’. According to the ICTR indictment the Prefect is held responsible for mass killings in the churches at Cyanika and Kaduha, the girls’ school in Kibeho and at Murambi Technical school. In late April 1994 he issued a message to the local population, after a meeting with interim government officials. His fear was that the killings were beginning to take on another dimension over and above the slaughter of Tutsis, and people were being killed ‘for their property or are betrayed and killed out of hatred’.52 He was, however, less concerned about the Tutsis’ fate than about the international community cutting off the interim government’s aid. Having fled to France, Bucyibaruta ‘retired’ to live in the pretty town of Saint-André les Vergers in the Champagne region, 100 miles south east of Paris. Arrested and released in 2000 by French authorities, he was, like Munyeshyaka, rearrested in July 2007 on an international arrest warrant issued by the ICTR. However he was also released and despite the case being officially transferred to France no action has yet been taken – or indeed shows any sign of being started. According to a senior source at the ICTR, the fact that Bucyibaruta worked alongside Operation Turquoise has blurred the case further with French military fears on what the former Prefect might reveal about the motivation and practical reality of the ‘humanitarian mission’ were he put on trial.
Genocide suspect Colonel Tharcisse Renzaho, prefect of Kigali, who carried out a census of the city’s Tutsi population before the killings began, was sentenced to life for crimes against humanity and genocide in July 2009. His family meanwhile enjoy residency in Verpillière, in the Isère alpine region of France. The CPCR have issued civil proceedings against 23 high profile genocide suspects enjoying justice-free living in France since 1994. ‘It’s a constant battle to achieve, in a way, the duty of the French justice system which has so totally failed resulting in not just impunity but also allowing revisionism and genocide denial to take root.’53
On 9 February 1995, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 978 urging ‘states to arrest and detain, in accordance with their national law and relevant standards of international law, pending prosecution by the International Tribunal for Rwanda or by the appropriate national authorities, persons found within their territory against whom there is sufficient evidence that they were responsible for acts within the jurisdiction of the International Tribunal for Rwanda’.54 France protested that this resolution was not obligatory and, in effect, it had no need to enforce it. Belgium, by contrast, has not only sent several suspected genocidaires to the ICTR who were arrested on its national territory, but has also tried and imprisoned those found guilty of atrocities during 1994. In 2001, in a case that raised international interest, Consolata Mukangango (Sister Gertrude) and Julienne Mukabutera (Sister Marie Kisito) who were members of a Benedictine convent in Sovu, Alphonse Higaniro who ran a match factory and Vincent Ntezimana, a professor at the National University of Rwanda in Butare were all found guilty of war crimes by a court in Brussels. Though Belgium did not have an extradition treaty with Rwanda at the time, it used universal jurisdiction to prosecute the case.
According to the Geneva conventions, to which France is a signatory, ‘each High Contracting Party shall be under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts.’ Geoffrey Robertson wrote:
‘Crimes against humanity will only be deterred when their would-be perpetrators – be they political leaders, field commanders or soldiers and policemen – are given pause by the prospect that they will henceforth have no hiding place: that legal nemesis may some day, somewhere, overtake them.’55 Just as thousands of Nazis fled to comfortable South American exile in the years after the Second World War, so genocidaires have relied on France to continue to support their comfortable post-1994 retirement.
Nyamata survivor Innocent Rwililiza, speaking five years after the genocide, had harsh words to say about Western justice and his constant fear that the lack of it could again trigger yet another mass killing.
One thing that surprises me today is that many of the genocide’s promoters have become everyday people again, whether they dispersed undisturbed, whether they stroll down streets in France, in Europe, in Kenya. They teach at university, preach in churches or give treatment in hospitals and, in the evening, they listen to music and supervise the children’s schooling. … If you ran into one in Paris, with his fashionable suit and his round glasses, you would say, ‘well, there’s a very civilized African’. You would not think: There is a sadist who stockpiled, then distributed two thousand machetes to peasants from his native hill. So because of this negligence, the killings can begin again, here or elsewhere.56
Four years after the genocide, France followed Belgium’s example by holding an inquiry into its role in Rwanda. From 3 March to 15 December 1998, the French parliament, the National Assembly, presided over by Paul Quilès, looked into the interventions of its army and politicians in the central African country between 1990 and 1994. Quilès had been Mitterrand’s minister of defence in 1985–86, which raised doubts about his ultimate objectivity in judging the actions of his former boss.
Pressure for such an inquiry had been building, especially from aid organizations with first-hand knowledge of what had happened in Rwanda. In early 1998 MSF, with human rights groups Action contre la faim and Ligue des droits de l’Homme, issued a statement calling for an inquiry into the French government’s role in the organization and implementation of the genocide between 1990 and 1994. MSF president Dr Philippe Biberson stated:
France’s African policy has been conducted without any form of democratic accountability for too long. The French government supported the Habyarimana regime to the bitter end, and failed to exert the necessary pressure when the genocide was launched, and has even continued to provide support after that time. It is high time the French government broke its traditional silence on its shameful role in the genocide.57
The Quilès inquiry had been in part a hasty attempt at political damage limitation. In January 1998 new and highly damaging articles were published in Le Figaro by the journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry.58 On 3 March, the day a group of leading French intellectuals published in Libération a demand for a public inquiry into the role of France, a fact finding mission was announced by Quiles, now chairman of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the French National Assembly. Members of the Foreign Relations Parliamentary Committee and the National Defence and Armed Forces Parliamentary Committee took part, hearing witnesses from 24 March to 9 July 1998 and visiting Rwanda for a meagre two-day period. The three volume final report was issued on 15 December 1998.
The Quilès inquiry heard evidence from 88 people – 20 politicians, 21 diplomats, 34 army personnel and 13 African experts. French newspapers and journals added to the highly-charged atmosphere by publishing documents testifying to French military involvement in training the Rwandan army, selling arms after the UN embargo and taking part in identity searches at roadblocks.
The inquiry aimed to resolve key questions about France’s involvement in Rwanda – its motivation, the extent of its military support, and its reaction to human rights abuses and information about both pre-1994 massacres and the genocide. Questions were also asked about how the closest ally of the Habyarimana and interim governments had failed to exert pressure to stop the appalling actions they carried out.
However, there were vital flaws in the inquiry. It interviewed only 88 witnesses despite four years of complicit involvement by all areas of the French government and military, while some officers from the special operations command refused to have their testimonies published and around 40 per cent of their statements were not included in the report.59 The inquiry spent much time on the plane crash that killed Habyarimana without reaching a verdict, while skimming over controversial areas like breaking the UN arms embargo, evacuating ‘secret employees’ from St Agathe’s orphanage and the role of Barril and the secret service in Rwanda from 1990 to 1994. Quilès explained that Barril, who did not testify, was not needed because the inquiry was made up of ‘parliamentarians, not judges and police’, and that Barril would instead give his evidence before Judge Bruguière who, in the very month the Quilès fact finding mission opened, took the opportunity to launch his own, more powerful judicial inquiry into the plane crash. It meant vital witnesses like Barril were allowed to be called before the judge to give evidence as his investigation took precedence over the National Assembly one, further weakening its mandate. Some critics have speculated it was far from coincidence, four years after the event, that these two investigations should be launched within three weeks of each other, and at a time the French media were actively beginning to pursue the truth of events in Rwanda.60 The government also failed to declassify important documents relating to Rwanda, thus leaving vital gaps in understanding the political motivation of Mitterrand’s government. Some witnesses gave their testimony in private session, and none were required to give their evidence on oath; needless to say, many used their witness box appearance more to justify their actions than hint at the truth.
The politicians who gave evidence to the inquiry were in no mood to give their doubters any leverage. Former Prime Minister Édouard Balladur gave a particularly barnstorming performance, telling his questioners that ‘France was the only one to have intervened to limit the horror. The others [countries] did nothing.’ The minister attacked the ‘violent, biased and often hateful campaign’ directed against the French government. Foreign Secretary Alain Juppé was equally forthright before the world’s media, which suddenly found an interest in the subject once a politician was seen to be in trouble.
Our diplomacy ended up giving a bad conscience to an international community capable only of expressing noble sentiments while doing nothing. So how can one explain that we are today investigating an action our country should be proud of? I can neither understand nor accept that the good intentions of our humanitarian intervention of that era, which saved tens of thousands of lives, are now being questioned.
Balladur again denied that Paris had ‘participated in military operations on the side of the Rwandan armed forces between 1993 and 1994’, though admitted that as far as arms deliveries made after the UN embargo were concerned, ‘despite my stated wishes, I was not disposed to have the necessary information’. In other words, such deliveries could well have happened, but he denied any knowledge of them.61
The eventual inquiry report concluded that the Rwandan president, anxious to maintain power at all costs, had sucked Mitterrand into a military conflict in Rwanda. The Rwandan dictator ‘took advantage of the invasion of October 1st [1990] to stop many Hutu and Tutsi opponents and to mobilize the “Hutu people” against the Hima–Tutsi threat’.62 Quilès decided that Mitterrand’s government did know about the massacres taking place in the country from 1990 to 1994, many of them carried out by the same presidential guard and FAR units its soldiers were training. It also uncovered the close involvement of Operation Noroît with the military command of the Rwandan army and in some field operations.
Yet, there was no analysis of the ‘unofficial’ war France launched and that included illicit gunrunning, frontline action, training Rwandan government forces and surveillance of the RPF; there had either been a catastrophic failure to gather information by the secret services, or the information was not shared or ignored. Instead, Quilès found that
France did not encourage the Rwandan genocide from April to July 1994 that saw close to 800,000 [2001 Rwandan government census estimated 937,000] Tutsis and moderate Hutus decimated. This genocide was committed against Rwandans by Rwandans even if the United Nations was unable to prevent the violence from escalating because, following the failure of the operations in Somalia, the United States did not want to consider an immediate increase in UN forces.
The blame, such as there was, was directed at Rwandans and the international community.
Quilès made some progress in attempting to establish the truth, even if it is blurred in the report’s final conclusion. It is stated that ‘France considered the Habyarimana regime a lesser evil’ – a curious statement that is not clarified. Given that the Rwandan government was known to be anti-democratic, to have harboured a network of known extremists and Hutu radicals and to have supported the massacres of thousands of its population and opposition politicians, it begs the question if this were the lesser evil what was the greater threat? Was the RPF really capable of being worse – or was its perceived Anglophone stance the real problem?
The error, then, was naivety and being too supportive of a friend, rather than a cynical disregard for human rights and the reality of massacres and genocide. The inquiry chose to believe each and every word from the politicians and military officers called, coming to the conclusion that there were ‘errors of judgement’ and a failure at times to adapt the actions to the situation. However, while France committed errors, it was ‘not at all implicated in the unleashing of the violence.’
When the report was published in mid-December 1998 critics attacked its conclusions as a ‘whitewash’. For one such critic, the real question to be asked was ‘how a democracy at peace like France, a rich country without any serious adversaries, became so deeply involved in a criminal policy that fills any conscience with revulsion. … The parliamentary fact-finding mission was hurriedly put together so as to wipe away the main aspects of France’s responsibility. Thus it is really a mission of disinformation.’63 Survie, a French pressure group seeking reform of Franco-African relations, was forthright in its criticisms of the National Assembly inquiry.64 Other questions it pointed out were not answered was why, after Foreign Secretary Juppé called the atrocity in Rwanda a ‘genocide’ in mid-May 1994, did the French government continue into June and even July to recognize the interim government carrying out the mass killing? It noted that the inquiry heard the evidence of only four Rwandans, three of whom were ex-Habyarimana ministers or ambassadors. While the Quilès inquiry marked a watershed moment in French politics, as it was the first time the deputies had taken it upon themselves to investigate a ‘reserved’ function of the President, usually off limits to scrutiny outside the Élysée, it failed to produce the detailed, analytical and independent report that was needed. That its mandate was for the years 1990-94 meant it did not consider the continuing assistance after that period by the French political and military establishment to destabilize the new Rwandan government and retrain and rearm its enemies in Zaire.
Less surprisingly, Rwandan President Paul Kagame alleged that Operation Turquoise was aimed at reorganizing the ex-Rwandan armed forces and Interahamwe militia. ‘When this could not be achieved in Rwanda, France proceeded to re-arm and re-train these forces in Bukavu and Goma in the then Zaire.’ Kagame accused the French government of complicity with the Habyarimana regime, citing a letter of support Mitterrand sent to the militia. He concluded that it was no surprise that the National Assembly inquiry had found no responsibility attached to France for its actions; it was, after all, the same key people who were investigating themselves.65