Chapter 4
Agathe Habyarimana was no ordinary president’s wife and mother. Those who had the pleasure of meeting the terrifyingly ambitious wife of the Rwandan dictator were left under little pretence that she was intent on keeping her family in power – whatever the consequences. While her husband dealt with the imminent dual threat of a renewed RPF attack and a peace process that threatened to undermine his authority, Agathe began to plan her own solution to staying in control. From the late 1980s Agathe began to form around her a group of Hutu radicals and extremists. Le clan de madame, or Akazu (small house), was bent on one objective alone – a violent retention of power and influence. Here was a highly potent core of people, most of them her relatives, whose aim was to exploit the Habyarimana presidency for personal wealth and power. Even today, 20 years after the genocide, the dread this woman engenders makes it difficult to have any real conversation about her. A very real fear of Agathe and her Akazu network makes Rwandans from all walks of life, from villagers to army generals shy away from making any comment. Email and telephone conversations about her are courteously declined. It is the one subject that produces a degree of discomfort that is remarkable given that most individuals have lived through the genocide. It is a testimony to an incredible influence that lives on, even though she is now thousands of miles away in a comfortable Parisian retirement.
Born Agathe Kanziga in the northern region of Bushiru, her marriage to ambitious military recruit Juvénal Habyarimana promised her and her family a return to power and greatness. Unlike her husband, she could trace her ancestry back to the royal line, when her Hutu forebears ran their own small independent principality.1 Many Rwandans saw Agathe’s unusual snake-skin outfits and horn-rimmed dark glasses as signs that she was a witch or sorceress.2 To Rwandans, she became known as ‘Kanjogera’, an unflattering reference to the fabled murderous mother of former Rwandan King Musinga. Around Agathe, Akazu members included her brother and prefect of Ruhengeri, Protais Zigiranyirazo, cousins Séraphin Rwabukumba and Elie Sagatwa and military figures such as army chief Laurent Serubuga and head of the gendarmerie Pierre-Célestin Rwagafilita. The group also included powerful administrators of the country such as the prefect and deputy prefect of Kigali, Tharcisse Renzaho and François Karera respectively, and the head of military intelligence at the office of the President, Pascal Simbikangwa.
By the late 1980s, as the Rwandan economy dipped and internal opposition to Habyarimana mounted, the Akazu was already plotting to maintain and increase its slice of the profits of power. Those who stood in its way like Habyarimana’s personal friend and head of Kanombe military camp, Colonel Stanislas Mayuya, were murdered. Others who threatened the clique were also removed, such as Colonel Aloys Nsekalije and former commander of the Rwandan army, Colonel Innocent Rwanyagasore who was poisoned after threatening to expose the Akazu.3
The Akazu had close working ties with the French, not to mention personal friendships. Chollet and Maurin met Colonel Serubuga almost daily through their military liaisons; Renzaho operated alongside French gendarmerie trainers and Théoneste Bagosora, a leading planner of the genocide, had been to a French military college and later commanded the military training camp at Kanombe, where French troops were also billeted. Agathe was a constant visitor to the Mitterrand household when she was in Paris where she was guaranteed a warm welcome and a few handsome trinkets.
The Akazu also lay behind the establishment of a death squad made up of soldiers, presidential guards and militia members. In 1992, Rwandan academic and former head of the Rwandan press and media office ORINFOR Christopher Mfizi went public, naming this group as Réseau Zero – Network Zero. He accused it of being behind the killings and disappearances taking place in the country during the previous two years. ‘Réseau Zero was a hard core of men around President Habyarimana and of whom he was the centre. They expanded into the army, the civil service, the economy and even the churches with the intention of taking over the apparatus of the state and even putting it at their own service.’4 When Mfizi, later Rwandan ambassador to Paris after the genocide, was asked if the French ambassador in Kigali, Georges Martres, had known of Network Zero he replied, ‘Certainly ... I discussed this with the French ambassador at the time and he congratulated me on my analysis.’5
French intelligence had already worked out the dynamics of the political situation in Rwanda. In a report of July 1991 they pointed to three circles of power in the country, with the grouping around Habyarimana seen as the most militant. It makes it all the more remarkable then that ‘Monsieur Afrique’, Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, the man charged by his father to run the Africa Cell at the Élysée, denied that Network Zero existed.
I know that’s a phrase this person [Mfizi] came up with but I don’t really believe there was such an organization. I mean give me some surnames and I’ll agree with you there was corruption and maybe some gangsters. I mean there are affairs like this going on everywhere. There are gangsters everywhere. But in general you only know they are gangsters when they are arrested, not before. Someone says, you know, so and so’s a gangster but you only find out for sure a couple of years later. You just don’t know at the time. It’s not marked on their foreheads, you know what I mean? At the time I knew Rwanda of course there were guys who said ‘yes, there is corruption’. But try proving it! Well I’d have loved to. But I just didn’t know anything.6
This was surprising given his close personal relationship with the Habyarimana family, visits to the country after 1990 and the quite considerable secret service, military and diplomatic information he was fed.
It suited Mitterrand’s strategy to put the ever-increasing massacres of civilians and political opponents down to disorganized anonymous ‘gangsters’. The truth was that the murders were a deliberate, ordered and centrally led terror by the very people in Rwanda with whom French politicians, the military and the secret services were working on a daily basis. Even more frightening, new evidence points to the direct complicity of French troops in training the killers.
In a series of targeted and well-prepared massacres in the four years preceding the 1994 genocide, Hutu militants began to seek a ‘final solution’ to their ‘Tutsi problem’. Thousands of Tutsi villagers were killed in attacks orchestrated by the Akazu, and carried out by Habyarimana’s presidential guard, the regular army and, increasingly, the new illegal militias, the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi.
These militias were armed youth supporters of the MRND(D) and CDR parties, created by the government to use violence against its perceived enemies – the Tutsi and liberal Hutu opponents. The Interahamwe, literally ‘those who stay together’, was formed in 1992 and the Impuzamugambi, ‘those who share the same aim’, a short time later; both acted with the ruling elite’s support but outside the law. Using unemployed, poor and easily politicized Hutu youth, these militia groups brought a new dimension of terror to Rwanda.
With direct instructions from their presidential backer, they could not effectively be stopped. Those who tried were the victims of assassination or torture. ‘Like the army, [the militia] were divided into sections, each with a particular assignment to accomplish ... usually coordinated by the army.’7 These killers were not just thugs roaming the streets and villages. They became a trained and disciplined outfit that killed to order, disrupted opposition political groups where and as required, and spread ethnic hate and fear in a coordinated manner, aided by government media support. Sibomana referred to the militia as the ‘spearhead for the genocide’.8
The young militiamen were far from just clumsy wielders of machetes or axes. Most had special military training at the various army camps that had sprung up since 1990 where they learnt the tactics of war, and how to use small arms and grenades. Camps in the Nyungwe and Gashwati forests, and three in Kibungo prefecture and Bugarama in the south, became training grounds for the genocide. By March 1992 the militia were able to put their new skills in butchery into action at Bugesera.
Set up initially to discipline the Rwandan army (FAR) into a force that could repel the RPF, these training camps were not just for Rwandans. French specialist military trainers, the products of commando instructor courses at the Mont St Louis French army centre in the Pyrenees, were there too and their mission now was to train the FAR and presidential guard, both of whom took part in the genocide.
According to 35-year-old witness ex-militiaman Aloys, who spoke of French involvement in his training, he
was trained at the Bigogwe commando training centre at Gisenyi [in the north]. ... I’d received military training from French instructors at the Bigogwe camp. These were military exercises of exactly the same kind as the exercises performed by professional soldiers. Their intention was to do damage. In short, we were training them [the militia recruits] to run for long periods and to increase their powers of endurance, to climb up a rope, to kill with a knife; and they also practised shooting. They were taught how to use grenades.
I can’t remember the names of our instructors, but they were Frenchmen, they were the ones who first introduced the guns called ‘machine guns’, this was the first time they brought the guns to us at Bigogwe. As for me, I’d been entrusted with training the Interahamwe; I trained them for a long time. After that came the dreadful disaster affecting Rwanda. But before that, there’d been the war between the Tutsi cockroaches and us. Where I was, at Bigogwe, the French had trained us, saying it was so that we could go and fight the enemy, and the only enemy was the Tutsis. Eventually we killed the Bigogwe [villagers] who lived in the region. They were Tutsis, they were killed after the arrival of the French – who stood by and did absolutely nothing even though they were the ones who had taught us to inflict so much damage. … We’d go there with the French, and then, one of the accompanying sergeants would tell us, ‘go ahead, just slaughter those people, those Tutsis, they’re the ones who are sending their children into the [RPF] army.’ To begin with, we were scared because of the French presence, but this sergeant could go and discuss things with our French instructors, and to our astonishment they told us, ‘of course, kill them – otherwise, don’t be surprised when they come to attack you. I’m in training, true, but I wouldn’t go into battle in your place! I’ll give you all the equipment necessary, but if you let them carry on producing children they can send to the front, you’ll never be done with them.’
Yes, the French knew that the Bigogwe were civilians but they were Tutsis, and the Tutsis had a great sense of solidarity and sent their children to the front. ... When the Bigogwe got massacred, they saw it all with their own eyes. What did they do? Well, they didn’t do anything except support us in what we were doing there.9
In 1992, human rights investigator Jean Carbonare travelled to Rwanda to seek the truth behind rumours of widespread ethnic killing. He was part of an international mission of inquiry that consisted of four NGOs – including Human Rights Watch and FIDH (the International Federation of Human Rights). His key informer, Janvier Afrika, an ex-member of Network Zero who had turned against his former henchmen, testified to Network Zero’s aim to eliminate not just political opponents but Tutsis in the villages. The investigators found bodies hidden in one mayor’s garden, despite his denials that they were there.
Carbonare told the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur, ‘I have seen what French military instructors did in the camp of Bigogwe between Gisenyi and Ruhengeri in northwestern Rwanda. In the presence of French soldiers, the Hutus were taking their Tutsi prisoners away in trucks to torture them and to kill them.’ Carbonare said the bodies were then taken to a mass grave in Gisenyi, which human rights activists later uncovered.
Janvier Afrika, who went into hiding to avoid being killed by the very death squads of which he had once been a part, confessed he had been at a meeting of militia leaders in a Kigali building known as ‘La Synagogue’ on 1 September 1992, which Habyarimana and his wife Agathe had also attended. There the orders were given for opponents to be wiped out. He alleged the president told the meeting it was important to ‘find all the politicians who were not with us. They were all considered to be RPF, because they opposed the killing of Tutsis, which Habyarimana wanted to have them do. And Madame Habyarimana, she addressed the meeting to advise how to neutralize opposition among women.’ Afrika was later gaoled for opposing the killing, but escaped death when the RPF overran his prison. His revelations implicated the French military in the massacres now ripping through the country.
We had two French military who helped train the Interahamwe. A lot of other Interahamwe were sent for training in Egypt. The French military taught us how to catch people and tie them. It was at the Affichier Central base in the centre of Kigali. It’s where people were tortured. That’s where the French military office was.
At the camp I saw the French show Interahamwe how to throw knives and how to assemble and disassemble guns. It was the French who showed us how to do that – a French major – during a total of four months training for weeks at a time between February 1991 and January 1992. The French also went with us Interahamwe to Mount Kigali, where they gave us training with guns. We didn’t know how to use the arms which had been brought from France.
Afrika went on to testify to the effectiveness of the militia killers now they were armed and trained. ‘In early 1992 we did our first killing. Around 70 of us went to Ruhengeri to kill Tutsis from the Bagogwe clan. We killed about 10,000 over one month, from our base at the Mukamira military camp at Ruhengeri. Two weeks later we went to Bugesera, where we killed about 5000 people.’10
The informer also produced photos of victims and said how he had been sent to see a local mayor to check that a massacre had been successfully carried out. His militia had ‘massacred the Tutsi men one by one. They were ready to kill the widows and orphans too if I’d wanted.’
Carbonare told the BBC that he thought Afrika’s testimony was ‘perfectly credible. I don’t say that everything he said was true, but there were a lot of interesting things he said that tied in with what we’d found out on the ground. And of course he didn’t know where we’d been because he’d been in prison. So we knew some of what he was saying was true.’11 There is also evidence of French instructors living with their ‘pupils’ in the training camp at Mukamira and commando centre at Bigogwe,12 and of French instructors helping to train the presidential guard, the ultra-loyalist soldiers hand-picked by Habyarimana from his northern territory and responsible for many of the worst atrocities in the genocide in the preceding years.
Journalist Christian Jennings, on interviewing former MRND officials in Goma in 1994, reported them saying off-camera that ‘the French made and kept the Interahamwe’. He commented, ‘this is not strictly accurate. The French Special Forces instructors instructed Rwandan army soldiers ... these men went on to massacre Tutsis or trained men who did. The French trained men who carried out a genocide, not to carry out a genocide.’13
It is difficult to know how much differentiation there was at the camps between the FAR, presidential guard and militia. It would have been easy for French instructors just to train all those in front of them, whatever their background. After all, they were all fighting the ‘enemy’ RPF and were loyal to the government. No instruction came from Kigali or Paris to ensure that the militia, which by 1993 had been named in a number of reports as complicit in killings, did not receive arms or training. Africa Watch reported that following the February 1993 offensive by the RPF ‘Rwandan soldiers killed at least 147 civilians and beat, raped or arrested hundreds more in the four months following the offensive.’ The use of rape and sexual crimes to ‘dehumanize’ the Tutsi population was to mirror its widespread use in the following year during the genocide. While it is easy to blame individual French military figures for failing to reassert the human aspect of any conflict, given the noises coming from politicians in Paris about the RPF being ‘Khmer noir’ and ‘Maoist’ Ugandan-backed anglophones, it is hardly surprising that DAMI military training specialists were content only to train those in front of them to kill -and leave their protégés to make the differentiation between civilian Tutsi and RPF soldier.
The first slaughter of innocent civilians had taken place only days after the initial RPF attack, between 11 and 13 October 1990. Ordinary villagers in the Kibilira commune near Gisenyi were targeted; more than 500 homes were set on fire and many families were forced to flee.14 Following the massacre 10,000 mainly Tutsi ‘suspects’ were rounded-up, imprisoned, tortured and some even killed. André Sibomana, a priest who edited the church newspaper Kinyamateka, entered Kigali prison with an official human rights delegation that Habyarimana had organized to prove how well the prisoners were being treated. What he found when he managed to sneak away from the main delegation was horrifying. ‘Under a blanket, I discovered a pile of bodies; some of them were motionless, others had been mutilated. Innocent people had been beaten, their backs slashed with bayonets. Some had deep cuts in their arms from being tied up.’15 Sibomana published pictures of the scene in his newspaper, much to the government’s disgust. Pressure on Habyarimana caused by this scandal helped to gain the release of many of those imprisoned, though the genocide of 1994 later ‘finished’ the job of murdering them. The death squads revisited Kibilira in March and November/December 1992, but it was not the only area to suffer.
Once the RPF invasion had begun, Hutu extremists also targeted the Bagogwe Tutsi who lived in the northwest. The initial massacres of October 1990 gave way to more systematic killing after the RPF attack on nearby Ruhengeri in January 1991, where 1000 civilians were murdered.16 Between fighting the RPF and being trained by the French, Rwandan army soldiers helped round up the civilian victims. The region was targeted again in late 1992 and early 1993 with radio broadcasts announcing that the ‘bush’ (Tutsi) ‘must be cleared’, with dire consequences if it were not.
The Bugesera region in the south near the Burundian border was subjected to massacres in March 1992, though as elsewhere no one was convicted of organizing or taking part in them. With the initiators being government soldiers, local mayors and officials, MRND(D) members and, from 1992, the militia, this was not surprising. A Human Rights Watch investigation into the killings blamed ‘authorities at the highest level, including the President of the Republic’.
The Rwandan army slaughtered hundreds of civilians in the course of its military operations against the RPF The army also killed civilians in support of the attacks by Hutu civilian crowds against Tutsi. In a number of cases the army assassinated or summarily executed civilians singled out for murder by local authorities. The army also killed RPF soldiers after they had surrendered and laid down arms.17
Nor did UN special rapporteur Bacre Waly Ndiaye mince his words after his mission to Rwanda of 8–17 April 1993. The French-trained FAR was, he said, playing an
active and well-planned role at the highest level … of killing of Tutsis by the population, notably with respect to massacres targeting the Bagogwe. For instance, soldiers of Bigogwe camp (Mutara Commune) are said to have organized fake attacks by rebels during the night of 4th February 1991, so that they could unleash indiscriminate and bloody reprisals against those alleged to be responsible. The FAR are accused of incitement to murder and of giving logistic support to the killers.
The FAR’s involvement in the killings has been confirmed by numerous reliable witnesses, and even by the findings of a commission set up by the [Rwandan] Government on 15 September 1992 to investigate allegations of massacres in the prefecture of Kibungo. It should be noted that these findings have not resulted in the imposition of any penalties on the accused military personnel.18
The report singled out officials (prefects, sub-prefects, mayors, councillors, sector and cell leaders) as ‘encouraging, planning and directing’ the massacres, as well as spreading rumours to ‘exacerbate ethnic hatred’. It accused the militia of massacres and political assassinations and ‘imposing a reign of terror with complete impunity’, and being backed by the FAR, some in plain clothes, as well as the local authorities. Such militias, it found, had been ‘trained by members of the Presidential Guard and members of the armed services’.
The report condemned the activities of the ‘death squads’, ‘Network Zero’ and the military ‘Amasasu’ – a militant group in the army that armed and worked alongside the militia – and called for them to be disbanded and all weaponry already distributed to civilians confiscated. Moreover, it reminded the Habyarimana regime that under its own 1991 law it was expressly forbidden to establish militias.
Ndiaye’s investigation, issued a year before the 1994 apocalypse, described the massacres taking place up to 1993 as genocide because Tutsis were being targeted for no reason other than their ethnic identity. It reminded Habyarimana that he had acceded to the Genocide Convention in 1975. This UN report echoed one sent previously on 25 September 1992 to the Rwandan president, as well as reports by the international commission of inquiry of 7–21 January 1993. The evidence was damning about the ‘genocidal’ killings taking place.
Yet, the response of the French government, which had copies of all the reports and inside information from its own military and secret services, was to ignore them. It continued to sell arms to the FAR, despite evidence they were going to the militia. Extra DAMI personnel arrived to continue training the FAR and presidential guard, both explicitly cited for committing massacres. There is now evidence that the French were also actively training Hutu militiamen. While some areas of the French government, like the foreign office officials actively trying to reach a diplomatic settlement, may have been kept in the dark about the role of its special forces personnel and army units in Rwanda, it is clear that, from an early stage, Mitterrand and the hardliners in his government and military had chosen to ignore any moral or ethical questions arising from supporting Habyarimana and his extremists. Retaining the dictator was more important than villagers in Bugesera, and an RPF victory would have been intolerable.
Thierry Prungnaud, a sergeant with the elite GIGN (Gendarmerie Intervention Group) was one of a number of troops sent in to train the FAR and presidential guard during the Noroît campaign. He later went public with what he had witnessed, in direct contradiction of the denials of the Paris government. According to Prungnaud:
I saw French soldiers giving fire-arms training to civilian Rwandan militiamen in 1992. There were about 30 militiamen being trained. I am absolutely categoric about this. I saw them and that is all there is to it. They must have been militiamen because the soldiers used to go around in fatigues and these were civilians. It must have gone on till 1994. It didn’t shock me – after all I didn’t see how it all turned out. It just seemed normal.
Prungnaud alleged the troops were from the 1st RPIMa, a regiment noted for its hard line attitude, and one that would later be involved in controversy for its ‘pro FAR’ role in operation Turquoise in 1994.19
In March 1992, after learning of the Bugesera massacres, a group of Western diplomats confronted Habyarimana with their concerns. French ambassador Georges Martres refused to join them and dismissed the international commission of inquiry’s findings on the killings in the northwest as ‘just rumours’, despite an avalanche of proof from witnesses, not to mention the uncovering of mass graves. It was a remarkably blasé approach even from an individual accustomed to tagging along in Habyarimana’s slipstream.
The French ambassador’s lack of objectivity was a crucial weak link in the communication chain back to his government in Paris. ‘According to officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Cooperation, Ambassador Martres never reported on the rise of the extremists, Hutu power, and the continuous violence during his tour in Rwanda from 1990 until 1993.’20 As a result, the foreign office was unprepared for and ill informed about what the Rwandan government it supported was doing. Members of Mitterrand’s government and military mission shut out reality in favour of the usual ‘RPF = Anglophone menace’ mantra, with a member of the French foreign ministry asserting that Habyarimana’s regime was ‘rather respectful of human rights and on the whole concerned with good administration’. This same official declared that the massacres were the Tutsis’ fault because their agents (provocateurs) had infiltrated and caused both the Bugesera massacre and the carnage at Bagogwe in 1991.21 Philippe Decraene, a pro-Mitterrand journalist whose wife Pauline was long-time secretary to the French president, was still managing to write in April 1993 that Habyarimana was a ‘moderate democrat ... whose image has been tarnished by the clumsiness and excesses of some Hutu extremists’.
Many other open sources were sending detailed information back to Paris about the atrocities, even if its ambassador was reluctant to confront the truth on the issue publicly. Secret service, military and media reports,22 as well as evidence from human rights organizations and diplomats, all made the massacres and their perpetrators open knowledge. That elements in the French government, at the Ministry of Cooperation and the Africa Cell knew what was happening was not in question. Like Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, they blamed ‘gangsters’ and ethnic tensions created by the RPF invasion, but held to the view that the Rwandan president was a ‘moderate democrat’ whose good work Hutu extremists were puting at risk.23
It was becoming clear to human rights activists that they were wasting their time trying to help stop the killing by talking to the French. Regime critic and journalist André Sibomana approached the US representative in Kigali, Ambassador David Rawson, with a plea for help, but it fell on deaf ears and Sibomana did not even approach the French. ‘I didn’t have any contact with the French embassy,’ he wrote, ‘even if I had, what could I have learned or expected from the country which was the most open supporter of the Habyarimana regime?’24 By 1993 Habyarimana and the Hutu militants were the only people left in Rwanda with any faith in the French strategy.
In France, as the political classes’ intrigues reached boiling point in the build-up to the March 1993 elections, there were bigger fish to fry than the fate of a few thousand black Africans. The eventual right-wing victory ushered in a period of so-called ‘cohabitation’, with socialist president, Mitterrand, having to work with conservative prime minister, Édouard Balladur. The Élysée now had to deal with Michel Roussin, the new minister of cooperation, a former secret service officer and friend of General Quesnot. For the ailing 76-year-old Mitterrand, the election defeat reflected his personal unpopularity. He had finally replaced his tarnished son Jean-Christophe with Bruno Delaye as head of the Élysée’s Africa Cell in a last ditch attempt to head off the criticism of corruption aimed at his presidency, but this had failed.
However, the new right-wing team in the French government was content to change little in terms of French policy towards Rwanda. Besides, the president made it crystal clear that Africa was still his personal policy item, dictated through Delaye at the Africa Cell, and Generals Huchon and Quesnot and the secret service networks.
On 8 February 1993 400 crack new French troops that had been rushed to Rwanda met the new RPF offensive that had come within 25 kilometres of the capital Kigali. Only two outcomes were now feasible, an RPF military victory or a negotiated peace. The third option, that the Rwandan army could on its own be strong enough to repel the rebels was no longer a possibility. French military intelligence had concluded that the RPF was on the verge of victory in the civil war.25
France’s problem was how to keep Habyarimana in power given the current military position and increasing insecurity in the country. One option, never discussed, would have been to replace Habyarimana, who was already implicated in massacring his people, with a moderate candidate more acceptable to the RPF, at least in the short term while peace talks reconvened. Mitterrand’s single-minded determination to keep Habyarimana in power was deeply flawed, for it gave the Hutu Power militants the time and resources with which to continue planning a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Tutsi problem.’
As human rights reports detailing Habyarimana’s French-trained forces’ massacres of Tutsi civilians were published, Paris focused only on the RPF. Marcel Debarge promised not to ignore the reports of the government-instigated massacres, but then did so, never publicly denouncing the regime in Kigali and saving his venom instead for the RPF. The 64-year-old Debarge, the minister of cooperation, encapsulated the confused and highly ambiguous French position. In an interview with Le Monde on 17 February 1993 he announced that ‘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 only there to protect our citizens.’26
It was in effect a ‘have my cake and eat it’ argument. According to Debarge, France was helping to mediate the Arusha agreement (to which it had assigned a solitary very junior diplomat). Meanwhile, its multimillion dollar military help protected French citizens and allowed aid projects to continue. In fact, according to Debarge, French efforts in Rwanda benefited everybody. He omitted to mention the massacres, now in full swing, that the government his soldiers were keeping in power were carrying out, or indeed the financial scams siphoning off millions of dollars of foreign aid money into the coffers of the Akazu.
Prejudice against the ‘anglophone’ RPF blinded any French policy reassessment. An African strategic expert confided, ‘it is not possible to tolerate this attack from Uganda, 18 million people against Rwanda with only seven million. The Belgians have abandoned their old colony, and they are alone. But, thanks to us, the Rwandan army is able to hold off the coup.’27 Remarkably, such views did not include the white Western French as ‘invaders’, only the RPF, who though mostly from Uganda were actual Rwandans forced into exile. It was the RPF that was seeking a return to its homeland, not the French who were merely asserting their neocolonial rights to intervene as and when it suited them in a foreign land – without even a UN mandate.
Ten days after his remarks to Le Monde, Debarge was in Kigali. On 28 February, the man tasked with finding a peaceful solution told the Rwandan opposition parties that they should make a ‘common front’ with Habyarimana against their ‘enemies’. It was a simplification and underestimation of the whole Rwandan mess. According to Prunier, ‘in such a tense ethnic climate, with massacres having taken place in recent weeks, this call for a “common front” that could only be based on race was nearly a call to racial war.’ The result was a clear delineation in Paris of what the conflict was about. ‘The equation thus suggested was “Uganda equals Anglo-Saxon equals RPF ... equals Tutsi. ...” This of course implied another equation: “Rwanda equals France equals common front equals Hutu”.’28
There were dissenting voices in the French camp. On the release of a number of high-profile reports on human rights abuses in Rwanda in March 1993, Guy Penne, a former government minister and now vice-president of the senate commission on foreign affairs and defence, wrote to Prime Minister Balladur expressing his anxiety. He mentioned France being ‘very implicated’ in the situation, asked the prime minister to arbitrate between the ministries of foreign affairs, cooperation and defence, and stated the need to reduce the French military presence. Moreover, he expressed the view that any remaining troops should be used specifically for humanitarian work and to protect French citizens, and that cooperation with Habyarimana should be suspended until the international commission on human rights abuses in Rwanda was published.29 Predictably, such views were swiftly consigned to the Élysée’s ample wastepaper basket. France was not renowned for changing a stance merely for human rights abuses and Mitterrand, champion of Vichy and the Algerian campaign, was not about to let the fate of ‘a few’ Rwandan villagers upset his Rwandan policy.
An RPF press release, issued on 8 February 1993, the day it renewed its offensive, conclusively equated Habyarimana with France. As far as the RPF was concerned the new offensive it had launched was due solely to Habyarimana’s intransigence and his French allies. The RPF press release was dominated by an attack on the continuing French role in Rwanda.
Contrary to the terms of the ceasefire agreement [of July 1992], the French troops remain in Rwanda, six months after the ceasefire came into effect. Their presence has continued to sustain President Habyarimana’s intransigence towards a peaceful negotiated settlement. Once again we remind the international community that these French troops not only participate in the president’s efforts to make war but also train the security agents who are responsible for the genocide that has been taking place in Rwanda. It is against this background of genocide, rejection of a negotiated settlement to the current conflict in Rwanda and the persistent presence of the French troops in our country that hostilities have resumed.30
Habyarimana was not about to change tack, and his reply to the February RPF offensive was to plead with Paris for more troops and to announce a ‘common front’ to repel the offensive. In a presidential communiqué issued with the support of various representatives of the Rwandan political parties on 2 March, the RPF was condemned and the French military help welcomed. Government troops, which had been hastily shifted from massacre duties to fighting the RPF, were thanked for their ‘bravery’ and assured of full support.
The presence of the new French troops at the front was all too obvious. Guardian reporter Chris McGreal, one of the few to cover the war, found one RPF recruit in his position near Byumba disappointed not to have the opportunity to get to grips with this foreign foe.
Shaban Ruta wears his French army uniform to make a point. He would like to have captured a French soldier inside it to prove that Paris has sent troops to fight in tiny Rwanda’s civil war. Instead he has to confess that the uniform was still folded in its packet when it was abandoned by fleeing government troops last week.31
Spring 1993 saw the RPF still occupying positions threatening Kigali, despite a ceasefire signed at Dar es Salaam in March 1993 agreeing to retreat away from the zone tampon (buffer zone) to a previously held location. The CDR Hutu militant party’s extreme reaction to this ceasefire had given all parties cause for immense concern. A CDR communiqué called the agreement ‘high treason’ and accused Habyarimana of letting down the Rwandan people. France complained to the international community about RPF aggression and called on the United Nations to act.
Inside Rwanda, law and order had broken down amid violence and corruption. By July 1993 ‘everybody was exhausted. The political rigmarole had reached a point of almost total absurdity. Hutu supremacists were sniping at President Habyarimana who was consorting with liberals who wanted to see him fall; in Arusha the RPF’s appetite seemed to grow by the day; extremists were arming almost openly … the only thing that seemed equally distributed between all the political actors was corruption money.’32 And behind the scenes the Akazu was already formulating and carefully organizing the ‘final solution’ to the Tutsi problem.
The World Bank, along with the main donor nations, insisted that a treaty be signed by 9 August, otherwise funds to Rwanda would be halted. Given this was Habyarimana’s main source of income the result was inevitable.33 Habyarimana, with a heavy heart and no doubt a wife incandescent with rage, made his way to neighbouring Tanzania to sign the Arusha accords on 4 August 1993. He could hardly bring himself to smile for the waiting press, let alone make the correct noises about how pleased he was that the civil war was now over. For the international community there was much backslapping and relief that Rwanda could now be stabilized and, it was presumed, both the civil war and massacres stopped. The reality was far more complex and the accords were greeted with dismay in Kigali, with the hard-line Hutu CDR and Akazu activists decrying this ‘sell-out.’
The accords were made up of a number of previous protocols on power-sharing and setting up a broad-based government, but included an agreement on the return of refugees and on the thorniest of all questions, the RPF’s integration into a new Rwandan army. They were, however, deeply flawed. With neither the RPF nor Habyarimana prepared to accept an imposed peace and the political solution they offered, they were set to collapse before the ink on the treaty paper was dry. Underlying tensions festered and were not addressed. Habyarimana had signed an agreement neither he nor Agathe and her Akazu coterie could ever accept, while looking down the barrel of an ultimatum from Western bankers and Kagame’s RPF. Reforms such as power-sharing, army-sharing and finance-sharing, undermined the whole corrupt ethos of Habyarimana’s government. Plans for the genocide were already being carefully worked out before the Arusha accords were signed. The treaty was another piece of Munich writing paper, promising peace in our time when extremists were already in advanced preparation for the carnage to come.
Although several African leaders were represented at the Arusha talks, including Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, President Ali Hassan Mwinyi of Tanzania and Faustin Birindwa representing Mobutu’s Zaire, France was the only country in regular touch with the Hutu extremists. Having been roundly praised in the radical paper Kangura, Mitterrand was definitely the flavour of the year as far as the CDR and Akazu were concerned. France had saved Kigali in February 1993, but there was no sign before or after the signing of the accords that Paris had a real strategy for dealing with the extremists. Was the idea of keeping them onside by ignoring their human rights abuses and violent statements a policy to keep them from even worse actions? Or was it a purely cynical exercise in politics – of wanting to keep a popular stance with what it perceived as the ‘rank and file’ Hutu majority and the many powerful military and government figures with whom it had been working for the previous two-and-a-half decades? Equally, were there extremist elements in French political and military circles that encouraged their Hutu counterparts to reject any peace that could curtail them? According to French analyst Jean-François Bayart:
Some French military officers seem to have suggested, both to the Habyarimana regime and to his entourage, that the Arusha accord was neither good nor ineluctable. Even if they did not want this atrocious genocide, one may ask whether they had not put the seed of this idea among the extremists of the regime that this accord had to be sabotaged at all costs.34
For the peace deal to work a neutral military power was needed to assist in the new broad-based elections and to provide stability and security in the current knife-edge political situation. France agreed to withdraw Operation Noroît to allow UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda) to take its place. However, operating under a Chapter VI peacekeeping mandate of the UN Charter that banned proactive disarming measures and with a chronic lack of well-trained and armed troops, the UN force was spineless. With the Bosnian crisis in full cry and the US embroiled in a Somalian nightmare, Rwanda got the fag end of UN help. Sub-Saharan nations without oil, international terrorists or political clout could count on little support from the UN despite every nation’s theoretical entitlement to equal help.
General Romeo Dallaire, UNAMIR’s charismatic Canadian commander, had no experience of Africa or UN missions in the field; his immediate reaction on being told that the UN was considering him for a mission to Rwanda was, ‘Rwanda, that’s somewhere in Africa, isn’t it?’35 When he flew to Rwanda for a pre-mission reconnaissance tour on 17 August he found both the politicians and military in a state of extreme nervousness, as well as thousands of refugees created by the recent civil war who were now living in camps that smelt a long way off of ‘faeces, urine, vomit and death’. The UN commander made contact with the French parabattalion in Kigali ‘but the visit yielded little except some map references of RGF (Rwandan army) sites around the city. The battalion too was close-mouthed about its strength and true mission in Rwanda. We rarely saw French soldiers, except at the airport or at night when they operated patrols and roadblocks in and around the capital.’36
Dallaire soon became aware of rifts within the French political and military establishment. The UN commander met new French ambassador Marlaud before he left after his short two-week fact-finding mission.
I took the opportunity to run some of my findings past him [Marlaud]. The ambassador thought my report reasonable, but as soon as I started to talk actual figures, the French military attaché leapt into the fray. He said he couldn’t understand why I needed so many troops. France had a battalion of only 325 personnel stationed in the country and the situation seemed to be well in hand. There was an awkward moment as the ambassador reiterated his support for my plan and the attaché sat back in his chair silently fuming. The attaché’s position made no sense to me, and I concluded that he was being deliberately obstructive. The incident alerted me to an outright split between the policy being followed by France’s foreign affairs department and its ministry of defence.37
The division between the French military, which had worked closely with its Rwandan army and government counterparts for the past three years, and the foreign office, which was far less subjective about Rwanda, was clear. The French military saw UNAMIR as ‘impinging’ on its territory, even if that was presently filled with daily murder, violence and political hatred.
UNAMIR finally rolled into Kigali in late November nearly three months after Dallaire’s initial mission and three-and-a-half months after the accords had been signed. It did so without key equipment, including APCs and helicopters. One less than enthusiastic UN official told the BBC that UNAMIR was just ‘taking in France’s dirty linen’.38
Operation Noroît pulled out of Rwanda on 10 December 1993, honouring a clause in the Arusha agreement on which the RPF had insisted. Habyarimana organized a hero’s sendoff at Kigali airport to these troops that had literally kept his regime in power. French television treated the occasion as a cause for great celebration, with the commentator praising the ‘humanitarian’ help the paratroopers had given the Kigali government over the previous three years. After a smart march past on the airstrip by singing troops, Rwandan government ministers gave the commander of the French force neatly wrapped gifts. But, as the planes carrying Operation Noroît took off, an unspecified number of French military intelligence and ‘security’ experts who remained began their secret role of continuing to support Habyarimana. Minister of cooperation Michel Roussin admitted that 40–70 French soldiers were still in Rwanda in early April 1994.39 The shadowy world of the secret services, the DGSE, as well as maverick security ‘experts’ and ‘parallel network’ mercenaries like Captain Paul Barril, were to be another vital lifeline for Habyarimana and the Hutu extremists.
By late 1993 the undercover war in Rwanda had been going on for several years. French agents were already in the country in the late 1980s, at Habyarimana’s request, looking at how to strengthen his security network. La Françafrique was interwoven with networks of ex-police, secret service agents, ex-marines and paratroopers.40 Such men included Paul Barril, Jeannou Lacaze, Paul Fontbonne, Jean-Claude Mantion, Pierre-Yves Gilleron and Robert Montoya. With these ‘operatives’ doing the French political and military establishment’s work but being paid by their African employers, the operation was cleverly disguised. If there were to be an operational failure, no blame would fall on the French government. Instead, the mercenaries, ‘parallel networks’ or their African employers would take the rap.
The French secret service (DGSE) had suffered a few high profile embarrassments in the recent past and badly needed to boost its credibility. In October 1981 an alleged coup took place in Chad and President Goukouni Oueddei disappeared. When Mitterrand demanded to know what was happening he was told that his two secret service men in the country were unable to help. One was on holiday and the other away from the capital.41 Debacles like the Rainbow Warrior affair, when secret service operatives Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur sank a Greenpeace ship in Auckland harbour on 10 July 1985, killing a photographer on board, did little to enhance the service’s reputation. According to former DGSE head Admiral Pierre Lacoste, Mitterrand had personally approved the sinking of the ship.42 True to form though, the French president issued a briefing six weeks after the murder denying that either he or his secret service was involved – though recent evidence has proved this to be yet more Mitterrand fabrication. Paris had put pressure on the New Zealand government at the time to release the two convicted DGSE operatives after serving little more than a year of their ten-year sentences. In 1987 they were flown back to Paris on ‘humanitarian and medical’ grounds. New Zealand protests were muted when it was pointed out that its butter and mutton market in France might suffer.43
In Rwanda, as in many francophone countries, there was fierce competition for the lucrative role of presidential ‘minder’. Two mercenaries, Captain Paul Barril and former secret service agent Pierre-Yves Gilleron, who had served in the French counter-intelligence branch, the DST (Direction de la surveillance du territoire) saw a chance of making a profit on the back of Habyarimana’s fears. Gilleron had also worked in the anti-terrorist cell of the Élysée (cellule antiterroriste de l’Élysée) under Major Christian Prouteau and alongside Barril in the elite state security police, GIGN. Both men had now left official Élysée service, Barril in disgrace after being found to have tampered with evidence in a court case, and had proceeded to undertake various semi-official contracts for African Presidents. Barril started his own security company, ‘Secrets Inc’, in 1992 and even opened a branch on the Avenue de la Grande Armée in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. With support from influential figures at the Élysée like François de Grossouvre, Barril was able to secure lucrative contracts guarding francophone leaders. Central African Republic president Ange-Félix Patassé paid him with diamonds and funds from the Libyan secret service. He also worked for Cameroon’s dictator Paul Biya, training the president’s security guards,44 for Burundian president Melchior Ndadaye and by the late 1980s was on Habyarimana’s payroll. But all these African adventures did not stop the Élysée in Paris employing him to run an unofficial ‘dirty tricks’ operation against Mitterrand’s opponents.45
In Rwanda, Barril and friend, now rival, Gilleron, who had founded his own company, ‘Iris Services’, were assisting the Habyarimana government. From 1990 onwards the presence of these two Frenchmen helped bolster defences against both the RPF and internal opposition. A British journalist in Kigali noticed in the windows of the Hotel Diplomates, alongside the usual assortment of CNN, BBC, French radio and environmental organizations’ stickers, one with the emblem of the amphibious warfare company of the French paratroopers. Next to it was a label ‘bearing the logo of “Groupe Barril”’, which had been working for the Habyarimana regime.46 Advertising his services to a regime smeared in human rights abuses was of no more concern to the French mercenary than working for it.
The allegations against Barril and his ‘unofficial’ Élysée backers were far more serious than a few ill-judged stickers. Barril was alleged to be directly training the Hutu militia killers. ‘Rwandan military sources assert that Barril was hired by the Rwandan Ministry of Defence to conduct a training program for 30 to 60 men, eventually to grow to 120, at Bigogwe military camp in the northwest. He was to provide training in marksmanship and infiltration tactics for an elite unit in preparation for attacks behind the RPF lines.’47 Bigogwe was the camp from which government soldiers and militia carried out massacres in 1991. It was at this camp that men like Aloys had received their French training in the art of killing. Journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry commented that there was a ‘parallel structure of military command’ in Rwanda, and that the Élysée was treating the country in a ‘secret manner’.48 A French journalist quoted a high-ranking French officer who became so concerned at Barril’s activities in Rwanda during 1993 that he reported to Mitterrand that such actions could, if made public, be very damaging. The French president is reported to have replied that Barril had ‘received no orders from him’.49 The inference was that there were orders from ‘someone’ in the French military or government, but Mitterrand was in Rainbow Warrior mode – deny everything.
The DGSE also played an important role for Mitterrand in ‘spinning’ Operation Noroît to the French public as a humanitarian life-saver for the African nation. After the RPF’s February 1993 attack, the DGSE informed the media in France that the ‘rebels’ had burned villages, that mass graves had been found and that Uganda was responsible for helping the invasion.50 The DGSE did not explain how the FAR, in full retreat, found the time and motivation to exhume mass graves in RPF-held territory. The point was to show French readers that a ‘Ugandan’ invasion was taking place and that France was the good guy helping a distressed friendly regime to counter this threat. Days later, Le Monde reported a massacre at the Rebero refugee camp. In fact, when priests went to tend to the presumed injured and dying, they found no one there, everyone had fled. They then hid for fear that the militia and Rwandan army would kill them to keep the massacre story alive. For the DGSE such disinformation made it creditable to send hundreds more French troops and millions of francs worth of heavy weaponry to Rwanda.
On 11 October 1993 Habyarimana flew to Paris on a private visit to see his friend François Mitterrand, while also taking time to meet Foreign Minister Alain Juppé and the head of the French military, Admiral Lanxade. Whatever was said in the state rooms of Paris, Habyarimana returned to his own country in better spirits, and no doubt with words of endorsement ringing in his ears. Less than four weeks later the Rwandan president chaired a meeting on 5 November at Hotel Rebero in Kigali where it was decided ‘to distribute grenades, machetes and other weapons to the Interahamwe and to CDR young people. The objective is to kill Tutsis and other Rwandans who are in the cities and do not support them’ (namely the Interahamwe and CDR).51 Plans for genocide were well under way and arms, including hundreds of thousands of machetes, bought for the purpose, were being imported. One delivery alone of 987 cartons of machetes, weighing 25,662 kilograms, arrived into Kigali via Mombasa in early November.52
Warning signs had been glowing warmly since 1990, but had been ignored. The French reaction seemed ambiguous in the extreme. Its ambassadors, including the pro-Hutu Martres, were sending reports back to Paris that genocide was possible. After the RPF invasion in 1990, Colonel Rwagafilita, a close associate of Habyarimana, ‘told the general who directed French military cooperation in Rwanda that the Tutsi “are very few in number, we will liquidate them”’.53 In their daily meetings with their Rwandan counterparts, the French military attached to Habyarimana’s army, and police attached to the Rwandan gendarmerie, would have picked up the undercurrents of ethnic tension and hatred, especially as their Rwandan counterparts were often members of the Akazu.
Yet Mitterrand and Delaye, his chief adviser on Africa, together with General Christian Quesnot, then head of military affairs for the French presidency, seemed unable to see beyond the hyperbole with which they had bedecked the RPF. Each passing atrocity was blamed on this Anglo-Saxon enemy. Each political assassination, unsatisfactory peace talk or bloody massacre was the result of the ‘Khmer Noir’ invaders. ‘During the three years of the conflict, this perception of the RPF stayed constant and masked the development of the Rwandan regime.’54 It was Uganda against Rwanda or on a broader level the United States against France, played out like Fashoda 100 years earlier in one of the poorest nations on earth.
Throughout November and December 1993 reports came in from diplomats and human rights agencies that the militia and civilians were being armed. There were daily calls on the state radio, Radio Rwanda and its ‘private’ counterpart, RTLM, which was powered by electricity from the presidential palace, to ethnic violence. The Belgian ambassador reported to his foreign affairs ministry on 26 November that the radio was calling for the murder of the liberal prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiana and her designated replacement, Faustin Twagiramungu. In early December UNAMIR reported suspicious movements by the militia while the Interahamwe were being made ready. On 27 December Belgian intelligence reported ‘The Interahamwe are armed to the teeth and on alert. Many of them have been trained at the military camp in Bugesera. Each of them has ammunition, grenades, mines and knives. They have been trained to use guns that are stockpiled with their respective chiefs. They are all just waiting for the right moment to act.’55
On 11 January UNAMIR commander Dallaire sent a so-called ‘genocide fax’ to UN headquarters warning in stark terms that an ethnic massacre of immense proportions was being planned. According to a source named Jean-Pierre, the Interahamwe was in the later stages of readiness to begin wide-scale killing. The informant, a member of the militia and of Habyarimana’s security staff, told Dallaire that the UN ‘were to be provoked’, with Belgian troops especially targeted and killed to produce their withdrawal from Rwanda. Jean-Pierre estimated that the Interahamwe could kill 1000 in a 20-minute spell. He had gone to the UN because he disagreed with its plans and asked for protection for himself and his family in return.
The UN commander in Kigali received a fax back that same day, under the name of now UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, who at the time was head of the UN’s department of peacekeeping operations (DPKO). It bluntly stated that no action to raid arms caches named by Jean-Pierre could be countenanced. It was against UNAMIR’s mandate, as was protecting the informant. Instead, New York told Dallaire to inform Habyarimana of the location of the arms, even though the president had probably ordered them in the first place. The information was also to be passed on to the ambassadors of France, the United States and Belgium; each was almost certainly already aware of the weapons stores and their possible use by the militia.
France was fully conscious of the increasingly dangerous and explosive situation. The French military attaché, Colonel Cussac, visited UNAMIR on the same day that the fax was sent to ask about evacuation plans in the event of the crisis reaching breaking point. Three days later the Belgian and US ambassadors went to Habyarimana to urge him finally to put the Arusha agreements in place, especially the broad-based government the president had delayed implementing. The French chargé d’affaires accompanied them because Ambassador Marlaud declined to join the delegation. The diplomatic mission to Habyarimana failed to ask for urgent action to be taken on the matters contained in the fax after the French opposed any reference that could antagonize the Rwandan president.56 While the mission desisted from making diplomatic waves, a DC-10 carrying 90 boxes of 60 mm mortars, probably destined for the FAR and presidential guard, arrived in Kigali from France on the night of 21/22 January. The weapons violated the terms of Arusha and, when UNAMIR discovered them, they were put under a joint guard with the Rwandan army.57
In an open letter issued by Human Rights Watch on 25 January Paris came under fire. Directed at President Mitterrand, the letter called for France to reveal the true nature of its military assistance to Rwanda, which it said was ‘tantamount to direct participation in the war’.58 The letter identified France as ‘the major military supporter of the government of Rwanda … providing combat assistance to a Rwandan army guilty of widespread human rights abuses, and failing to pressure the Rwandan government to curb human rights violations’. Mitterrand did not respond. UN envoy for Africa Stephen Lewis was blunt in his assessment of French culpability.
There was diplomatic information flowing in in significant quantities. The French, the Italians, the Vatican, the various governments who had missions in Rwanda, [they] were sending reports at the end of 1993 and early 1994 that signalled an apocalypse. The French government were with the Rwandan government that were planning the genocide, knew everything that was going on and not only didn’t complain but did the opposite – legitimized and spoke on behalf of the government everywhere in the world. So the French government kept giving the killers the conviction that they could get away with murder.59
An independent report commissioned into the causes of the genocide also stressed the failure of French intelligence either to make the precarious situation known to its government or to garner information that seemed well known to others in a less amicable relationship with Habyarimana. As one official later said: ‘Given its close relations with Rwanda, France had better access than most to obtain intelligence on the extremists. Yet it is striking that senior officials in the Ministry of Cooperation in 1993 regarded Rwanda as the “Switzerland of Africa”.’ To the extent that human rights violations were noted, they were considered as not particularly bad by African standards. Evidently, DAMI, which is located in the Ministry of Cooperation and reports to it, either did not observe the mounting force of Hutu extremism – which is possible given its preoccupation with monitoring the designated enemy, the RPF – or observed but did not report. Either way, for the ministry most directly and broadly involved in Rwanda, it amounted to a massive intelligence failure.
A 33 year-old Tutsi survivor, Innocent Rwililiza, explained that he felt ‘the French knew that a genocide was in preparation, since they advised our army. They supposedly just did not believe it; nevertheless many Whites knew Habyarimana’s programme and his character, as they knew Hitler’s.’60 UNAMIR too was struggling. Dallaire found that information discussed between his force commanders seemed to end up with Habyarimana and his advisers. While many of the troops making up UNAMIR were ill-trained and ill-equipped, some of the French military mission remaining in Kigali still saw the force as a threat. When Dallaire left for New York in March 1994 he received news that:
France had written to the Canadian ambassador to request my removal as force commander of UNAMIR. Apparently someone had been reading my reports and hadn’t liked the pointed references I had made to the presence of French officers among the Presidential Guard, especially in the light of the Guard’s close link to the Interahamwe militias. The French Ministry of Defence must have been aware of what was going on and was turning a blind eye. My bluntness had rattled the French enough for them to take the bold and extremely unusual step of asking for my dismissal. It was clear that Ottawa and the DPKO were still backing me, but I made a mental note to keep a close watch on the French in Rwanda, to continue to suspect their motives and to further probe the presence of French military advisers in the elite RGF (FAR) units and their possible involvement in the training of the Interahamwe.61
Diplomats in Kigali also reported observing French officers with Interahamwe units in a national park.62 These were the very killers who were getting ready to unleash the horror in the months to come. The Interahamwe ‘were easily recognizable from their uniform (kanga). It was one of the “open secrets” of Kigali that the militias were training in the national parks.’
Habyarimana continued to delay implementing the Arusha accords, specifically forming a new transitional government. Militants used the delay to continue arming, while the RPF began to do the same.63 Massacres were becoming increasingly common, with the civilian Tutsi population targeted, another sign of the explosion to come. Dallaire had reported back to UN headquarters of the slaughter on 17–18 and 30 November of around 55 men, women and children. He told his superiors in New York that, given the thorough planning, organization and cover-up that characterized such massacres, ‘We have no reason to believe that such occurrences could not and will not be repeated again in any part of this country where arms are prolific and political and ethnic tensions are prevalent.’
On the early autumn evening of 6 April 1994 President Habyarimana walked across the still warm Tanzanian tarmac to his plane for the short trip back to Kigali. He had just attended a regional summit of heads of state in Dar es Salaam, but things had not gone according to plan. The other regional leaders had politically ambushed the 57-year-old Rwandan president. President Ali Hassan Mwinyi of Tanzania, George Saitoti of Kenya, Cyprien Ntaryamira from Burundi and Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni had been champing at the bit to discuss Habyarimana’s failure to put a stable peace agreement into action in Rwanda. Habyarimana not only received the – probably expected – criticism from old rival Museveni in neighbouring Uganda, but also from his own Hutu neighbour, the new president of Burundi Cyprien Ntaryamira. Why, they repeatedly asked, had he not put the Arusha peace agreement into action in his country? The regional leaders concluded that such a failure was destabilizing the whole Great Lakes area, with refugees fleeing into their countries and militants travelling to Rwanda in search of a new war. Habyarimana faced a ‘solid wall of verbal criticism laced with implicit threats in case he failed to comply’. President Ali Hassan Mwinyi of Tanzania implored his Rwandan counterpart to bring an end to the ethnic bloodbath and terror taking hold of his country. ‘Now is the time to say “no” to a Bosnia on our doorstep. Now is the time to ensure that hostilities are not passed on to the children of Rwanda and Burundi,’ he told Habyarimana. Museveni even accompanied the Rwandan leader to the airport still badgering him to honour his promise to implement Arusha. He described the shell-shocked Juvénal as leaving the conference in no doubt that if he failed to put his own country in order, he would face ‘sanctions’.64
As he stepped on board his luxury executive jet, a Falcon 50, the gift of the French government, Habyarimana must have been a very worried man. One thing was certain; the Hutu militants would never buy the peace agreement, however it was packaged or whatever public relations effort was attached to it. Near to him sat longtime personal aide and intelligence chief Colonel Elie Sagatwa. Neither would have been looking forward to reporting the Dar es Salaam deal to Akazu colleagues on their return to Kigali.
With a show of generosity, even after the verbal battering he had received at the conference, the Rwandan president offered to give a ride to the Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira who was feeling tired and wanted to return to Bujumbura as soon as possible. No French jet had been given to him and his old propeller-driven plane promised a far less smooth and speedy ride. Habyarimana invited him on board to enjoy the Falcon’s hospitality and perhaps to do a little more diplomatic wrangling over a drink. At 6.50 p.m. the Falcon 50 set off from Tanzania carrying the two presidents, with a view to dropping Habyarimana off in Kigali before going on to Burundi with its guest passenger.
At 8.24 p.m. the Falcon jet began its descent through the night sky towards Kigali airport. Two red streaks of surface-to-air missiles flashed upwards to greet the returning Rwandan leader. One struck the fuel tank on the left side of the plane, creating a deadly fireball that lit up the night sky. The missile strike was to trigger an inferno that engulfed not just the ten passengers on the plane, but the whole nation where the wreckage landed.