Chapter 3

Civil War and Peace Talks

It was a typically hot humid Rwandan day in April 1991, with temperatures hitting the mid thirties, that found Immaculée Cattier travelling in a minibus with a Canadian religious group, bumping its way along the potholed road outside the northern town of Ruhengeri. With the civil war going on all around her in this area of the country, Immaculée, like many Tutsis, was trying to escape the fighting and government reprisal killings of civilians. But the sweat on her brow inside the minibus was not just from the force of the sun; Immaculée was scared. Despite being in the van with her Canadian friends, she was well aware that if they were stopped, she could, with her identity card showing her ethnic group, be hauled off the vehicle and killed by Habyarimana’s soldiers.

Suddenly, to her horror, she felt the vehicle slow to a halt as it reached a queue in front of an army checkpoint.

The tension was unbearable. From a distance I saw armoured vehicles ready to attack. Their drivers were white men. My Canadian friends whispered: ‘the French’. … We saw the soldiers who were in charge, and militiamen holding the gates while patting their machetes. My old [Canadian] guardian looked at me in the mirror with eyes that urged me to keep calm.

My prayers ceased inside me, I already believed myself to be dead. We went forward one or two metres as a car in front pulled away. I realized that among the soldiers there were also some French who were also asking to see identity cards where it was recorded ‘Hutu, Tutsi, Twa’. The Tutsis were made to leave the car and the French soldiers handed them to the angry militiamen who hit them with machetes and threw them into a gully (a water canal) very close to the main tar-macadamed Ruhengeri– Kigali road. After curfew, a truck came from the town to load the bodies and take them to another place I don’t know.¹

In spite of the orders of the Brothers to pretend to be calm, I glanced in the mirror of our Hiace minibus to see what happened in other cars and I saw a Tutsi who was made to leave a car not far from ours and after his identity card had been inspected, a French soldier and another Rwandan officer handed him to the militiamen who began, in front of the cars, to hit him with machetes and other weapons like clubs before throwing him into the gully. (It was done quickly so they could get ready for the next person).

When I saw this I looked about the gully where I saw a few bodies which lay without making any noise (they died without a sound). I closed my eyes, our motor ran without stopping for a long time and I understood that we had authorization to leave without injury. … No one in our car commented on what had happened, just the head Brother who asked for a small prayer in our hearts for the people who had been killed.²

Despite pronouncements that Noroît would not interfere in internal matters, witnesses like Immaculée and photographic evidence show French soldiers directly assisted Rwandan army units in civilian areas. A Human Rights Watch investigation in 1992/3 ‘observed French soldiers manning checkpoints [just north of the capital Kigali] on the roads to Ruhengeri and Byumba. They were armed with 5.56 mm FAMAS automatic rifles, as well as Wasp 58 assault rocket launchers and other infantry support weapons. Like Rwandan army troops, French troops demanded identification from passing civilians.’³

Such identity cards, which carried the holder’s name, address and ethnic origin, were to become a vital component of the genocide. The cards were a legacy of colonial times. Belgium introduced them in 1933 and for the first time categorized the ethnic origin of the populace. Despite opposition, the cards were retained when Rwanda gained independence and by Habyarimana when he seized power in 1973.⁴ Despite diplomatic pressure from several foreign donor countries to change the cards, Habyarimana’s militia was already using them to identify Tutsi victims in massacres that took place in northwest Rwanda in 1993. French paratroopers from Operation Noroît working alongside their FAR and presidential guard colleagues at roadblocks also used the cards to ‘spot’ Tutsis. With all Tutsis seen as possible if not probable RPF members, the cards often spelt a death sentence to innocent civilians. It was as if they were walking down a street in 1930s Munich with a yellow star emblazoned on their coats.

Video footage taken during this early period of Operation Noroît shows smartly dressed French soldiers with automatic rifles by their sides and red berets atop their traditionally shaven heads surrounded by Rwandans at a roadblock. The Gallic soldiers have stopped a minibus and are taking their time to study identity cards. Other pictures show soldiers from Operation Noroît setting out from their barracks, each fully armed, including one carrying a missile launcher. One French soldier was quoted as saying: ‘It is well known that the Tutsi are the enemy.’⁵

Michel Campion, the owner of the Ibis Hotel in the southern town of Butare witnessed firsthand French Noroit troops in action at a roadblock. ‘One day, I gave a ride to a Tutsi student. On arriving at the bridge over the Nyabarongo River, he was checked by a French soldier who asked him for his identity card. When the soldier discovered that he was Tutsi, he told him: “Get out of the car and go sit with your brothers over there at the edge of the road.” There were approximately twelve boys and girls, apparently Tutsis, who had been detained by the French soldiers. I stepped in and told these soldiers: “Listen, really I do not understand your position; it is not for you to do that. The Rwandan gendarmes should carry out these checks. Where do you believe yourselves to be? Is this a French overseas territory?’ I said: ‘You are in an independent state and you come to screen citizens in their own country?’ I added: ‘I will not move from here, and this boy will not leave this vehicle. I asked them to call the officer in charge. They brought a second lieutenant who, after listening to my protest told me that was not my business. I answered him that it was my business because I had a passenger they wanted to get out of my car. In the end, the second lieutenant told me: “Listen, go on, just leave…!”⁶

Emmanuel Nshogozabahizi, a former member of the PSD party, who later joined the Interahamwe militia in 1993, reported a similar experience.

‘In 1992, I was in a minibus on the way from Kigali with my [Tutsi] cousin Mudenge Jean-Baptiste who worked with the Brewery at Kicukiro. On arriving at Mukamira [on the Ruhengeri-Gisenyi road in the north], towards 19h00, the French stopped the minibus and asked us for our identity cards. Noting that my cousin was Tutsi, they made him get off and detained him. I have not seen him ever since. Yet I had immediately started searching for him, and my membership to the Interahamwe enabled me to go anywhere, which means that if he had stayed alive, I would certainly have found him. I have never known his fate.’⁷

Not surprisingly, the French troops formed close bonds with their FAR counterparts with whom they trained, worked and socialized. A student studying history at Ruhengeri University from October 1991 to April 1994 related how French soldiers frequented local bars ‘where we could sit with them. They would tell us they were here because of the cooperation between the two governments. We often saw them with FAR troops, and the RPF were always seen as “the enemy”. But they were easy enough to chat and have a drink with.’⁸

According to this Rwandan witness, some of the French paratroopers expressed sympathy for the regime they were defending, the ‘underclass’ Hutus against the ‘aristocratic émigré’ Tutsi – the ‘Ugandan enemy’. This was an entirely understandable reaction from troops with little knowledge of the complexities of Rwandan history or politics. Less explicable are the views of a French army general who, according to Prunier, declared to Bruno Delaye, head of the French presidential Africa Cell, that it would be ‘an act of high treason’ for Paris to order his troops out of Rwanda.⁹ The intervention had already become, in the minds and imaginations of many top ranking French military a France plus Hutu government/people versus RPF/Uganda/Tutsi rationale. It made any withdrawal and objective decision-making at the Élysée and on the ground in Rwanda a far more difficult proposition.

A letter from the Rwandan foreign ministry to Ambassador Martres in Kigali dated 24 December 1991 confirmed that France was engaged in a ‘secret war’ by expressing ‘deep regret’ over an incident at the northern town of Gatuna. French observers in this area, on the Ugandan border, came under fire from their Rwandan army friends on 1 December after the Rwandan government forces mistook them for the RPF.¹⁰ It is hard to answer why French military observers were in such a forward position when they were meant to be defending their nationals and protecting Kigali airport unless it was understood that the French role was to provide significant frontline help to Habyarimana’s regime.

In fact, France was strengthening its military support for Habyarimana as well as its political resolve that, come what may, the dictator would come out on the winning side in the civil war. At the beginning of March 1992 Daniel Bernard, the director of the cabinet at the foreign office, wrote to his colleagues at the ministry of defence pointing out the weakness of the FAR. He concluded, ‘In this context, France doesn’t seem to have any other solution than to accentuate its support, in particular its military support, to the Rwandan government.’ Two months later, on 21 May, Paul Dijoud, director of African affairs at the foreign office, commented in an internal memo that, ‘for the balance of the region and in the perspective of the negotiations, it is imperative that Rwanda is not in a situation of military weakness.’¹¹

The RPF’s continued probing attacks culminated in another offensive by its forces on 6 June 1992 at Byumba, about two hours north of Kigali. To make matters worse for the government in the capital, ill-trained and despondent FAR troops in the area chose this moment to mutiny, leading to a spree of looting and killing, with the predictable result that 150 more French troops were rushed to the area on 10 June. Again, the all-encompassing explanation from Paris was that its response was ‘to prevent any violence against the foreign community’. An uneasy ceasefire, brokered at Arusha in Tanzania on 12 July came 24 hours before an RPF radio broadcast alleged that French soldiers were in combat next to their FAR allies, and that they were helping the government, especially in giving heavy artillery support.

By 1992 Rwanda was staring down a barrel and not just because of the civil war. The economy, barely adequate for peacetime needs, could not afford the millions of dollars being spent on heavy armaments and an army grown to eight times its 1990 strength. Foreign debt had more than doubled from $452.2 in 1986 to nearly a billion dollars in 1993, while the value of the Rwandan franc plummeted to half its 1987 level.¹²

Habyarimana had been expecting a form of power-sharing government. After La Baule, he loyally told Mitterrand that the ‘democracy for French help’ campaign would have his support. The question was how much power would be shared and with whom. Habyarimana saw new political parties as mere decoration – ‘the whole point of the exercise being to please the French’¹³ – while his MRND party carried on its solitary role of running the country. To give the correct public relations feel to anxious Western aid backers, in July 1991 an extra ‘D’ was added to the MRND’s name, making it the ‘Revolutionary National Movement for Development (and Democracy)’. It may have meant nothing to his people, but that ‘D’ for democracy pleased his French backers and European aid donors.

In the same vein of spin and public relations in June 1991 the president had announced a new multiparty system to govern Rwanda. The opposition, faced with the possibility for the first time since independence of a share of power and influence, quickly dissolved into infighting. The formation of the Hutu extremist party, the CDR (Coalition pour la Défense de la République), in March 1992 only added to underlying strains as its sole policy was to exploit ethnic tension.

Early attempts to form a transitional government showed a gulf between expectation and reality. A new cabinet appointed on 30 December 1991 included no members from any party other than Habyarimana’s MRND; the president did not quite grasp that ‘multi-party’ government meant that more than one group should be involved. The result was mass demonstrations in Kigali by the opposition parties followed by a government clampdown and the first wave of political beatings and attacks on the demonstrators by Interahamwe militia.

While these half-hearted efforts to establish a ‘multiparty system’ were underway in Rwanda, talks started in Paris to resolve the civil war. Paul Kagame, now effective head of the RPF, arrived in the French capital on 17 September 1991 to meet Jean-Christophe Mitterrand. Interpreters were in place because the anglophone Kagame spoke no French, a source of some irritation to his hosts. Two months later Habyarimana arrived for private discussions with the French president at a Franco-African summit held at Chaillot. The result was that a French observation mission, composed of a diplomat and two soldiers, was sent to monitor RPF incursions into Rwanda from Uganda in violation of the current ceasefire. Predictably, the French chose not to send a mission to investigate their own gunrunning, which saw planes loaded with arms arriving in Kigali, also in breach of the truce.

Kagame flew back to Paris for a meeting with Paul Dijoud, director of African affairs at the foreign office, in mid-January 1992. It was clearly a stormy affair. The French politician told Kagame, ‘If you do not stop the war, if you seize the country, you will not see your brothers and your family again, because they will all have been massacred.’ Dijoud, an old-style Gaullist conservative, later denied in the press that he had any memory of this visit by Kagame, though in 2005 his memory ‘returned’ and he admitted the meeting took place even that he said such words, though he denied they were any kind of ‘prophecy’.¹⁴

In 1991 and 1992 France had hosted a number of meetings in Paris with Kagame and Habyarimana aimed at resolving the conflict, while at the same time continuing to arm, train and supply the Rwandan army. This dual policy was symptomatic of a deep division in French strategy. Hardliners in the army, Élysée and Ministry of Cooperation made it clear they would stand by Habyarimana, and that talks with the RPF were a final resort, best avoided. Yet, some diplomats at the foreign office had a realistic ‘soft’ policy that accepted the need for a negotiated peace. However, by 1993 there had been three years of close wartime collaboration between the Rwandan and French armies and General Jean-Pierre Huchon firmly resisted any attempt to abandon their Rwandan allies now.

Huchon, who was now head of the military mission of cooperation in Paris, had been instrumental in pushing for greater French military involvement and undermining ‘soft track’ diplomacy. Accordingly, there was unsurprisingly little contact between Paris and its embassy in Kigali, which received ‘little direction or instruction’.¹⁵ Consequently, those favouring diplomacy were often isolated and unable to achieve their objectives. Only two French officials supported the Arusha peace process and were prepared to oppose Huchon’s view, ‘somebody in Tanzania and someone here in Paris at the Ministry of Cooperation’.¹⁶

However, according to analyst François-Xavier Verschave, Huchon’s rigid pro-Habyarimana stance reflected Mitterrand’s outlook. After all, when the president appointed the general he knew his views on Africa and fully backed his policies.¹⁷ Mitterrand’s personal pride was at stake, for other francophone nation heads were anxious to see if his help to the Rwandan government was unconditional. Habyarimana continued to flatter the French president and to reinforce the view that he was highly esteemed in Rwanda. The Hutu extremist journal Kangura carried a full-page photograph of Mitterrand in its December 1990 issue with the subtitle ‘A true friend of Rwanda’, along with the adage in Kinyarwanda, ‘It is in hard times you know your real friends.’¹⁸ In the same edition of this extremist paper were the appalling ‘Hutu Ten Commandments’ that urged racial purity by avoiding all contact with Tutsi and that effectively paved the way for their disappearance from Rwandan society. It was akin to having a full-page picture in a Nazi propaganda paper of the 1930s in which cartoons and stories vilified the Jews as vermin. Bizarrely, Mitterrand seems to have been flattered by the Kangura piece, which was just the reaction its editorial team of Hutu extremists wanted. The best way to the French president’s heart, such as it was, seemed to be to appeal to his vanity. This was repeated later when Hutu extremists demonstrated in Kigali in October 1992 against the ongoing peace talks at Arusha during which the mob chanted, ‘Thank you President Mitterrand, thank you French people.’¹⁹ In fact, had the ‘French people’ known the truth about their president’s policy in Rwanda and the ongoing massacres, they would have been horrified.

In this swamp of personal and military pride and the continuing fear of Anglo-Saxon intervention, it was US diplomacy that pushed the Élysée into action. When US deputy assistant secretary Irvin Hicks arranged for the RPF and Rwandan government to have talks in Harare in July 1992, alarm bells immediately rang in Paris over the audacity of the USA trying to hijack France’s attempts to bring order to its own pré-carré (backyard). Nothing was more guaranteed to produce a swift reaction in Paris than the thought that the Americans may be about to tread on their own neocolonial toes.

In July 1992, after two years of inconclusive conflict, the two sides in the Rwandan civil war finally sat down in an effort to seek a diplomatic solution. The small dusty Tanzanian town of Arusha where the discussions took place became synonymous with Rwandan hopes and nightmares. Today it is the setting for the ICTR, the UN war crimes tribunal for Rwanda charged with finding justice after the genocide. Back in the summer of 1992 it was the scene of hard diplomatic negotiations.

The talks were formally opened on 12 July 1992, with the Tanzanians acting as hosts and coordinators while the head of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), Secretary-General Salim Salim, played a prominent part in trying to mediate between the two sides. The difficulty was that the situation in Rwanda was becoming more politically pressured and dangerous, thus forcing the main actors into talks that were inappropriate. By summer 1992 President Habyarimana was under immense strain. With a new RPF strike expected at any moment, he knew he had to keep French troops in Rwanda, for without them he would face military defeat in weeks, if not days. He was also under sustained attack from the Akazu, the group of Hutu militants his wife Agathe led that would have no truck with Arusha. To make matters worse, Hutu moderates, now part of the multi-party government, were increasingly talking about gaining a greater share of power.

Habyarimana bowed to international pressure and, on 18 August 1992, Rwanda signed a first Arusha protocol on the rule of law, though the following day the president declared he refused to ‘lead our country into an adventure it would not like’.²⁰ The next stage of the talks saw an agreement reached on creating a broad-based transitional government, though for part of the negotiations the Rwandan government was represented by its foreign minister Boniface Ngulinzira who, it turned out, was acting without Habyarimana’s support. A second protocol was signed on 31 October agreeing to an eventual parliamentary system and downsizing the president’s power to that of a ceremonial head. While the French were not officially represented at the protocol talks, Jean-Christophe Mitterrand’s close friend Jeanny Lorgeoux took part in the negotiations as part of the delegation from the Habyarimana government.

The strategy at Arusha was highly complex, dealing as it had to with ending a civil war and reintegrating Tutsi refugees, soldiers and perceived political ‘enemies of the regime’ into Rwandan society. In particular, the two armies now intent on killing each other would have to be made into one ‘national’ army, and RPF leaders like Kagame accepted into a new transitional government, which would also give far more power to Hutu critics of Habyarimana and his MRND(D) party.

That Habyarimana was only taking part in the Arusha talks under duress presented a major difficulty. Without RPF forces effectively holding a trigger to his head he would not have been forced into the political corner he perceived Arusha to be. And, once cornered, he and the Hutu militants were at their most dangerous, for desperate times inevitably call for desperate measures. By mid-1992 extremist Hutu radio and newspapers were blurring in the public mind the precise identities of the regime’s ‘enemies’. The RPF and ‘Tutsis’ became inter-changeable terms for those who threatened the state. The Hutu population was deliberately fed the lie that if the RPF won, the country would return to a pre-1960 period of Tutsi domination. The extremist CDR party led by Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza called for Arusha to be abandoned on the grounds that ‘an enemy is an enemy. Anyone who cooperates with the enemy is a traitor to Rwanda.’²¹ The French, having close ties with these militants and their leader, were in favour of the CDR being part of the democratic process, though in the event it was excluded after pressure from the RPF.

Two weeks after the first Arusha protocol, CDR leader Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza received a letter of thanks from the Élysée signed by Bruno Delaye, Jean-Christophe’s replacement as head of the Africa Cell. The letter, dated 1 September 1992, came because Barayagwiza’s extremists had produced a petition in favour of French intervention.²² Delaye later said the letter and its compliments ‘surprised’ him, as if the CDR and its leader’s poisonous agenda were not fully understood. If this was so, French observers in Rwanda must have been the only people to misunderstand the simple message that the extremists preached daily.

While politicians in Paris privately backed the regime, the French military made clear its abhorrence of any ‘sell out’ of its Rwandan army ally. A French general confided to Gérard Prunier on 10 October that to abandon Habyarimana would be an act of ‘high treason’. Three days later General Quesnot arrived in Rwanda with a French delegation, visiting the northern front and meeting Habyarimana, the head of the Rwandan army and the Rwandan minister of defence.

At the end of 1992 and in 1993 Mitterrand and his government were focusing on events in a wider arena, on the Balkans, on the unfolding conflict in Somalia, on the effects of the Iran–Iraq war and on internal politics, which had seen the French president’s popularity wane as political controversy and record low poll ratings led one of his prime ministers, Edith Cresson, to resign in April 1992 after a mere nine ineffectual months in office; her replacement, Pierre Bérégovoy, shot himself less than a year later. Such political flux in France allowed hardliners in the military and Élysée to push their own agendas. Martres, Huchon, Marcel Debarge, the minister of cooperation and Bruno Delaye, the shamed Jean-Christophe Mitterrand’s replacement at the Africa Cell, all pressed for peace to be on Habyarimana’s terms.

On 17 February 1993 Le Monde reported Debarge as saying, ‘France has supported the Arusha negotiations which have led to an agreement between the government and the opposition to create a transition cabinet. … In any case, the World Bank and the other donors keep their representatives in Kigali only because of our military presence which – need I remind you – is there only to protect our citizens.’ Debarge did not say that behind the scenes the French military was keeping the RPF at bay and that his own president and military top brass were working towards keeping Habyarimana in power, whatever Arusha might bring. In an ideal world the Rwandan dictator would have no need for peace talks and political compromise at Arusha, and the French must have hoped, as Jean-Christophe Mitterrand originally predicted, that with Gallic military help, the RPF would have been crushed before now. The reality was that the French military presence had alone kept Habyarimana from defeat and exile, and that Arusha was now the best hope of keeping him and his Hutu hardliners in power – even if it meant some compromises.

On 9 January 1993 the two sides at Arusha agreed on the composition of a new national transitional assembly to run the country until new elections were held. In Kigali the news was greeted by CDR- and government-controlled Hutu extremist rioters taking to the streets to demonstrate against the ‘sell-out’ at Arusha. The violence lasted six days, with around 300 fatalities after murderous thugs had rampaged through the streets, torturing and killing as they went. The talks at Arusha collapsed and further negotiations were suspended.²³

The ceasefire that had accompanied the Arusha talks was broken on 8 February 1993 as the RPF launched a well-coordinated and well-organized attack on the northern town of Ruhengeri. The effect was the usual débâcle for the government forces and the town fell within hours. As predictable as the defeat of Habyarimana’s troops was the immediate arrival of French support as Paris swung into action two new military operations, Volcano and Chimera – the first to rescue trapped nationals, the second to shore up the FAR until politicians could reach a truce.

Operation Volcano began on 10 February with a remit to evacuate 67 foreigners now trapped inside the RPF-controlled town; 21 of these were French. A negotiated settlement was reached and the foreign workers were allowed to leave in three convoys. While this was happening, the French were stepping up their military strength because it had become obvious to their commanders that, without it, the FAR would be overwhelmed and the capital, Kigali, overrun. Colonel Bernard Cussac was informed that reinforcements were being rushed to the threatened area. On 20 February a second company of paratroopers arrived from Bangui, followed the next day by a heavy artillery section from Libreville.

On 28 February the French, under General Dominique Delort, set Operation Chimera in motion. It encompassed a detachment of special operatives (DAMI) as well as 20 paratroopers from the first RPIMA. Helicopters continued to be used for identifying RPF movements, while DAMI set up and managed artillery units, doing everything except firing the guns.

Such artillery was the difference between the two sides. With heavy mortar sited and aimed effectively by the French, the RPF attack was halted on 23 February. Human Rights Watch reported, ‘according to one French “instructor”, French trainers positioned the heavy artillery to bombard the RPF and then stood back to let Rwandan soldiers push the button to fire the weapon.’²⁴ Former Rwandan defence minister James Gasana admitted that the FAR were only allowed to employ artillery given by France after they had received permission from their foreign allies to use them.²⁵

The fact that Paris had flown another 300 troops into Kigali meant that any RPF assault on the capital would inevitably be against the French and, as such, the advance stopped about 20 kilometres short of the seat of government. French intelligence operatives in Rwanda, the DGSE, and Tanzanian intelligence experts shared this view of the motive behind the RPF’s sudden halt.²⁶ According to RPF Colonel Frank Rusagara, who helped lead the offensive, ‘What was important was not occupying land; it was to establish a buffer zone, and to put pressure on Habyarimana.’²⁷ The RPF certainly managed this, as hastily arranged peace talks were convened at Bujumbura in neighbouring Burundi.

A legionnaire told the BBC in an interview just how involved Noroît had been in the battle in early 1993 and how near Habyarimana’s government was to military defeat. ‘The artillery is on the front. There would be an officer, in this case a French military officer, who would observe all lines of fire, who would regulate by radio to his under-officer, who would give the orders to the general soldiers on the ground their direction of fire.’ The interviewer asked him: ‘So when you say the French army officer was regulating by radio what was his actual role?’

‘He was commanding the fire.’

‘If the French hadn’t been there what would have actually happened do you think?’

The Rwandan army would have been totally incapable of defending the country, and since they scarcely knew how to use their weapons and they knew very little about military tactics, the war would have been lost. There would have been a very small battle and in a day it would have been all over if the French hadn’t been there.²⁸

His military and political superiors shared this legionnaire’s assessment. Colonel Dominique Delort declared on 16 March that ‘any reduction of our help would entail the quick defeat of the government army if the [RPF] offensive is renewed.’²⁹

French information officer, William Bunel, told concerned Human Rights Watch investigators that ‘French advisers are prohibited from entering combat areas, and may only advise Rwandan troops in fixed training centres.’ The human rights group drew its own conclusions. ‘Western observers, diplomats and Rwandan military officers said that French advisers had been observed in tactical combat situations with Rwandan troops during the 1993 offensive.’ The new French ambassador in Kigali, Jean-Michel Marlaud, replied to this allegation in language that hardly suggested the opposite was true. ‘When you are supposed to advise, you must advise however it is necessary.’ He was also quoted as saying: ‘I don’t expect the Rwandan army to suppress the RPF by itself.’³⁰

Military hardware accompanied this tactical advisory support. The French provided anti-tank guns and a complete battery of 105 mm mortars. A letter from Colonel Deogratias Nsabimana, commander in chief of the FAR, to the Rwandan minister of defence showed his delight with his Western allies but warned, ‘the French work has been good, but they must be more discreet.’³¹

The number of French troops involved rose significantly with the RPF offensives in 1992 and early 1993, and by March 1993 had reached an official peak of 688. Other estimates put the number at nearer 850.³² A French army colonel even boasted that, by cleverly rotating units and dates, it was possible to almost double, to 1000 men, the official figure of 600 soldiers.³³ On top of this was an unknown number of ‘unofficial’ secret service operatives from the DGSE involved in a shadowy game of protecting and shoring-up Habyarimana. After their 1991 action at Ruhengeri, 15 French soldiers were recommended for medals,³⁴ while another document thanked the French for assistance that was ‘precious in combat’.³⁵

Pierre, a 37 year-old lance corporal in the FAR, had first-hand experience of the French.

In 1991–92, I was at Ruhengeri, in the Muhoza camps. The French (DAMI) were giving us military training in hand-to-hand combat. When they were training us, they told us that they were teaching us to defend ourselves in case we had to fight the enemy. We learnt from DAMI over a six-month period in 1992. Afterwards, I was sent to Ruhengeri at Butaro on the Muhabura volcano since there were attacks from the Inkotanyis [RPF].

There were French there, they had ‘support rifles’ that they fixed and then let us handle. It sometimes happened they took part themselves, like when we fought between Muhabura and Gahinga. They were firing on the Inkotanyis, but the latter put up a good fight.

It was only when the battle became difficult that the French came to support us with military training. They’d taught us and they could leave us on the field and watch us get on with it.³⁶

Allegations were also rife that some French soldiers were helping to question RPF prisoners, a charge Paris dismissed. In November 1991 the International Federation for Human Rights declared that French officers had led ‘strong-armed’ interrogations of RPF prisoners.

Éric Gillet, former president of Amnesty International in Belgium, returned from Rwanda in August 1991. He reported that RPF ‘major’ Jean-Bosco Nyirigira had testified that French officers in Kigali prison had interrogated him for many days. Witness statements by 17 other RPF prisoners reported French soldiers questioned them.³⁷ Six years later Colonel Cussac said he was the only French soldier to have met military prisoners.

Vénuste Kayimahe, a middle-aged Tutsi living in Kigali, also had experience of the French ‘interrogators’. His friend, Jean, who worked at the French Cultural Centre branch near Ruhengeri in 1990, had been arrested after an RPF attack and accused like many Tutsi of helping the enemy.

A colonel in the Rwandan army tortured him, with a French captain also present. It took place at the gendarmerie school in Ruhengeri, where the French had established a place to train new police. Jean was tied up, and during questioning he was beaten with a large stick when his replies did not please his captors. He later fled to Belgium. I saw his professional file in Kigali; it was full of letters between the [French] Cultural Centre and the prosecutor’s office. These French employers, instead of trying to protect this man who worked for them, instead seemed to take the side of those who considered him to be an ‘enemy’ because he was a Tutsi.³⁸