Chapter 6
As the giant French C-160 transport planes curved away from Kigali airport carrying soldiers from Operation Amaryllis and a cargo of foreign businessmen, aid workers, ex-Habyarimana officials and Akazu members, the land underneath them was bathed in blood. The Rwandan genocide was fully under way. The carefully laid plans were being dutifully carried out. The day the Interahamwe militia had waited for had arrived; the West had literally ‘flown away’ leaving them free to carry out their terrible umuganda.1
The world’s media, along with its politicians, had eyes at this time for only one African nation, South Africa, where the first post-apartheid elections were being held. On 10 May Nelson Mandela was sworn in as the new president, with his inauguration bringing together the largest number of heads of state since the funeral of US President John Kennedy in 1963. Politicians, journalists and businessmen swarmed to the hotels of Cape Town and Johannesburg, seeking vital alliances in the ‘new’ situation. Rwanda, a tiny, insignificant country with, it would seem, insignificant people, was by contrast the victim of appalling Western apathy.
Gitarama, in 1994 a small, dusty, faceless town 45 kilometres from Kigali, was the first haven for the interim government set up after President Habyarimana’s death. It was a government of murderers with a twofold objective: to repel the RPF advance now threatening Kigali, and to initiate and carry out the planned genocide to annihilate an entire ethnic group. An ageing and infirm Théodore Sindikubwabo was declared president and ambitious Jean Kambanda prime minister. The new ministers, appointed days earlier in the French embassy, now held meetings with local government officials to encourage, threaten or delight in the Tutsi genocide. Heading this group of killers and pulling the strings of the new government and militias was Colonel Théoneste Bagosora. The architect of the genocide was linked to the family of Agathe Habyarimana’s but had ambitions of his own to take charge of Rwanda one day. Using his position at the ministry of defence, Bagosora, an intelligent and ruthless individual, who had already acquired the nickname ‘the Colonel of Death’ for his role in the killing of Tutsis,2 had been able to monitor and set up networks for the ‘final solution’ during the two years prior to the genocide. He had returned from the Arusha talks in February 1993, where he had been supporting the extremist CDR party, proclaiming, ‘I come back to declare the apocalypse’.3 Now he was enacting it. These were the men the French government would spend the next three months legitimizing and supporting, politically and militarily.
The bright and busy corridors of the UN building in downtown New York were full of their usual complement of suited diplomats, fax machines and secret memorandums. While each day in April and May Security Council representatives picked up their coffee, croissant or breakfast bagel on the way to their office or debating chamber for another hard day of meetings, the lives of small children, pregnant women and terrified elderly Tutsis were being ended by laughing killers in Rwanda. The cynical disregard by Clinton’s America and its client British government of John Major for the lives of these ‘black Africans’ in a country of no economic importance has been well charted. Unlike Iraq, where evidence for armed intervention was either dubious or non-existent, in Rwanda satellites were showing the mass killings and masses of dead bodies. Even the Vatican, without any such spy system, was able to call the nightmare ‘genocide’ three weeks after it started. This was no ‘secret’ slaughter. By the end of April around 200,000 people had already been killed in Rwanda.
Besides its client francophone states, France had several important allies on the Security Council, as well as the amiable diplomacy of the UN head, secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The former Egyptian minister was a known francophone who had worked closely with all parts of the French government and, indeed, owed the government in Paris a debt of thanks because its support had been vital in gaining his current position. Boutros-Ghali had trained as a lawyer at the Sorbonne in Paris and France presented him as a candidate of impressive intellectual and diplomatic credentials when elections for the new UN secretary-general came around in November 1991. A personal friend of François Mitterrand, he commented that the French president ‘seemed to feel a personal victory in my election’4 – not surprising given that the anglophone countries, including the USA and Britain, had supported a different candidate. Three years after the genocide, in November 1997, Boutros-Ghali, with French backing, was elected general secretary of the International Organization of the Francophonie.5
In a UN vote on 21 April France followed Boutros-Ghali’s lead by backing Resolution 912 to reduce Dallaire’s UNAMIR force by 90 per cent to a meagre 270 peacekeepers. This effectively weakened UNAMIR so much that it would be almost impossible for it to give even humanitarian help to victims or assist those who sought UN protecttion. Other countries, including Russia and Britain, also voted for this option, but the difference was that France was deeply involved in Rwanda and knew the substance of events on the ground. It meant that the interim government and militia now had a free hand to continue the carnage knowing that no Western force would intervene. Bagosora’s apocalypse was safe to continue.
Prime Minister Balladur justified the French stance on the grounds that his country could not take an initiative to send troops to stop the massacres as this would look like a ‘colonial operation’, especially if they stopped the RPF advance. By contrast Operation Noroît, or the later Operation Turquoise, were, it seems, not deemed to have ‘colonial’ hallmarks.
The Rwandans’ plight managed to attract some media attention in France in the spring of 1994, and with it the views of the political establishment. From the original intervention of Operation Noroît in October 1990 to the plane crash on 6 April 1994, the occasional article in the French press had led the public to believe that Paris was standing by a country in distress. It was defending a fledgling democracy, pushing for a diplomatic solution, carrying out humanitarian work and protecting its own hard-working nationals. The genocide, with stories of the unfolding horror starting to appear in the press, especially in Le Figaro, Libération and Le Nouvel Observateur, shattered this cosy image with detailed evidence of the French government’s complicity with the Hutu regime. The earlier French presence was now questioned; Rwanda finally came onto the French political and public agenda. By 12 June Libération was even suggesting that France had trained the militias that were carrying out the bulk of the killings.
On 10 May Mitterrand went before the television cameras to defend his policy, stating that French soldiers could not intervene in every war, or be ‘international referees’ in the rivalries that split so many countries. Given his constant military interventions throughout francophone Africa during the previous decade, his words sounded particularly hollow.
The government’s defensiveness was well illustrated by an interview former minister for cooperation Michel Roussin gave to French radio on 30 May. When pressed about Operation Amaryllis leaving staff at the French embassy to be killed, and its relations towards the RPF, he lost his cool, shouting at the startled female interviewer, ‘What are you interested in? What are you interested in, madame? Is it the fate of these people, horrific pictures of whom we see every day, or is it a political analysis which is no longer topical?’ He then exploded at questions over French training of the FAR.
No, first of all the figure is wrong, it is – the figure is totally wrong, and, and also [pauses] I do not. … Even if it were seventy instructors, it is not these people who started [pauses] the slaughter we have been witnessing … [pauses]. We have not, we have cooperation … [pauses]. It was very limited because as soon as the Noroît operation was dismantled and UNAMIR took over from it we no longer had any role apart from traditional cooperation. Therefore I believe that again these are groundless accusations.6
Inside the UN, the 15-member Security Council, its decision-making body, continued to discuss the Rwandan crisis. But as ill luck would have it, one of the countries whose turn it was to be represented was Rwanda, in the form of Jean-Damascène Bizimana, its odious ambassador who represented the interim government. He used his position to make a series of highly inflammatory speeches maintaining that the killing was due to the civil war and that both sides were responsible. In a letter of 2 May to the president of the Security Council, Bizimana alleged that since 6 April ‘several tens of thousands of people have been killed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)’, and they were carrying out ‘large-scale massacres’. He demanded the UN put a force into Rwanda to cause an immediate ceasefire.7 This constant confusion between the RPF and FAR fight for control of the country and who was carrying out the genocide was carried over into the media. Papers like the New York Times and The Times (London) failed to differentiate, with reports of wide-scale ethnic massacres and war, and a failure to analyse those organizing and implementing the genocide.
Publicly, French foreign minister Alain Juppé was giving out the same message as Bizimana. ‘Since the international community cannot and is not willing to interfere physically in the country [Rwanda] … the only remedy is democracy. The African countries are committed to get more deeply involved in resolving this country’s conflict.’ Thus, the French were making ‘all possible efforts’ to make this happen. Juppé, like the Rwandan interim government, constantly referred to the need for a ‘ceasefire’ and a return to the Arusha accords to stop the killing, so further increasing the diplomatic smokescreen.
On 28 April, Juppé told the National Assembly in Paris that the large-scale massacres were part of a vicious ‘tribal war’, with abuses by both sides.8 Later that summer Bruno Delaye told a human rights group that, though the Hutu had committed terrible crimes, it was because they were frightened for their lives. ‘It was regrettable but that was the way Africans were.’ It was more than a little akin to Mitterrand’s comment to an aide in spring 1995 that ‘dans ces pays-là, un génocide, ce n’est pas trop important’ (in countries like that genocide doesn’t really matter),9 revealing an inherent racism at the heart of the Élysée. Human Rights Watch noted that ‘France continued its campaign to minimize the responsibility of the Interim government for the slaughter.’10
The interim government wanted UNAMIR to stay, for it recognized early on that without it the militarily superior RPF would be unhindered in pushing for absolute victory. France, backed by its UN francophone votes, made sure pressure was increased behind the scenes to keep the UN vacillating. Czech ambassador to the UN Karel Kovanda summed up the French diplomacy on Rwanda at the UN as being about making any number of aspersions about this or that faction, with the aim of creating sufficient confusion to stop action being taken. Kovanda described how the francophone Djibouti ambassador had never spoken a word in French in the two years the Czech diplomat knew him at the UN. ‘Then suddenly he comes out with a whole speech in fluent French when the Rwandan debate begins.’ The fact was that France was pressing its ‘client’ francophone African states in the UN to back its pro-Hutu policy in Rwanda. With the backing of francophone nations such as Oman and Djibouti, together with Rwanda, France made no attempt, despite its inside knowledge of events, to clarify the need for immediate action to stop the genocide. It received backing in this political stance from the USA, which wanted no action for a different set of cynical reasons. Clinton was afraid the spectre of body bags returning from Rwanda would badly affect his poll ratings. The ‘black hawks down’ fiasco the previous year in Somalia had been highly criticized from all sides in the USA. For both Mitterrand and Clinton the ‘do nothing’ solution as a short-term answer to the unfolding genocide suited their individual political aims.
Mitterrand reaffirmed his support for the genocidal interim government at the end of April when two of its most extreme representatives were given an official welcome on a state visit to Paris. Foreign Minister Bicamumpaka and Hutu militant leader Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza had the traditional red carpet treatment when they met Bruno Delaye at the Élysée Palace on 27 April. Mitterrand himself was away in Turkmenistan.11 Foreign secretary Alain Juppé then received them at the Quai d’Orsay and they later had talks at the cooperation ministry.
While they were wined and dined in Parisian splendour, in Rwanda Claudine Kayitesi, a young Tutsi girl was hiding in the Kinkwi forest. ‘On the 30th April they [Interahamwe] attacked from all sides … they had a vast programme of killing that would go on all day without a midday break. That evening, there were thousands of corpses and dying people, in the bottom of the ponds, all over the place.’12 That same evening, Mitterrand’s guests Barayagwiza and Bicamumpaka were rather more agreeably entertained at an official banquet in Paris.
The symbolism of these genocidaires’ official visit to France was vital because to the interim government it meant recognition by a permanent member of the Security Council. To the French people, it looked as if the new Rwandan government was indeed composed of ‘good guys’. Certainly, interim president Sindikubwabo was delighted at such a positive show of support from the French government and military. He called up French chief of staff General Quesnot on 4 May, leaving a message ‘to thank [Mitterrand] for all that you have done for Rwanda’ and for the advice given by Paris to his government representatives on their recent visit.13
When asked about the wisdom of giving an official political reception to two exponents of genocide in Paris, Delaye replied that he must have ‘received 400 assassins and 2000 drug traffickers in his office. You cannot deal with Africa without getting your hands dirty’.14 The same, many Africans might reasonably respond, could be said of dealing with the Mitterrand government.
The French intimated the importance of keeping diplomatic channels open with both sides in the conflict. Mitterrand, avoiding references to the previous French support for the FAR, spoke on 15 May about the need to facilitate dialogue between the two parties, the need for ‘international leadership’ through ‘big diplomatic efforts’. He reiterated the need for ‘humanitarian’ help, voting 200,000 francs for this purpose. Mitterrand also sought to involve other African countries in resolving the Rwandan ‘conflict’, chief among them Mobutu’s Zaire. Behind the scenes, Paris supported the Zairian dictator in scuppering a regional summit on Rwanda that had been scheduled for ‘anglophone’ Tanzania at the end of April. On 9 May, Bruno Delaye – Mitterrand’s African counsellor – reiterated this stance, saying, ‘We won’t have any of these meetings in Tanzania. The next one has to be in Kinshasa [in Zaire]. We cannot let anglophone countries decide on the future of a Francophone one. In any case, we want Mobutu back in, he cannot be dispensed with and we are going to do it through this Rwanda business.’15
A confidential newsletter, reputed to be from French government circles, showed the cynical disregard with which some, at least, of the French military and political establishment viewed the ongoing genocide. Entitled ‘considerable political and geostrategic interests are hidden behind the Rwandese heap of corpses’, it argued that the francophone country held a key to the region, and could not be ‘lost’ to anglophone influences. These included Museveni’s Uganda, with the spectre of the ‘Great Satan’ itself, the United States, in the background. The article finished by taking an uncompromising stance.
The region cannot be left in the hand of an English-speaking strongman completely aligned to American views and interests. This is why, since 1990, France has supported the late President Juvénal Habyarimana in order to fight the RPF. It did not work out, so now the only choice left to us is to put back in the saddle the Zairian President Mobutu Sese Seko, the one man capable of standing up to Museveni.16
French aid workers who had flown back home with Operation Amaryllis had tried to put pressure on their government to intervene to stop the genocide. Jean-Hervé Bradol, from MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières went to the Africa Cell at the Élysée to plead for action.
We went there to ask them to intervene, and because they have a strong link with the militaries in Rwanda, we guessed they could have an influence and stop the killings. The first answer that we got was that they had difficulties in reaching the Rwandese by phone. When they told me that it was impossible for them to reach the Rwandese by phone I was completely depressed because I realized that they were not ready, they did not have the will to stop the killings.17
The French were aware that a ceasefire was highly unlikely, but continued to push for it. With the RPF slowly but surely pressing back the interim government’s forces, a ceasefire became the only way Bagosora and his henchmen could hold onto power. Yet to expect the RPF leadership to sit down calmly and discuss ministerial portfolios with members of an interim government that had massacred up to half a million people by the end of May was quite fantastical. The Czech ambassador at the UN, Karel Kovanda, found the whole concept of a ceasefire ridiculous. ‘It is rather like wanting Hitler to reach a ceasefire with the Jews,’ he exclaimed. General Quesnot wrote privately to Mitterrand to say that any ceasefire was highly unlikely: ‘the process is from now on irreversible, Paul Kagame wants a total military victory.’18
On 15 May France was the first country to call the actions in Rwanda genocide, but deliberately confused the reality of the carnage by calling on both the Interahamwe and the RPF to end the terror and killings. Mitterrand later repeated this ‘double genocide’ fallacy. However, until the beginning of July, France continued to recognize the government that was carrying out the ‘genocide’ it had now named. It was akin to witnessing the work of the extermination camps while giving recognition to the Nazi government whose policy it was to use them. Equally, France made no public declaration calling for the interim government to halt the organized killing, though it was clear by May that the slaughter was happening in the area controlled by the interim government and not by the RPF.
In New York, France continued to back the interim government spokesman when discussion took place on the need for an immediate embargo of arms being sent to Rwanda. Mel McNulty, an analyst on the Franco–Rwandan situation commented:
At the UN Security Council on 17th May, France [in the person of its permanent representative Jean-Bernard Mérimée] made common cause with the ambassador of the Rwandese Interim government, who was trying to oppose the voting of an embargo on arms destined for Rwanda – on the pretext that this embargo would only penalize ‘government’ forces. France was opposed to it because the flow of arms deliveries was continuing, with the support of most of the [French] military personnel, who were hostile to the embargo.19
France eventually voted in favour of the embargo, mindful of the public outcry if it had stood against it, with the lone vote against it coming from the Rwandan ambassador. In reality, the embargo was for public consumption only because the arms deals were to continue, but in secret.
On the same agenda and day the UN voted through Resolution 918, which agreed to send a new 5500-strong force, UNAMIR II, to Rwanda acting under a newly-defined mandate that allowed it to take action against persons or groups that threatened protected sites and populations. During the debate the Security Council members had to listen to a speech by Rwandan foreign minister Jérôme Bicamumpaka in which he detailed alleged RPF atrocities, including the allegation that they tore out and ate the hearts of their Hutu enemies. It was, by all accounts, an extraordinary performance, made worse by the grim silence with which it remained unchallenged by its listeners. As the UN representatives sat back in exhaustion after an eight-hour debate to wring out this new resolution and mandate, it became clear that without money and resources being volunteered, the new force, UNAMIR II, would not see Rwanda or help its Tutsi victims for months to come. Like the embargo, it gave a public impression of action, though the reality was of no consequence to traumatized Tutsi still hiding out in the marshes and swamps away from their Interahamwe killers.
Dallaire, the UNAMIR commander in Kigali, had to face the effects of the world-power political manoeuvring. Stuck in the Rwandan capital with a decimated peacekeeping force, after repeated denials of assistance, he came to the conclusion that
self-interest dominated. I mean casualties overruled. I had one person come into my headquarters during the genocide asking for statistics on how many people were killed last week, and how many yesterday, and how many do you expect to be killed today, and how many weeks of this killing you think is going to go on. And my staff officers brought him to me and I said, ‘Why these statistics?’ He said, ‘Oh, you know my country is assessing whether it will come in and the government believes that the people, the public opinion, could handle for every soldier killed or injured an equivalent of 85,000 dead Rwandans.’20
At the end of May Dallaire heard reports of a speech by the French minister for human rights, Lucette Michaux-Chevry, to a special UN commission of diplomats at a meeting in Geneva. ‘As requested by France, the Security Council has significantly expanded UNAMIR [Resolution 918 on 17 May]. Without delay France had provided exceptional assistance to the victims of the conflict.’ Dallaire commented wryly, ‘Yes, I thought, to the French expatriates who wanted to flee and to members of the Habyarimana family. She patted her nation on the back shamelessly.’21
Two days after the vote at the UN, on 19 May, the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur published a four-page report entitled ‘Rwanda, journey to extreme horror’. It subtitled the piece, ‘the tragedy that has transformed Rwanda into a battlefield, the towns and roads into burial sites, is not an ethnic war between hostile tribes but an organized and systematic extermination of those who opposed a government armed and supported by France.’22 At least someone in France knew the truth.
While Juppé and Delaye defended the French response to Rwanda politically, the French military was far more proactive. For many of its senior figures the spotlight was on stopping the RPF victory rather than the genocide. Most influential of all were Generals Huchon and Quesnot. The latter, with his daily briefing session with Mitterrand at the Élysée, was able to push his own anti-RPF agenda. Huchon, as head of the Military Cooperation Mission, had the power to put such theories into action. It was, as Franco-Rwandan expert Mehdi Ba asserts: ‘like Huchon was an arm and Quesnot the brain’ behind French policy in Rwanda.23 In the three years preceding the genocide only two people were prepared to stand up and offer an alternative view to Huchon’s pro-Hutu bias. One, it was thought was ‘somebody in Tanzania – maybe the young chargé d’affaires who sat through the Arusha process, with the other at the Ministry of Cooperation’.24
From April to July Huchon welcomed visits from Lieutenant-Colonel Cyprien Kayumba, director of financial services in the Rwandan ministry of defence, who was shuttling between Rwanda, Paris, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Cairo, Tunis and Tripoli. The interim government’s representative was on a tour of francophone dictators and arms dealers. The object of his 27-day stay in Paris was to gain funding for urgent arms deliveries to the interim government. He noted, ‘it is necessary without delay to provide total proof proving the legitimacy of the war that Rwanda [the FAR] is involved in, in order to regain international opinion in our favour and to be able to gain bilateral cooperation. In the meantime, the [French] Military [Assistance] Mission of Cooperation is preparing to make emergency actions in our favour.’
On Monday 9 May Lieutenant-Colonel Ephrem Rwabalinda, adviser to the Rwandan chief of staff, arrived for a secret meeting with General Huchon at the MAM. His four-day stay until 13 May was designed to bring pressure on the Rwandan army’s French ‘allies’ to acquire vital combat equipment. In a two hour meeting with Huchon, accompanied by Rwanda’s Military Attaché in Paris, Lieutenant-Colonel Sebastian Ntahobari and Kayumba, Rwabalinda ‘spelled out the FAR’s urgent needs: munitions for the 105 mm artillery battery (at least 2000 rounds); completion of the munitions for individual weapons, if necessary by passing indirectly via neighbouring countries friendly to Rwanda; clothing; transmission equipment’.25 According to a report of the meeting later recovered by Belgian journalist Colette Braeckman, Huchon realized that the French army was ‘tied hands and feet’ by public opinion. The order of the day was secrecy, with open arming of the FAR as in 1990–93 now clearly not possible. However, the MAM gave the go-ahead for a ‘secure telecommunications system to allow General Huchon and General Bizimungu of the FAR to communicate without being overheard.’
Some 17 radio sets were shipped from Ostende to the FAR. These were capable of communicating on seven different channels in secure mode, thus allowing Huchon to speak to General Augustin Bizimungu and other Rwandan military and political leaders without fear of their private conversations being overheard. It also allowed French secret service agents to remain in constant touch about what was happening in Rwanda and to plan their own actions. Huchon is said to have promised that the ‘urgent needs’ Rwabalinda described would be evaluated in a ‘detailed and concrete’ way once the secret telephone contact was established between him and Bizimungu.26
Huchon also told Rwabalinda that an airfield was needed at which to land aid in ‘complete security’, with all spies driven out of the area first.27 Such a strip was available at Kamembe, near Cyangugu in the southwest corner of Rwanda. Huchon promised that the French military was ‘preparing measures to save us’ [interim government and its armed forces].
According to Human Rights Watch ‘Rwabalinda reported that Huchon returned several times to this point – that the “French government would not put up with accusations of helping a government condemned by international opinion if that government did not do what was necessary to defend itself. The media war is urgent and all subsequent operations depend on it”.’28 The inference was, according to Human Rights Watch, that ‘Huchon and his aides were more concerned about the public perception of the killing than about the killing itself. The condition for important renewed French assistance was not to end the genocide, but to make it more presentable to the international press.’29
Human Rights Watch asked for a meeting with Huchon to discuss a letter it uncovered in which Rwabalinda described his meetings with the French general. Unsurprisingly, Huchon was unwilling to discuss this evidence. The details in the letter are corroborated by a Rwandan military source.30
Rwabalinda’s meetings with Huchon showed how desperate the interim government was to get its major backer onside and fully involved. Without French help, the RPF was set to defeat the FAR within weeks. The Rwandan officer pleaded with Huchon to let French troops intervene and to put pressure on the international community to stop the RPF offensive. While he mooted the use of ‘indirect’ military assistance (mercenaries) Huchon ‘urged the creation of a zone under secure FAR control, where deliveries could take place safely’.31 Ephrem Rwabalinda was shot dead in a Zairian refugee camp in 1995 – an act, according to investigative researcher Jean-Paul Gouteux, that bore all the hallmarks of the French secret services eliminating a witness to this murky affair.32 The defence attaché at the French embassy in Paris, Lieutenant-Colonel Ntahobari who had also been privy to the negotiations with Huchon, also ‘died mysteriously in a Paris suburb’33 – though not before he had burned thousands of incriminating documents in the embassy itself – a reenactment of the destruction that happened to the archive in the French embassy in Kigali.
Neither the French media, parliament nor the later National Assembly inquiry ever looked into the secret meetings between the Rwandan and French military representatives in Paris or the encoded radio sets ‘given’ to the FAR. General Huchon’s diary, payment details and other factual identification could have been used to testify to the validity of the report Braeckman made public. Instead, the French military and political establishment’s official ‘silence’ on this matter speaks volumes about the truth of the allegations.
On 30 April Boutros-Ghali condemned the ongoing slaughter in Rwanda and appealed for states to stop arming the protagonists. ‘The Security Council warns that the situation in Rwanda would be further seriously aggravated if either of the parties were to have access to additional arms. It appeals to all states to refrain from providing arms or any military assistance to the parties to the conflict.’34
Two weeks later the appeal was reiterated as part of Resolution 918. Paragraph 13 declared that ‘all States shall prevent the sale or supply to Rwanda by their nationals or from their territories or using their flag vessels or aircraft of arms and related material [sic] of all types, including weapons and ammunition, military vehicles and equipment, paramilitary police equipment and spare parts.’35 It called on all states to give information on how the embargo could effectively be implemented, give information on any violations and recommend ‘appropriate measures in response to violations’. However, a number of very credible witnesses point to France, officially and unofficially, continuing its arms deliveries to the Rwandan military throughout the period of the genocide.
Two days after Habyarimana’s death, a UN Senegalese military observer reported to his Belgian commander Colonel Luc Marchal, that he had seen arms being unloaded from two French planes at Kigali airport. The French flights had arrived two hours earlier than expected. Marchal later told a journalist that the armaments were not for Operation Amaryllis but for the Rwandan army. ‘They [the ammunition] just remained a few minutes at the airfield and immediately after, they were loaded in a vehicle and they were moved to the Kanombe camp’ where the government troops were based.36
The commander of the French operation rubbished this account and said his troops had requisitioned Rwandan army trucks to take the cargo away, and that anyway it was not mortar ammunition. This raises two further points: the ease with which the French were able to liaise with the FAR on the ground and the question of whether it was ammunition for different weapons, if not mortars.37
The interim government made contact with international arms dealers and shippers, and used its French army connections to obtain supplies that bypassed arms-control regulations and the UN embargo. A host of dealers in various countries assisted the deliveries, including the UK, South Africa, Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, Israel, the Seychelles and Zaire. None of those responsible has been convicted of the crime of ‘assisting genocide’.
From mid-May onwards, arms supplies were delivered via Goma in Zaire, just across the Rwandan border. Journalists, the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry (UNICOI) set up in 1995, and human rights organizations pieced together the trail from the ‘unofficial’ arms dealers to the banks that financed the deliveries. This complex path involved several governments, though each in turn denied any official participation.
Two 40-ton arms deliveries arrived on the nights of 15 and 18 June on Air Zaire flights to Goma from the Seychelles. The weapons were then transferred to the embattled FAR across the Rwandan border in the northern town of Gisenyi. They included anti-tank missiles, fragmentation grenades and ammunition. The trail for financing the deal was detailed and well hidden, and included payments to an arms dealer from the Banque Nationale de Paris on behalf of the Banque Nationale du Rwanda in Kigali.
It was alleged that the use of the Banque Nationale de Paris was an intrinsic part of the deal, and that it was no coincidence where it was based. According to an investigation by the French paper Le Figaro:
The inventory of the weapons bought from the Seychelles government closely resembled a list the exiled interim Minister of the Interior of the Rwandan government had sent to the French government in May 1994. Both Bagosora and Ehlers [the arms dealer] were well-connected in France. Bagosora had been the first Rwandan officer to be admitted to the French war academy in Paris. Ehlers, a former member of the South African navy, had received military training at French submarine bases in Toulon and Lorient in 1970 and 1972.38
The complex gunrunning operation continued throughout May and June, with the last delivery to the interim government made on 18 July. The choice of route for financing and shipping the arms, via Goma, suggests a need both for secrecy and for the perpetrators to ‘cover their backs’ now that the UN embargo had been enacted.
An investigation into the illicit arms dealing by British journalist Christian Jennings, aired as a documentary called ‘The Gunrunners’ in November 1994 concluded, ‘Efforts to investigate … bank accounts and find out which private French security company was contracting aircraft to fly weapons into Zaire, was blocked.39
French state enterprise Sofremas (Société française d’exploitation de matériels et systèmes d’armement) was also heavily involved, despite coded denials. It acted as a go-between selling arms manufactured in France, South Africa, Israel and former eastern bloc countries to regimes willing to buy them. According to Human Rights Watch, based on correspondence recovered from the Rwandan ministry of defence, ‘Sofremas wrote to Kayumba [chargé d’affaires at the Rwandan embassy in Paris] on 5th May at his Paris address stating they were prepared to ship $8 million worth of ammunition of South African manufacture as soon as they received a payment of 30 per cent of the price and necessary EUC/Zaire.’40 The EUC (end user certificate) related to the country in which the arms would be used. By putting down Zaire, the real destination of Rwanda could be hidden and no awkward questions asked.41
On 5 May, the same day this deal was agreed, the French cabinet suspended all arms deals to Rwanda, confirming a provisional suspension in place since 8 April. The director of Sofremas, Germaine Guell, stated that the 5 May deal never took place or at least that the company made no further deliveries to Rwanda after the embargo of 17 May.
This carefully worded statement, like those of the [French] government ministers, did not exclude deliveries to Goma. In fact Guell explicitly conceded that ‘it is possible and even probable that Mobutu’s government agreed to have Goma serve as a conduit for material meant for Rwanda.’ He admitted that his company had been asked to deliver arms this way … but he declared they did not do so. … He remarked, ‘It would be a pretty unscrupulous government to deliver matériel to Zaire that it knew would end up in Rwanda.’42
Jennings’s investigation was damning in its conclusion of French complicity in rearming the Hutu militants and militia.
These arms shipments were either going directly from a French parastatal [Sofremas] and being shipped by a French company [DLY Investments Ltd], or were being subcontracted by a series of French middlemen and front companies. All were going to a regime that had left such legacies as the mountain of corpses in the church at Ntarama. The FAR and the Interahamwe were being re-supplied.43
Franck Johannes, a journalist on the South African French language paper, Journal du Dimanche, said deliveries of weapons to Rwanda had been taking place ‘every evening since mid-April’ in unmarked Boeing 707s.
When questioned about these illegal arms deals the French government issued a number of denials, though many of them were in guarded and ambiguous language. Bernard Debré, for example, admitted that arms deliveries had continued for ‘between five and eight days, perhaps ten days after the massacres started … because we didn’t immediately realize what was happening’. Yet, within two days, France had known enough to send in Operation Amaryllis and embark on a total evacuation of its nationals.
The French consul in Goma, Jean-Claude Urbano, justified five arms deliveries in May and June, which were taken across the Rwandan border to Gisenyi, by telling reporters from Human Rights Watch Arms Project that they were simply honouring contracts negotiated with the Rwandan government before the imposition of the embargo. French paper Libération noted on 4 June that ‘all sources on the spot [in Goma] – including well-placed French ex-pats – have expressed their “certainty” that these arms deliveries were “paid for by France”.’44
On 12 June the MSF president and director, Philippe Biberson and Brigitte Vasset, met foreign minister Alain Juppé.
We asked him, ‘people say there are deliveries of weapons to the Rwandan government or to the Interim government or to the government in flight – is it true that France continues to deliver weapons to Goma?’ Juppé answered: ‘Listen, all that is very confused, there were some agreements of cooperation or defence with the government, there were some hangovers maybe, but with regard to my services, I can tell you since the end of May there are certainly no deliveries of weapons to the Habyarimana regime.’ While he was saying this he looked at the other side of the [river] Seine, towards the Élysée [Palace]. ‘But what happens over there, I don’t know anything about it.’ The implication that the Élysée was countenancing continued arms deliveries was far from subtle.
The two aid workers concluded that ‘it was pathetic’.45
Meanwhile, foreign secretary Juppé, while not beneath pointing the blame for the arms deliveries at his political rival François Mitterrand, was making sure that his reputation stayed clean. An unnamed defence attaché at a French embassy in the region denied that there had been official deliveries of arms from Paris, but added, ‘an under-the-counter assistance, by parallel circuits, is always possible. You know, I could tell you a story or two about shady arms traffic deals in Paris.’46 While the arms deliveries were a political matter in the West, in Rwanda they meant more misery, suffering and death.
At Michel Roussin’s office in the Ministry of Cooperation, former secret service man Philippe Jehanne confided that on 19 May, two days after the embargo began, we were ‘busy delivering ammunition to the FAR through Goma. But of course I will deny it if you quote me in the press.’47 On 22 May, President Sindikubwabo wrote to Mitterrand to plead for more help, with the situation in Kigali now desperate. The official head of this genocidal government composed a moving testimony to the appreciation he felt for all Mitterrand had done. ‘Monsieur le President [Mitterrand], the Rwandan people express to you their sentiments of gratitude for the moral, diplomatic and material support that you have given them from 1990 to this day.’ He signs off assuring the French leader of his ‘highest consideration’. It is a truly remarkable letter from the president of a nation that had planned and carried out the genocide of around 400,000 by this point in late May.48 A month later, Admiral Lanxade, chief of staff of the French armed forces, robustly defended the French military and government against its many critics in a radio broadcast. He told listeners to Radio Monte Carlo at the end of June, ‘we cannot be reproached for having armed the killers. In any case, all those massacres were committed with sticks and machetes.’49
French mercenary Paul Barril was at the heart of French efforts to maintain links with the Rwandan army and give support on the ground to the Bagosora regime. He was now working as part of the ‘parallel network’ of unofficial French operatives linking the interim government with the Élysée. Barril claimed to have been in Rwanda throughout the period of the genocide, April to July 1994. In fact, as already seen, he arrived in Paris to appear on French television on 28 June to accuse the RPF of shooting down his employer’s plane.
Barril, dressed like a Gallic James Bond, smiling and self confident in military gear, appeared rather appropriately in the French version of Playboy magazine in March 1995. Here he happily boasted that he had been Habyarimana’s ‘counsellor’ for years and that after his death the new Rwandan interim government’s defence secretary had naturally turned to him. ‘I arrived by helicopter [in Kigali] … my first decision was to hurry to the French embassy and to raise the flag. … For the [Hutu extremist] Rwandans, to declare that my home was in the embassy would have a strong psychological meaning.’ It was an attempt to show that although he was now employed in a private capacity, the Frenchman and his country would not abandon those who spoke the same language.50 Indeed, Barril was happy to have ‘holiday snaps’ that later appeared in the French press taken of him standing heroically outside the French embassy and lolling next to an artillery gun.
A confidential and incriminating document found when Barril’s home was searched in 2012 and published in Le Parisien in January 201351 gives some idea of the scale of Barril’s importance to the genocidal government and the sums involved. In a letter dated 27 April 1994, Minister of Defence Augustin Bizimana wrote to ‘Captain Paul Barril’ outlining the critical situation the genocidal regime now faced. The letter goes on to confirm Barril’s ‘agreement to recruit, for the Rwandan government, 1,000 men to assist the FAR against the RPF’, as a matter of urgency. As a French judicial source confirmed, this appeal to Barril was, in essence, an appeal to France itself given Barril was continuing to be used ‘unofficially’ for the work of the state. Sebastien Ntahobari, the military attaché at the Rwandan embassy in Paris reported that the money had been transferred from Nairobi to Paris in June, with an associate of Barril’s coming to collect it.52
Le Parisien reported that ‘besides the demand for one thousand mercenaries, investigators recovered bills of weapons, ammunition and men, related to a ‘support agreement’ concluded between Barril and the Rwandan government dated 28 May 1994. Three million dollars worth of cartridges, shells and mortars were to be delivered. Barril later told Judge Trevidic that this support contract ‘never happened,’ and the bill for it ‘was never paid’. According to the mercenary, the whole episode was symptomatic of ‘la mayonnaise africaine’ – ‘the African mayonnaise.’ A mayonnaise, Le Parisien points out rather ironically, of nearly one million deaths.53
The Belgian lawyer who publicly defended Barril in the French press, Luc de Temmerman, was also Agathe Habyarimana’s lawyer and he told those who were interested that Barril had worked for the Rwandan government but had not done anything illegal to his knowledge and that his men had only participated to a small degree in the war. Augustin Bizimungu (head of the FAR) told Temmerman that the war was fought fairly and that the militias had carried out some massacres, but this was a ‘normal enough situation’ in a war that had gone on for four years.54
Barril was not the only French operative working in Rwanda before the arrival of Operation Turquoise in mid-June.
UNAMIR, Rwandan army officers and RPF sources all reported seeing several white men in military uniform in Rwanda, and not part of UNAMIR, in early April and again in mid-May. Three or four French-speaking white men in military uniform ate at the Rwandan army officers’ mess for several days in April and then left Kigali by helicopter for the northwest.55
In mid-May a Rwandan army helicopter flew French-speaking soldiers with large amounts of equipment to Bigogwe. The helicopter pilot, according to witnesses, was white. Elsewhere, UNAMIR officers reported seeing whites in military uniform driving rapidly through Kigali on two occasions,56 as well as at the Hotel Meridien in Gisenyi, the interim government’s headquarters. Other witnesses reported seeing French-speaking soldiers in the south of Rwanda. A French officer told journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry that these men were probably mercenaries. The question then arises: were they working with Barril or other agencies, and with the official or unofficial support of the French government or Huchon’s MAM?57
Military sources had tried to raise 100 mercenaries to help the Rwandan army secure the southern Rwandan towns of Butare and Kigoma, and in doing so keep open the arms routes from Zaire and Burundi. ‘This was supervised by DGSE parallel agents close to a retired French officer.’ A mercenary recruitment office had even been opened in Brussels.58 The French officer was also said to be responsible for introducing Agathe Habyarimana to Lebanese and Belgian arms dealers.
Meanwhile, in Rwanda the daily killing continued. Innocent Rwililiza, a 38 year-old Tutsi teacher who fled to the countryside remembered hiding behind a ruined house.
Some Interahamwe walked inside and found a [Tutsi] family. I heard the blows striking bones, but I could barely hear any lamentations. Next they discovered a child behind a well. It was a little girl. They set to cut her. From my hiding place I could listen to everything. She did not ask for pity … only murmured before dying ‘Jesus’ … then little cries.59
In market stalls in neighbouring Uganda, laughing traders yelled out in Luganda, ‘Lelo tulide mututsi’ – ‘Today we shall eat a Tutsi’. It was an allusion to the hundreds of bloated corpses that had flowed down the Akagera River into Lake Victoria. Eating fish had become a joke for eating Tutsis.60 While arms dealers, mercenaries, politicians and presidents exploited the ongoing genocide in whatever way was most conducive to them, the ‘little cries’ of the victims went unheard.