Chapter 5

Retreat

As the wreckage of the crashed presidential plane lay burning brightly in the dark Rwandan night, ironically in the grounds of Habyarimana’s own lavishly equipped presidential palace, the Akazu swung its carefully nurtured plan for genocide into action. Within hours of the Rwandan dictator’s death, the presidential guard left their barracks and began methodically killing those on pre-planned lists. For France, the major political and military backer of the Habyarimana regime, there followed what seems at first glance to be a seismic policy shift. Instead of rushing more troops to Rwanda as it had over the past three years, Mitterrand’s government decided on a near total withdrawal of its military capability. However, this public retreat masked Mitterrand’s decision to support the new extremist Hutu government that seized control.

The authors of the attack on the president’s plane have yet to be found. The finger of blame was almost immediately laid at the door of Hutu extremists suspected of using the plane crash to initiate their planned genocidal ‘final solution’ once it was clear that Habyarimana had ‘sold them out’ by agreeing to implement the Arusha accords. The years since the crash have been marked by a number of inquiries of highly variable integrity and methodology. Two main inquiries have been launched by France, the November 2006 report of Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière¹, and that of Judge Marc Trevidic that gave its initial findings in January 2012. In January 2010 Jean Mutsinzi produced a report for the Rwandan government citing research especially commissioned by Cranford University Defence Academy in the UK. The later French National Assembly investigation into the role of France in Rwanda that took place in 1998 had also constructed detailed hypotheses of possible scenarios behind the crash. (For a fuller explanation of these highly controversial enquiries see chapter 10).

The French fascination with the crash is understandable. If Paris could prove that Kagame and the RPF were implicated, then its involvement with the regime would be validated. At one level Paris had every right to be involved with the Falcon-50. It was a French-made plane that had cost 60 million francs from the cooperation budget and was piloted by three French crew members – Jacky Héraud, Jean-Pierre Minaberry and Jean-Michel Perrine, all of whom perished in the crash.

The status and employment of the pilot, co-pilot and mechanic engendered some debate. Despite assurances from Paris that these were civilians hired purely for the specific job of flying the Falcon, some people suspected they were working for the French secret service as well as for Habyarimana. The Ministry of Cooperation paid to return the badly burned bodies of the French crew to Paris for funerals and justified the outlay on the grounds that the three dead men were ‘indirect technical helpers’ of the French government. Ambassador Martres later admitted that the crew had passed information on to him about the movements of the Rwandan head of state. This was the norm in other francophone African countries like Chad, where French crews working for its president routinely passed on vital information to the French secret services. On 14 June 1994, President Mitterrand awarded the three dead crew members the posthumous Legion of Honour, an unexpected action given the official declaration that these men were ‘civilians’.

The report by French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière relied upon evidence from several non credible witnesses including mercenary Paul Barril and RPF defectors, who later retracted their testimony or said that the French judge had manipulated their statements to bring a case against Kagame. The allegation was that he shot the plane down knowing that massacres and genocide would follow, gambling that in the ensuing conflict his forces would gain total military and political victory. It is a breathtaking charge, and depends on the reliability of these defectors’ testimony. Barril, who was in the pay of Agathe Habyarimana, was quick at the time to go on French television to accuse Kagame. In the days after his excited performance in front of France 2’s cameras on 28 June 1994, none of the supposed ‘proofs’ that he claimed justified his accusations materialized. The missile launcher, tapes of men speaking English with Belgian accents and satellite photographs all remained unseen.²

Cooperation minister Bernard Debré reported that French secret service surveillance showed that the RPF was ordered to begin advancing on Kigali on the very day of the assassination, 6 April. The remark showed the effort France was making to tap into RPF communications and its secret surveillance of actions in Rwanda. This makes it even more difficult to believe that Paris was unaware of the genocidal intentions of its Rwandan government partners.

A French military officer, Grégoire de Saint-Quentin, was one of the first people on the crash scene. He lived only 300 metres from the presidential palace where the wreckage of the Falcon-50 lay and had been alerted on hearing gunfire, which he attributed to the panicked reaction of the presidential guard. He reached the scene at 10.00 p.m., about an hour-and-a-half after the disaster had occurred and an unnamed Rwandan officer accompanied him. He searched until 3.00 a.m. for the bodies of the French crew members, and returned at 8.00 the next morning to try unsuccessfully to recover the plane’s black box. Over the next two days de Saint-Quentin returned to the presidential palace charged with evacuating Akazu head Agathe Habyarimana and her family. Four French soldiers were positioned as guards outside Habyarimana’s house on the morning after the crash, while the presidential guard escorted the family in and out.³

This instant French investigation had the blessing of the presidential guard, FAR and the extremists who controlled the city in the early days after the crash and before an interim government could take over. That the French were close to Hutu extremists like Colonel Théoneste Bagosora was evident from their ability to go freely into such a sensitive area, while Dallaire’s UNAMIR force was barred from access to the site, as were the Belgian UN peacekeepers controlling Kigali airport.

In the days following Habyarimana’s murder and the consequent start of the genocide, three other French nationals were killed in equally mysterious circumstances. Around 8 April, Chief Warrant Officer Alain Didot and his wife Gilda and Chief Warrant Officer Jean-Paul Maier were murdered. The bodies were found on the 12 and 13 April in Didot’s house and garden located near the parliament building occupied by the RPF. Didot had worked in Rwanda since 1992 as part of the Military Assistance Mission to the Rwandan gendarmerie and army. Maier had arrived in late 1993. The job entailed keeping French embassy communication equipment working, though it is unclear how much surveillance was also involved. At the French National Assembly inquiry in 1998 Colonel Bernard Cussac described the work of the two gendarmes as being in ‘radio transmission.’ Didot had fitted a large radio antenna onto the roof of his Kigali home and it is this, it was assumed, that led to his murder. The question remains if they had heard confidential conversations on this equipment which were not meant to be heard – and especially between the 6 and 8 April when it is suspected that they were killed. Had they heard information from Hutu extremists about the crash or from Bagosora, a man they were in regular contact with along with other Rwandan military personnel? According to Gilda’s parents, when they spoke to their son-in-law on 8 April he sounded tense and clearly upset and they remembered a voice in the background saying ‘hang up, hang up.’⁴.

The question of who killed the men has been further mired by events that followed. The bodies of the three were repatriated to France via the French base at Bangui in the Central African Republic. Here Maier’s body was viewed by a doctor and given the necessary death certificate. However, he was named as ‘John’ not ‘Rene,’ and his death was ascribed as ‘accidental’, despite the corpse being riddled with bullet wounds. The doctor who signed the certificate was Dr Michel Thomas – except this Doctor now says that the signature was forged and he had never prepared this document, which did not carry the official seal. Gilda Didot’s first death certificate was also ‘signed’ by Dr Thomas.

The question posed in an investigation by the French journal Libération in January 2013 is therefore who had ordered this fake death certificate and why? ‘Gaëtan Lana, brother of Gilda Didot, still remembers: “Shortly after the funeral, a senior official came to find my parents and had them sign a document in which they pledged never to begin an investigation into the death of my sister. At the time, my parents were devastated by grief, so they signed.”⁵

More bizarrely, the death certificates signed in CAR were dated 6 April – the day of the attack on the plane. It was only later that Gaëtan Lana received a new certificate from the Nantes prosecutor bearing a different date. The over-riding question, given no official inquiry was ever launched – indeed it would seem all questions relating to their murders were suppressed – is what did these radio operators know that made their demise so important and were they murdered precisely because of this? For Judge Marc Trevidic, the anomalies are such that this mystery is now one that is forming a central part of his current investigation into the crash.

The deaths of six French nationals were the trigger for Operation Amaryllis. Less than two hours after the crash, well-prepared and well-organized Hutu militias were on the streets of the capital setting up roadblocks and Colonel Bagosora seized effective control. By midnight, less than four hours after the crash, the first opposition official had been murdered. By midday on 7 April, the presidential guard had killed and sexually mutilated the body of the liberal prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. The 15 UNAMIR peacekeepers sent to protect her were then captured, though the five Ghanaians among them were released. The remaining ten Belgian soldiers were beaten and killed by machetes, bullets and grenades at the Kigali military camp. Rwandan soldiers had been taught by constant propaganda that just as France was ‘the saviour’, their previous Belgian colonial masters were in league with the RPF and Uganda. By murdering ten defenceless soldiers they planned to get Belgium to do what it had done in autumn 1990, namely withdraw.

On 8 April the French foreign ministry issued a statement. ‘In the face of the spread and worsening violence in Kigali’, it had been decided to launch a new limited military operation designed to ‘provide the security necessary for a possible evacuation of the French nationals’ in Rwanda.

Within 36 hours of Habyarimana’s death, the French government had decided to fly in a well-equipped armed force of paratroopers – Operation Amaryllis – with the sole objective of evacuating their people from Rwanda, namely French and foreign nationals, members of Habyarimana’s family and former government ministers. It was a remarkable volte-face by Mitterrand. In 1990 France had sent in troops to support and keep Habyarimana in power, again at a few days’ notice. Yet, after an expensive three-year campaign to keep Rwanda under the former president’s control, in a matter of hours a decision came via the chandeliers and velvet couches of the Élysée to abandon past policy and launch a full-scale evacuation.

A number of different interpretations can be given of why this happened. The Élysée’s stance was that its priority was to protect French citizens, though it claimed the same thing in 1990 when it sent troops in to stay. Admiral Lanxade, chief of staff to the French armed forces, later defended this new evacuation as the only possible policy. According to him, France could not send in a force to stop the genocide because it did not have the information at the time that it was taking place. He argued that although France could act rapidly to evacuate its nationals, within days of the threat to them, it did not have the means to put in place a deployment to stop the killing, though it later proved able to get such troops together to launch just such an intervention two-and-a-half months later. Lanxade reasoned that those who opposed French intervention in Rwanda would see any mission as a pro-Hutu one.⁶

However, these points do not add up. Given the constant warnings by human rights groups, RTLM hate radio broadcasts, the International Commission on Human Rights, regular intelligence reports from General Dallaire and Belgium, and ‘unofficial’ sources like Paul Barril working with Akazu members, it is difficult to believe that the French government did not know that the planned ‘massacres’ heralded the start of a wider-scale policy of ‘annihilation’. It was this knowledge that decided Paris to withdraw rather than bolster the FAR again. When Roussin was questioned on 13 April about ‘the planned and signalled’ ongoing massacres, which raised the question of how much the French executive knew about them beforehand, he refused to answer. It is probable that the French government realized that its allies in the Habyarimana government were hell bent on genocide and that Operation Amaryllis was an effort to save France’s reputation before the whole country descended into an inferno of killing. By 13 April the RPF was already expressing the view that the killing taking place was indeed genocide, a planned and systematic attempt to exterminate a whole ethnic group. If the RPF understood this, it is difficult to believe that France, which was so involved in the Rwandan situation, did not. In addition, the speed with which Operation Amaryllis was started showed that they knew that the situation was far graver this time than it had been during the previous years of massacres and civil unrest. With more than 15,000 troops in Africa, France could intervene quite suddenly if it needed to and if there were a political will in Paris to do so. Indeed, when the political will did change two months later, in June, France was very quick to put together just such an intervention force – Operation Turquoise.

A report by an international panel of experts later concluded that ‘The French government had unrivalled influence at the very highest levels of the Rwandan government and Rwandan military. They were in a position to insist that attacks on the Tutsi must cease, and they chose never to exert that influence.’⁷ It was inconceivable to Mitterrand and the French military that they should now turn on their former Rwandan government allies, with the anglophone RPF the major beneficiary of any such policy. Any return to the Arusha accords would mean a power sharing government with Kagame and his RPF. Paris may have reasoned that it was better to let the renewed civil war, even with its massacres and/or genocide, continue to completion, after which it was likely that the Hutu majority would still hold power. What was politically expedient was to avoid being sucked into the Rwandan carnage, while hoping for and indeed secretly supporting the best-case scenario – victory for its former pupils in the Habyarimana regime.

Lanxade’s final argument that an intervention would be seen as bias in favour of the Hutu camp is equally flawed. Mitterrand had ordered French troops to intervene in Africa on numerous occasions in the past and in Rwanda in the previous four years without worrying about how its action would be construed.

Michel Roussin, showing no conceivable embarrassment, told the National Assembly that ‘France could not be Africa’s policeman’. He insisted that Paris could not and would not intervene in the renewed civil war now under way in Rwanda, with RPF troops in Kigali under attack from government forces and widespread massacres already taking place. Hours after Roussin’s announcements in Paris, 190 French paratroopers landed at Kigali airport for the start of Operation Amaryllis. Despite declaring that the intervention would be discreet and strictly neutral, Roussin conceded that Agathe Habyarimana and her family would be airlifted to Paris on 9 April.

At the UN in New York, the Rwandan ambassador got his French counterpart to say that the presidential guard now controlled Kigali airport and any attempt to mount a military intervention, especially by Belgium, would be met by force. However, he added that French troops would be welcome.

Publicly, French government figures suddenly became loquacious about the tiny African country. After barely one speech each year mentioning Rwanda, as France attempted to keep its Rwandan military intervention secret from 1990 to 1993, politicians were now lining up to show their concern about the situation and making five media calls a day. Citing a ‘disaster in which violence and hatred have reached unbearable limits’, and ‘in which horror has no limits’, government ministers told their people that France was ‘disconcerted’. Foreign Minister Alain Juppé reminded French people that ‘we had already done quite a lot for peace to return to Rwanda between both parties’ by supporting the Arusha accords and by using a military presence to help bring a peaceful outcome to the talks.⁸ This was at odds with the official view the Élysée had pushed since 1990 that its troops had only ever been in Rwanda to protect its own citizens. Juppé now decided the time was right to claim an extra benefit from their presence in Rwanda during the past three years.

The view from the RPF was very different. In his office in the still shell-blasted building housing the Rwandan parliament, Dennis Polisi, former RPF ambassador to Brussels, in April 1994 made no effort to hide his disgust at the French attitude.

I was in Brussels when the plane went down. I had been touring East Africa just before, advising the heads of state to [put] pressure [on] Habyarimana to accept Arusha and the peace plan. I was at Uccle in Brussels and, at a press conference on 12 April, we [the RPF] issued a statement that said any French troops staying in Rwanda would be treated as enemies and we would fight them. Kagame made the same statement in Rwanda.

We saw France as being in league with the genocidaire. We certainly did not see them trying to help anyone. France knew all about the genocide, its military intelligence knew about the preparation and the people who must be killed. I think they see the problem for Rwanda and in other African countries as a problem of tribes – so if this Tutsi minority disappeared then so would the problem.

He added, by way of conclusion after a moment’s reflection, ‘They are cynical, and criminal.’⁹

The French forces that flew into Kigali were bent purely on an ordered evacuation. Indeed, such was their rush to get to Rwanda from their bases in Africa, that the mission did not even inform UNAMIR commander General Romeo Dallaire of its intention.

Dallaire, not surprisingly, was ‘livid’. Since UNAMIR had lost control of the airport, he was concerned that the RPF could attempt to shoot the French planes down. Equally, he feared that the Belgian rescue mission, launched like Amaryllis to bring home its nationals, might suffer the same fate as its ten peacekeepers the presidential guard had already butchered. Dallaire also questioned the French motive for Amaryllis. ‘Were the French going to get involved once again with the fight or were they really only here to evacuate their expatriates?’ he asked himself.¹⁰

Dallaire was left in no doubt after battling through the corpse-strewn streets of the burning capital.

My conversation with Colonel [Henri] Poncet [Amaryllis commander] was curt and the French commander showed no interest in cooperating with us. This unhappy exchange was an indication of how the French evacuation task force, Operation Amaryllis, would continue to behave with UNAMIR. … We had heard from the MilObs at the airport that the French had already evacuated a number of Rwandans and that twelve members of the presidential family were part of this group, but Poncet insisted to me that he was here only to evacuate expatriates and “white people”. I told him that within two hours there should be a truce in place but that there was no guarantee from the RGF that they would observe it. At that Poncet asked to be excused and, without waiting for a response from me, simply turned his back and walked off. I decided then that Luc [Marchal] would handle all future dealings with this rude Frenchman.¹¹

During the night of 8 April five French C160 transport aircraft arrived in Kigali. The FAR allowed them to land after a French officer asked for vehicles blocking the runway to be removed. The next day Akazu head Agathe Habyarimana and 11 members of her family were flown out to a warm welcome in Paris.

In Kigali, Dallaire witnessed examples of Western ‘humanitarian’ assistance.

I passed by an assembly point where French soldiers were loading expatriates into vehicles. Hundreds of Rwandans had gathered to watch all these white entrepreneurs, NGO staff and their families making their fearful exits, and as I wended my way through the crowd, I saw how aggressively the French were pushing black Rwandans seeking asylum out of the way. A sense of shame overcame me. The whites, who had made their money in Rwanda and who had hired so many Rwandans to be their servants and labourers, were now abandoning them. Self-interest and self-preservation ruled.¹²

A Belgian journalist, Els de Temmerman, was equally horrified at what he saw.

I arrived in Kigali on 10 April, with a plane sent by the World Food Program. There were fifty journalists following French and Belgian troops. I was in a French convoy. At some point, we witnessed the murder of six persons in front of us. The journalists begged the soldiers to intervene; we were crying. ‘It is not our mandate’, one of the soldiers replied. I was so revolted and disgusted … people were laughing in front of the mountain of corpses.¹³

UNAMIR ran into more trouble with the unilateral French operation. A heated row developed after the French used UNAMIR jeeps parked at the airport to evacuate their nationals and Akazu members. Dallaire complained bitterly that:

Seth [RPF liaison officer] angrily told me that the French had been using UNAMIR vehicles to move Rwandans of known extremist background to the airport, where they were flown out of the country. He also alleged that the French had opened fire on a number of occasions from these vehicles. It was absolutely unacceptable for the French to use UNAMIR this way, putting my own troops at risk and confusing everyone about what our blue helmets meant, and I told them [the RPF] that Luc [Marchal] was arguing this point with the French commander.¹⁴

The UNAMIR commander registered his disgust to a Security Council adviser who had telephoned him late on 10 April, denouncing the French for stealing his UN vehicles from the airport.¹⁵ Poncet, the French commander, countered that while they had taken the transport they had put French flags over the UNAMIR markings. Eleven years later, Poncet, now a four-star general commanding the French intervention force in the Ivory Coast, was suspended from his position after being suspected of ordering a captured ‘bandit’ to be murdered by his peacekeeping troops.¹⁶

The situation in Kigali was one of unimaginable fear and violence. The drunken Interahamwe manning the roadblocks stopped, searched and butchered those they took to be Tutsi or on ‘death lists’ they had been given. The presidential guard drove around the capital breaking into homes belonging to ‘political enemies’ or Tutsi. Whole families were chopped to pieces and their bodies left where they fell to provide an unexpected feast for the street dogs. By contrast, inside the regal setting of the French embassy, matters were tense but spirits high as the new post-Habyarimana Hutu regime was in the process of being chosen.

It was an incredible event. With representatives of Mitterrand’s administration playing host, an interim government was formed in beautifully furnished rooms filled with smiling and laughing Hutu extremists later to be condemned by the UN tribunal in Arusha for genocide. Their French hosts welcomed Froduald Karamira, Justin Mugenzi, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, Hassan Ngeze, Ferdinand Nahimana, Jérôme Bicamumpaka, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and Théoneste Bagosora, as well as other genocidaire who no doubt drank a few toasts to the new regime once the wrangling over their various ministerial portfolios had been completed.¹⁷ Ambassador Marlaud is reported to have told a friend from Belgium that ‘it is certainly the first time in my life that I have put together a government,’¹⁸ albeit one that was to organize and carry out the systematic extermination of its own people. Marlaud must also have noticed that, despite the proviso in the Arusha accords for a broad-based government representing all ethnic and political groups, all the members of this new interim government were Hutus and political extremists. While Marlaud suggested that Arusha prime minister designate Faustin Twagiramungu head the new interim government instead of Jean Kambanda, he was quite content to accept the latter.¹⁹

A Rwandan named Gakumba described the surreal but fearsome atmosphere inside this western embassy when he fled there to escape the killing going on in the streets outside.

Imagine my incredulity to see the people who were gathered in the French embassy! All the high-ups from the former regime, and their families, the ministers from the President’s [Habyarimana’s] party, his in-laws. There was the director of Radio Mille Collines and his assistants, well known for their exhortations to commit massacres. … On the way to the embassy, at dozens of roadblocks, I saw people sitting on the ground, arms tied behind their backs, in the process of being killed. … I don’t know what these powerful people from the [Hutu hard-line] regime had to fear, since I saw them going in and out of the embassy with their FAR escorts to go round parts of the city where the massacres were taking place. In due course they would have meetings in the French embassy to discuss how the situation [the genocide] was developing; they took pleasure in totting up the total number of victims, or complaining that such-and-such a person had not been killed, or that such-and-such a part of the city had not been cleaned [all the Tutsis killed]. They were boasting about the results of their plans and the exploits of the militias. The night I spent there was one of the most agonizing of my life.

The following day the French ambassador [Jean-Michel Marlaud] began the evacuation of all these people to the airport. First on the list of people earmarked for evacuation were certain people well known as heads of militia gangs.²⁰

Another witness was Joseph Ngarambe, a 40-year-old member of the opposition PSD. He had escaped to the embassy after running into a French diplomat whom he knew. On arrival he found around 200 Rwandans, including women and children.

I was very surprised to meet all the members of the Akazu, that is to say the entourage of Habyarimana. Certainly, all the politicians who had found refuge at the embassy did not have the same degree of responsibility – Habyarimana had attacked some of them – but those directly responsible for the massacres were certainly there; for example, the Minister for Health, Casimir Bizimungu,²¹ one of the pillars of the regime. And Ferdinand Nahimana, MRND ideologue and founder of radio RTLM ‘the radio of death’ which made appeals for massacres. Also there was minister of planning Augustin Ngirabatware. In this crowd, people who were not part of the intimate group around Habyarimana were small in number.

The ambassador proceeded in the destruction of the archives. Dossiers, files, all were burnt before our eyes. Eight Rwandans, among them a pregnant woman came to ask for refuge at the embassy, which refused to open its doors. It was horrible to see.

On the 12th [April] at dawn, someone came to wake us to announce the evacuation. Thirty minutes later, a French soldier made the first roll call: it was the names of Habyarimana’s key men. A group of VIPs presented itself at the final moment to take advantage of the evacuation. Among them, ex-Prime Minister Sylvestre Nsanzimana, a member of the MRND, and his family. They were boarded directly onto the lorry. Around 10 o’clock, the minister Casimir Bizimungu went forward at the second roll call. We left while the eight Rwandans and about 20 embassy guards were asking for asylum. It should be known that generally the embassy personnel were Tutsi. But the embassy did not evacuate any member of the administrative staff. Of course, between them they had worked for a very long time at the embassy. They were not considered as friends of France. The plane took off from Kigali at 1.00 p.m. and arrived at Bujumbura in Burundi at 1.30 p.m. The Burundian authorities gazed with hatred as the figures of the Rwandan politicians compromised in the genocide disembarked.²²

Casimir Bizimungu certainly made his feelings plain when he saw Joseph Ngarambe at the embassy, snarling, ‘What is he doing here?’ All the other leaders of his liberal opposition PSD party had already been murdered. Bizimungu was clearly upset at this lack of completion, quite apart from him turning up in what Prunier called ‘an embassy the Akazu now referred to as their own’. According to a list André Guichaoua submitted, the vast majority of the 178 people evacuated from the French embassy were members of Habyarimana’s regime or Hutu extremist network. Ambassador Marlaud later protested about this but only managed to name two other opposition politicians who sought refuge at the embassy – Pascal Ndengejeho and Alphonse Nkubito.

While ministers of the newly-formed interim government smiled, compared notes on which ‘enemies’ had been killed and enjoyed traditional French hospitality at the embassy, the story was less rosy for others who were holed up in French property trying to stay alive. Vénuste Kayimahe, a 45-year-old Tutsi, had been a faithful and diligent employee at the French Cultural Centre for a number of years, where he worked as the projectionist and exhibition organizer.²³

‘It was a very big centre, Mitterrand himself visited twice’, said Vénuste, ‘as well as [former president] Giscard [d’Estaing]. Before the start of the war in 1990, everything went well there and we all got on with each other.’ Once the war came things changed for Vénuste. All Tutsis were suspected of being RPF sympathizers and he found himself in constant arguments at work with his French and Rwandan Hutu colleagues and bosses.

When I heard about [Habyarimana’s] plane crash on RTLM radio, my first feeling was that things were going to change very badly. I thought the genocide of before [1960s and 1970s] would happen. During that night [6/7 April] I heard gunfire near the centre so I stayed there with my wife, two of our children and a niece. During the following day many journalists telephoned the centre to talk about what was happening but the ambassador was not around and I ended up talking to them instead. All the French staff stayed away on the 7th.

I phoned my French manager, Madame Anne Cros and asked her to send soldiers to take me to where my other children were. She said that it was a period of great insecurity and I would have to try by myself. When I rang Monsieur Cuingnet [head of the civil and cooperation mission], he told me he would send soldiers to get us out. When they arrived they just laughed when I asked them to take us to safety. They told me, ‘our mission is not to protect you but the building’. We tried to find a place to hide in the theatre. The French soldiers now occupied the library and conference hall, and they had weapons, including rocket launchers, set up about the place. I helped to cook for them, and shared the food but when I asked again if they would help accompany me to find my other children they refused. It was ‘not their mission’.

When the French soldiers came to go they looted all they could, including telecommunication equipment, monitors, even televisions. As I tried to get onto the truck with a friend we were pushed off. The soldiers warned us not to follow them. Later that afternoon Belgian soldiers arrived at the centre led by a French captain, who showed the soldiers where to set up guns. Then he left. The Belgian soldiers, led by a Colonel, promised not to leave us there. Their mission I heard afterwards was to collect the Belgian foreigners to take to the airport. They took us to a French primary school, then on to the airport in the Belgian convoy, with UN and Belgian soldiers accompanying us.

I think the French were criminals. They abandoned me to my enemies. I begged them to bring my children to me here or to a safe place.

A key allegation Vénuste made concerned French troops rearming the Interahamwe. ‘At one point the Interahamwe asked the French soldiers for more grenades. They said, “we have finished our food [grenades] will you give us some more?” And they did.’ This was perhaps not surprising given the huge airlifts of munitions from Paris to Rwanda over the past three years, but to restock the very killers who were currently roaming the streets murdering at will was appalling. Such behaviour goes beyond the genuinely friendly relations the two sets of armed troops showed to one another and that Vénuste also witnessed.

At the roadblocks there were friendly greetings exchanged in French between the Interahamwe and the French troops – “how are you” and “how’s it going?” A young Russian woman who managed to get airlifted to Nairobi told me the French trucks just went over the bodies of those massacred and made no effort to go round them. Only two young French soldiers seemed to be affected by what was happening. They told me they were frightened by the massacres going on.

Vénuste, a kindly, intelligent, well-spoken man, had worked for the French for 20 years. His reward was to be abandoned, along with his family, to the militia and their machetes. He suspected this was purely because of his ethnic background.

Charles, another Tutsi worker at the cultural centre, lived several hundred metres from his work. On the morning of 7 April he rang his French employers several times pleading for help. After watching from his window as women and children were shot and hacked to death at nearby roadblocks he was in no doubt that the same fate awaited him if he stayed. His employers told him to ‘make do’.

At the entrance to the apartment block, fifty of his neighbours were lying in a pool of blood. He managed to make it to the cultural centre, only to be told by French paratroopers on the morning of the 12th that they were leaving ‘because we’ve got all the French people out’.

Charles and the other Rwandan employees at the Centre were left to fend for themselves. The French paratroopers had gone as far as to smash a hole in the false ceiling of the library, in which they told the Rwandans that they could hide. Outside, on the streets of Kigali, there were militia roadblocks every 200 metres: hundreds of drunk, drugged, screaming Hutu gang members were slaughtering every Tutsi they could find, and any Hutu suspected of sympathizing with them.²⁴

Like Vénuste, Charles was rescued by Belgian troops, who came to use the centre as a base for their own evacuation. Crouching under tarpaulins in the back of trucks, he was smuggled out to the airport.

Ambassador Marlaud’s defence was that he had never been asked at any time about what to do with employees at the embassy and cultural centre, so no decision was made on the matter.²⁵ Cuingnet, who told Vénuste at the time that he had no power to intervene to save him by evacuation, declared that ‘we were not put in charge of saving the Rwandans’.

On 11 April a telegram arrived from Paris confirming that Rwandan nationals who were recruited locally and were part of the embassy staff should be evacuated. Yet, despite this order, Pierre Nsanzimana was the only Tutsi employee to be evacuated with his family; all the others were abandoned, which suggests that the French staff and members of Operation Amaryllis discriminated against them.

The later 1998 French National Assembly inquiry into the matter concluded that ‘the treatment given to the family of Habyarimana was far more favourable than that given to the Tutsi employees at the French representative offices, the embassy, the cultural centre and the Cooperation Mission.’²⁶ Despite this admission, the inquiry stopped short of asking why a bias was so apparent, and why French soldiers and diplomats ignored the pleas of their longstanding Tutsi work force. Were the French soldiers and staff ‘too rushed’ or concerned about lack of space in the lorries and planes? Or did it betray a lack of sympathy and even racism towards the Tutsi?

Some of the more gung-ho French soldiers’ attitude certainly betrayed a bias towards their former comrades in the Rwandan government. Colonel Jean Balch, while recognizing the danger that justified the evacuation of foreign nationals, declared that closing the embassy was ‘a little hasty’. He stated that the RPF was not necessarily going to win at that moment and that the FAR were resisting well the attack of the Inkotanyi (RPF).²⁷ Balch felt it would take only a few more French military advisers to reverse the situation, so that ‘June 1992 and February 1993 could be “replayed” exactly again in April 1994. In effect, instead of running, the French should do as before – and repel the RPF.’²⁸

Ambassador Marlaud had one last important job to do before locking up the embassy and heading for home – to shred and burn all documents and paperwork gathered over the previous decades. Those entering the embassy afterwards spoke of two rooms filled with destroyed evidence of the French role in the Habyarimana regime. Some of the last footage of the operation showed three concerned French soldiers carefully placing Marlaud’s dog in the evacuees’ plane. It was obviously not a canine of Tutsi origin.

As the new interim government was being formed in the French embassy, Amaryllis commander Colonel Poncet sent troops to a local orphanage to rescue the children and their helpers. St Agathe’s orphanage, which the president’s wife founded for the children of FAR soldiers killed in the war had, according to the French pressure group Survie, been subject to some important ‘personnel’ changes before 6 April. Hutu militants and members of the president’s entourage had been put into the orphanage as ‘helpers’ and were now ready to be evacuated as ‘staff members’.²⁹

The orphanage driver was alleged to have helped in the ethnic ‘whittling down’ of the children’s original carers. The day after the plane crash all female helpers had been gathered in the orphanage common room. Militiamen entered and the driver went from one carer to another pointing out who was Hutu and who was Tutsi. The Tutsi women were then taken outside and killed – in one case a woman called Alice suffered a horrifically slow death after she was deemed not to deserve a quick end.³⁰ Seven Tutsi helpers at the orphanage were murdered. They were quickly replaced by ‘killers’ who now wanted to head into a luxury exile in France and the West.

Five days later the French troops arrived; 60 children were evacuated, plus 34 adults, now mostly men betraying a very high ‘care to child’ ratio. When the refugees arrived in France on 12 April the male ‘carers’ disappeared. It is difficult to believe that the French did not know who these men were, given the thorough checks that took place before anyone was allowed to embark and that the men did not seem to know the children. The French military’s response was that they were told that some of the children were to be adopted in France, but they did not have time to sort out which children this applied to and which were staying. Given that every place on the plane was at a premium, it is surprising that more checks were not made on carers and children and that the orphanage ‘staff’ were allowed to disappear on landing in France. According to pressure group Survie, the only possible reason such children were evacuated was as a front to save the adults – whom it alleged were heavily implicated in the genocide.

By contrast, the attempt to evacuate the children of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who had been murdered at the very beginning of the genocide, raised other concerns about French impartiality. The children had hidden after their mother was killed and, despite militia and presidential guard efforts to find them, they were rescued by UNAMIR Captain Mbaye Diagne and taken to the Hotel Mille Collines. The problem then was to get them out of the country. On trying to board a French plane at the airport they were denied political asylum and told to go away. It was left to French Africanist André Guichaoua to hide the terrified and emotionally traumatized children and smuggle them on board a plane after distracting French officers overseeing the evacuation.

Tutsis throughout Kigali fled to places where they felt they could gain safety and protection; the Amahoro stadium on the outskirts of Kigali, which UNAMIR soldiers guarded, was one such refuge. Many thousands were stopped on the way and peremptorily slaughtered. Another 2500 refugees, including 400 children, fled to the École technique officielle (ETO), a technical school run by Catholic Salesian priests a few kilometres southeast of Kigali and considered safe because a detachment of Belgian UNAMIR troops was billeted there. While most of those who fled were Tutsis, a few opposition politicians or critics of the government also came. They were confident that UNAMIR, given its peacekeeping mandate, would protect them.

The ETO consisted of a number of buildings surrounded by a fence. Under Captain Luc Lemaire, the UNAMIR force of 90 had pitched camp in its grounds. But the foreign soldiers were as anxious and afraid as those who had come to be protected by them. After the murder of ten Belgium UNAMIR troops on 7 April they realized that they were possible targets for the militia, which surrounded the ETO the following day.

The position of the Rwandans inside the ETO’s fences was far worse. Many were refused entry to the actual buildings by the Belgian peacekeepers and had to camp outside. The situation became more desperate after 8 April when the Belgium government decided to evacuate its nationals. On 11 April, a French contingent from Operation Amaryllis arrived at the ETO to prepare the expatriates to leave. A priest noted that the French came because their relations with local people were good while the Belgians were afraid of local hostility, but the French troops, in red berets and with tricolours emblazoned on their vehicles, caused the Tutsi refugees much anxiety. Some felt they had come to replace their Belgian UN counterparts. Others felt that they were there merely to evacuate foreign nationals. Many feared they were in league with the genocidaire.³¹ The troops from Amaryllis were certainly able to go to and from the site without any objection from the surrounding Interahamwe who were baying for blood.

The French troops brought expatriates from the nearby area to the ETO site ready to evacuate them en masse. However, no one told the frantic Tutsi refugees inside the ETO that they were to be left to a certain, horrific death. Slowly the truth of what was happening dawned on the watching masses.

Yves, a survivor of the massacre, related:

We saw the French soldiers come back at about 12.00 or 1.00 p.m., in about five jeeps and three Hitachi minibuses. It was clear that something was going to happen … the French and UNAMIR soldiers began piling these [white] people into the lorries. When they had finished they came and told us to go and eat. We refused, because we had just realized it was a trick to distract us, so that they could get away quickly without our knowledge.³²

Except for some Rwandan clergy and nuns, those evacuated were white.

It was difficult to ascertain what the criteria for inclusion might have been. For instance Boniface Ngulinzira, who was an immediate target of the extremists, had been under UNAMIR guard since before the 7th [April]. He was brought with his family to ETO by the peacekeepers, but they offered him no further protection. He was not taken, although he asked the French troops to evacuate him, and was killed in the massacre later that day.³³

The journey for those few who did manage to get on one of the trucks in the French convoy was still filled with danger. Emmanuel and his wife, both Rwandans working for UNDP, eventually managed to convince a UNAMIR officer that they should be evacuated. ‘ETO was occupied by Belgian soldiers,’ Emmanuel wrote later,

but we were evacuated by the French. The streets of Kicukiro [in Kigali] were already littered with corpses as we left. As we drove past, cries of ‘vive la France!’ rang out from the crowds lining the roads. We’d been divided into two convoys. The first convoy went via Rubirizi to the airport. The second, our convoy, went to the French lycée. When we got there the soldiers, probably French, wouldn’t let us in. We stayed outside under the amused gaze of the soldier guarding the entrance. Not far from there, at the entrance to the Kigali sports centre, there was an Interahamwe roadblock. They came to threaten us, saying they were going to kill us in the night.

In the evening at around 6.00 p.m., the soldier guarding the entrance came up and told us to ‘clear off’. I answered, ‘I’d rather be shot than killed with a machete.’ He burst out laughing and left. It was as if they were mocking us.

Emmanuel and 12 other terrified refugees spent the night in hiding; the next day, as ten more lorries of evacuees arrived, they took advantage of the confusion to slip into the lycée. They were later evacuated.³⁴

The French military returned to the ETO around 1.00 p.m. and the Belgians seized their chance of a ‘safe’ escort provided by the red berets to pull out of the area. The Interahamwe waiting nearby began shouting and blowing their whistles once news of UNAMIR’s withdrawal came through. They knew their killing spree was only minutes away. In a desperate bid to keep the Belgian force and their French compatriots at the ETO, many Rwandan refugees threw themselves onto the road in front of vehicles or tried to clamber on board. The soldiers hit them to make them move and fired into the air, terrifying the already traumatized crowd.

One survivor of the later massacre told African Rights investigators, ‘There was already a group of Interahamwe beside another exit dancing, shouting and beating drums while UNAMIR soldiers [and their French escort] were going through the main gate. They were delivering us into the hands of the Interahamwe who intended to massacre us.’³⁵

Those who had fled to the ETO were, even at the last moment, unprepared for the sudden withdrawal. None had a chance to flee, for Interahamwe invaded the buildings even before the dust from the European convoy’s vehicles had settled. Militiamen armed with machetes, clubs, spears, grenades and guns attacked the helpless crowd of Tutsis. The killers taunted their victims with jibes such as ‘Where’s your UNAMIR? They’ve abandoned you, haven’t they?’

Thousands were hacked to death in the resulting carnage. The French and Belgian UNAMIR force could have escorted the refugees to the Amahoro stadium where UNAMIR peacekeepers were still in place protecting those who had fled there; or, given that the Belgian force had been ordered to withdraw from UNAMIR, other peacekeepers like a Ghanaian or Bangladeshi contingent could have taken their place guarding the ETO. At the very least, those fleeing should have been warned so that they could try to escape before the Interahamwe sealed all the routes around the area.

The French force held the key to this situation. Clearly popular with the Hutu militants who cheered them as they went about their evacuation, the French also had vital lines of communication with members of the new interim regime and military figures like Bagosora. If they had explicitly stated, given what they saw when reaching ETO, that the refugees were not to be harmed, it is difficult to believe that such would not have been the case. That no account seems to have been taken of the consequences of the withdrawal is incredible.

Belgian priest Father Louis Peeters condemned UNAMIR’s withdrawal as full of ‘ridiculous excuses’, arguing that Dallaire should have taken stronger action. ‘The soldiers were well aware that they were going to leave. The French and Belgian soldiers could have done something. The French were quite influential in Rwandese politics. As they were there during the evacuation, they could easily have escorted the refugees to the Amahoro stadium. Unfortunately they did not.’³⁶

Apparently no French commander radioed back to his headquarters about the situation at the ETO, asking for new orders to help save the refugees. More than 2000 died at this location.

According to Human Rights Watch:

The French were in a position to save Tutsi and others at risk with relatively little difficulty, and yet they chose to save very few. French troops moved easily around the city, even when transporting Rwandans. Militias cheered them and gave them the thumbs up sign, while they greeted the Belgian soldiers with a gesture of cutting their throats. In some cases, Belgian soldiers even removed insignia that identified them as Belgians, and passed themselves off as French. In at least one case, French embassy personnel made no response to pleas for help from a Tutsi employee and in another they refused assistance to a Hutu prosecutor [François-Xavier Nsanzuwera] well known for his opposition to Habyarimana. French soldiers on one occasion baulked at escorting some Rwandan clergy to a safe haven but in the end gave in to pressure from UNAMIR soldiers and did so.³⁷

Investigators later asked an unnamed French government official whether pressure from Mitterrand’s government had brought about changes in the policies of the genocidal interim regime. He replied, ‘What pressure? There was no pressure.’³⁸

French authorities proved they could influence and stop the Interahamwe killing when they intervened to save refugees at Hotel Mille Collines in Kigali during the first month of the genocide. The story was later given the full ‘Hollywood treatment’ in the film Hotel Rwanda which in true blockbuster fashion did not allow actual events to get in the way of telling its highly subjective and inaccurate story. The hotel, located 100 metres from the French Cultural Centre in downtown Kigali, had become a sanctuary for Tutsi and political refugees as the militia went ‘to work’ outside its gates. It was protected initially by being named a UNAMIR protected place – and indeed Colonel Moigny from the UN force was billeted there from 7 April to the end of the genocide. The hotel soon became a pawn in the ‘game’ of prisoner exchange with Tutsi refugees being traded by the extremist government for its own ‘people’ held in RPF controlled areas of the city. The hotel owners, the Belgian group Sabena were also keen that their property was saved from destruction. A crisis group, set up within days of the start of the killing, made hundreds of faxed appeals to the UNSC, foreign diplomats, NGO’s and world media to highlight the peril faced and pleading for intervention. Importantly, the hotel also became home on its 5th floor to a French army communications base.

When Paul Rusesabagina, an activist with the MDR party, arrived at the hotel from Hotel Diplomates where he had been working, to assist the management at Mille Collines in mid April, the crisis committee had already made incredible efforts to keep the Interahamwe at bay and to highlight the danger. According to Tatien Ndorimana,³⁹ Rusesabagina, the later ‘hero’ and hotel ‘saviour’ in the Hollywood film, actually cut off all the phones and fax access in the hotel except for in his own office on 18 April. Ndorimana kept the faxes he sent as evidence that it was the crisis committee, not the hotel manager who alerted the world to their plight.

While Rusesabagina has taken all the accolades for his ‘heroism’ in keeping the Interahamwe from invading the hotel, it’s clear the militia had other reasons for not attacking the hotel. Prior to the genocide Rusesabagina was on good terms with many of the eventual leaders of the extremist genocidal militia and government such as Georges Rutaganda, Theoneste Bagosora, Joseph Nzirorera and Edward Karamera. He was, by his own account, then able to call on these men for favours to keep the hotel safe from the killers they controlled.

According to written testimony given by businessman and Vice President of the Interahamwe Georges Rutaganda,⁴⁰ a friend of Rusesabagina in the pre-genocide days, it was thanks to him that the hotel refugees were kept fed and watered during the period they were effectively imprisoned. Rutaganda alleged the hotel manager had come to him to beg for provisions from his warehouse, which were eventually gifted without payment after Rutaganda felt sorry for the plight of those in the hotel. He later expressed his astonishment and disgust when Rusesabagina refused to testify for the defence at his trial at the International Criminal Court – Rutaganda assumed he did not want to besmirch his new-found Hollywood celebratory status.

Political pressure from Paris also played an important role in keeping the Interahamwe from overrunning the hotel. Libération journalist Alain Frilet pointed out that ‘Paris, of course, declared itself powerless in the face of the killings. But it’s not contested that the head of the Élysée’s African Cell, Bruno Delaye, succeeded…in personally intervening with the head of the Rwandan armed forces [Bizimungu] to prevent Hutu militiamen slaughtering the refugee personalities at Hotel Mille Collines.’⁴¹ A civil servant at the Quai d’Orsay commented that the ‘prompt intervention…showed to what extent Paris can still influence the unfolding events.’⁴² Despite the efforts of the hotel crisis committee, it was clear that the ‘life-and-death decision lay, as always, with the killers, and tellingly in this case, with their French patrons.’⁴³

Rusesabagina gained a raft of awards after the film came out, portraying him as some kind of ‘Rwandan Schindler’. Survivors from the horror, who according to Tatien Ndorimana were never consulted when Hotel Rwanda was made, have watched in disbelief as Rusesabagina has garnered the plaudits for his version. Dallaire has given his own verdict, describing the film as ‘junk’. “When people use the term Hollywood in a pejorative way, (it’s because) they produce junk like that. He attacked the film as both ‘skewed’ and ‘revisionist.’⁴⁴ Rusesabagina has in the past decade become a highly political figure in the Rwandan opposition, setting up his own charity and political party, the PDR-Ihumure, despite charges that he preaches genocide ideology and supports the FDLR, a terrorist group of former Hutu killers now in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

On 6 June 2008 Rusesabagina gave an ‘expert witness’ statement in defence of four Rwandan genocide suspects fighting extradition from the UK back to Kigali. When questioned about accounts that while in charge of the hotel he had charged guests to stay and indeed thrown out those who were unable to do so, the former manager denied this had been the case. He was then shown three faxes on this point – two from refugees and one from Sabena which instructed him not to pressure those who could not pay. He continued to deny he had been paid, though in an earlier article in The Washington Post by film-maker Terry George, he accepted that he received money from the refugees. Rusesabagina also intimated that there was no systematic government driven genocide and that those manning the roadblocks doing the killing were supporters of Paul Kagame – comments the judge called ‘worthless’ given the immensity of proof against this revisionism.

In a highly scathing summing up, the Westminster Magistrates Court District Judge Anthony Evans described Rusesabagina not as an independent expert, but rather a man ‘with a background strongly allied to the extremist Hutu faction, and as such cannot be considered as independent and reasoned. I am satisfied that no weight can be attached to this evidence.’⁴⁵ A number of events in North America where Rusesabagina has been a guest speaker have drawn noisy protests by Rwandan survivor groups angered by his ‘revisionism’ of what happened at the hotel and indeed his political and ideological views since, which they view as both dangerous and ethnically divisive.

While refugees at Mille Colline and throughout Rwanda continued to try to find a place to hide and stay alive another kind of refugee was arriving in Paris. Agathe Habyarimana, the late President’s wife, flew into France with her family to be welcomed with a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a cheque from the Ministry of Cooperation for $40,000, money designated for ‘urgent assistance for Rwandan refugees’. Bernard Debré, former minister of Cooperation, asserted that President Mitterrand remained ‘very attached to former President Habyarimana and his family, and to everything that was part of the old regime.

In an interview on Belgian television channel RTBF on 25 April, an emotional Agathe Habyarimana condemned the RPF, which she alleged had shot down the presidential plane. ‘I am sure that the Good Lord will avenge our family,’ she added.⁴⁶