Chapter 7
It was a typical summer day in Paris. While tourists ate homemade dairy ice creams outside Notre Dame Cathedral and sipped coffee in brasseries by the Seine, senior politicians shuffled from their offices and drawing rooms into the black limousines that would take them to the Élysée palace for a routine inner-cabinet meeting. Prime Minister Édouard Balladur, Foreign Secretary Alain Juppé and Defence Minister François Léotard sat comfortably in antique chairs as President Mitterrand, ageing and ailing, trundled through the various policy points assigned for discussion. Then, under ‘any other business’, as if announcing another mediocre spending review or Bastille Day entertainment, Mitterrand sprang his announcement. France, he had decided, was going to send a large intervention force into Rwanda. Operation Turquoise, as it was later named, would, he told his startled colleagues, take place as soon as possible. Balladur and his right-wing henchmen, shell-shocked by their Machiavellian president’s sudden about-turn, no doubt spluttered into their Perrier water.
The initial response was for Mitterrand’s political rivals to oppose any such action, fearing that France would get sucked into an African war it could not control. But opposition cabinet members, after looking for ways to stop the intervention, soon decided on a change of tack. The right-wing opposition could not be seen to allow Mitterrand the moral high ground of announcing he was in favour of helping Rwanda while they opposed it. Equally, they did not want a damaging split at the heart of the French political system.1
Juppé saw his opportunity to clamber onto the Rwandan bandwagon and gain plenty of ‘moral’ points by showing his concern. Despite Mitterrand asking his ministers to keep the decision to themselves, presumably so he could be the first to announce and take credit for it, the race was on to secure maximum political acclaim from the news.2 Within 48 hours of the cabinet meeting, Juppé had appeared on television to broadcast the forthcoming operation, before writing in the left-wing paper Libération on 16 June that:
we have a real duty to intervene in Rwanda. The time to watch the massacre passively is over, we must take the initiative. … France is ready with its main European and African partners to prepare an intervention on the ground to put an end to the massacres and to protect the populations threatened with extermination. … France will live up to its responsibilities.3
It was an astonishing piece of spin by Juppé. African analyst Gérard Prunier was unimpressed: ‘having spent the last 40 days silently watching its former pupils and protégés commit a massive genocide, the government discovered it had a conscience just as media pressure became irresistible and when South Africa threatened to intervene militarily.’4
Each part of the French government and military establishment had its own reasons to back the intervention. Mitterrand had already conceded privately by mid-June that the interim government was ‘a bunch of killers’.5 Turquoise gave him a chance to play the ‘humanitarian’ card so beloved by the media and show a sceptical French public and international audience that France ‘cared’. Moreover, it proved that France could still mount an impressive military expedition at short notice, which would bolster its flagging reputation with other worried francophone dictators who feared their own civil unrest.
Across the political divide, Mitterrand’s Gaullist opponents were pragmatic in their assessment of the intervention. Juppé and his ally Chirac were aware of the immense media bonanza such an ethically caring intervention could bring them. Balladur, the prime minister, and his defence minister François Léotard were less enthusiastic, recognizing the high stakes involved. If Turquoise went wrong the headlines would be unbearable and his job would be on the line. His reasons for reluctantly backing a scaled-down limited intervention were, according to a letter sent to Mitterrand on 21 June, because the situation happened in Africa, happened in a francophone country and because of the moral aspect.6 All three reasons had been true since the genocide began two months earlier.
Balladur also pushed for the operation to meet various conditions, the first being to gain a UN Security Council mandate for it. He argued that any attempt at a unilateral intervention, like the earlier Operation Noroit, would be catastrophic for France. Equally, the operation needed to be limited in time to ‘a few weeks’ until UNAMIR II, which had been authorized way back on 17 May, finally entered the country. As it stood, the UN operation was still months away from deployment in terms of preparation of troops, equipment and finance.
Generals Huchon and Quesnot, like other military ‘hawks’, had always been keen to intervene, arguing that France should never have left Rwanda but used its troops, as in 1993, to keep the RPF at bay. To the more gungho French military, Turquoise could enable the Rwandan army to re-form and counter the RPF advance. Gérard Prunier, the African expert, who surprisingly given his ‘liberal’ credentials had been drafted in to help plan the intervention, ran into such officers who were ‘grumbling in aisles about “breaking the back of the RPF”’.7
A mere nine months earlier the French military command had been involved in stopping the RPF dead in its tracks. It was unsurprising then that ‘many soldiers interpreted their Turquoise brief to imply a rearguard action in support of their beleaguered Rwandan allies, to allow them to retreat in good order and regroup.’8 A US military officer, who spoke frequently with several Turquoise officers, reported that many had seemed resentful of the pull-out ordered in 1993 under the Arusha agreement and were now determined to ‘kick butt’ when it came to meeting the RPF.9
The reality was that any intervention needed to take place without delay. By 13 June the RPF had advanced through the central town of Gitarama and was besieging the northern Hutu stronghold of Ruhen-geri. Military analysts expected Kagame’s army to sweep through the rest of Rwanda within a month, with the towns of Butare and Cyangugu in the south and Gisenyi in the north, to which the interim government had fled, the only major obstacles. Any French operation needed to happen fast if it was to gain credit for ‘saving’ Tutsis from the genocide or stopping a total RPF victory. With the aid of the encrypted communication system sent from France, General Huchon was well aware of the timeline working against him.
Criticism of the impending intervention was not slow in coming. Amnesty International called on the French government to explain its links with the Hutu extremists. A group of Tutsi priests wrote in a letter to their superiors that Turquoise was to them not a ‘humanitarian’ operation but merely a ‘cynical enterprise’. Why, they asked, had France done nothing in the two months the genocide ripped apart Rwanda, even though it was better informed about what was happening than others? Why had it failed to exercise the least pressure on the interim government when it clearly had the means to do so? ‘For us, France has arrived too late for nothing,’ the letter concluded.10 The OAU condemned what it saw as a blatant attempt by France to rescue its power base in Rwanda. Belgium condemned the planned operation, while the UN special representative in Rwanda called Turquoise a ‘political intervention’ that was ‘not helping matters’. Former right-wing president Giscard d’Estaing, no doubt anxious to pour scorn on his socialist successor Mitterrand, described Turquoise as purely an attempt to protect ‘some of those who had carried out the massacres’.11
Even the French media, significantly analysing their country’s involvement in Rwanda for the first time in four years, expressed reservations about the motivation for the coming intervention. Le Monde examined the government’s record and wondered why it had been
satisfied with selfishly repatriating French nationals in April and approving, like everybody else, the withdrawal of the 2000 UN troops in Rwanda just as one of this century’s worst massacres is taking place? Why this belated wakening that is happening, as if by coincidence, just as the RPF is gaining the upper hand on the ground? France will find itself once again accused of coming to the rescue of the former government, but its initiative will effectively shore up African regimes that are just as corrupt, like that of Zaire’s General Mobutu.12
However, the French media were still content to print ‘good news’ stories they were fed by their government. Some days before Turquoise was announced, Bernard Kouchner, a founder of aid charity MSF and a former French health minister, had arrived to see Dallaire at his UN Kigali headquarters. He told the UNAMIR commander that:
he wanted to save a bunch of orphans in Interahamwe-held territory. He wanted to fly them out of the war … [and that] the French public was in a state of shock and horror over the genocide in Rwanda and was demanding action. I told him I was totally against the export of Rwandan children, orphaned or not. They were not a means for some French people to feel a little less guilty about the genocide.
Kouchner then went off to see the genocidaire, accompanied by a ‘coterie of journalists, and managed to persuade Bagosora that letting the orphans go would be good “PR” for the Interim regime’. Dallaire commented, ‘I already didn’t like the idea of exporting Rwandan children, but to do it to give the extremists a better image made me ill.’13
However, when persuaded that it might make a ceasefire between the RPF and interim government troops more likely, Dallaire agreed. Bagosora was particularly keen on the transfer, seeing it as a chance to impress the French authorities, the public and the world.14 Some 50, mostly sick, children were eventually flown to Paris on 5 June, arriving to a waiting media circus anxious to witness French ‘humanitarianism’ in action. The ‘rescue’ of the orphans certainly made good PR all round – for Paris and Bagosora.
In mid-June Dallaire left for Nairobi and meetings with NGOs and UN officials. While on a two-day break, he received a phone call from the French ambassador asking for a meeting about orphans. ‘I wondered what it was with the French and their obsession with orphans: what did it mean that they were now approaching me directly rather than going through Kouchner? When I sat down again, I told Beth [his wife] that I thought the French were up to something and I needed to figure out what.’15 He commented that he never envisaged Paris planning an intervention ‘under the guise of humanitarian relief’, with the support of Boutros-Ghali and the Rwandan army, the FAR.
Three days after Mitterrand announced to his cabinet on 14 June that an intervention in Rwanda would take place, Kouchner was sent to see Dallaire again to get his cooperation for the French operation. The UN commander had just returned from his Nairobi trip and received the Frenchman, not knowing ‘when or if his humanitarianism masked the purposes of the French government’. Kouchner immediately told Dallaire he was there as an interlocutor for his government and, after recounting how appalling the present situation had become and the lack of any international action, went on to drop a bombshell.
The French government, he said, had decided that in the interests of humanity, it was prepared to lead a French and Franco–African coalition force into Rwanda to stop the genocide and deliver humanitarian aid. They would come under a Chapter VII UN mandate and aimed to set up a safe haven in the west of the country where people fleeing the conflict could find refuge. He asked me for my support. Without a pause, I said, “Non!” – and I began to swear at the great humanitarian using every French-Canadian oath in my vocabulary. He tried to calm me with reasons that probably sounded high-minded to him but, considering the track record of the French in Rwanda, struck me as deeply hypocritical: surely the French knew that it was their allies who were the architects of the slaughter.16
Being called out of the room to be told that another UNAMIR ‘peacekeeper’ had just been killed did little to lift Dallaire’s mood. He returned to fire another savage barrage at an uncomfortable Kouchner, telling him that he could not believe the effrontery of the French in planning to use a humanitarian cloak for an intervention that could enable the Rwandan army to remain in power in part of the country. He argued that France should have reinforced UNAMIR if it were so keen on sending help, not set up what looked suspiciously like a ‘rival’ UN force that was far better equipped and with a precious Chapter VII mandate allowing it to use force if necessary. Not surprisingly, Dallaire complained that the French government had spoken to everyone, including the Hutu militants and RPF, but had told him nothing. ‘I had been kept in the dark like a mushroom – and fed plenty of fresh manure,’ he countered.17
The first draft of the plan for Operation Turquoise envisaged French troops entering Rwanda through Gisenyi, the northern heartland of Hutu extremism. With the imminent arrival of RPF troops in this area, there was the possibility of an early firefight with them, as well as the embarrassment of militants welcoming the French with open arms. Yet, if the idea were to take the credit for saving Tutsi lives, then Gisenyi was the wrong place, as they were all dead. A Hutu trader in the area had told a French journalist, ‘We never had many Tutsi here and we killed them all at the beginning without much of a fuss.’ The plan was quickly shelved.18
In the end, the only feasible entrance to Rwanda was through Goma in Mobutu’s Zaire. The French mission would enter Rwanda through the southern town of Cyangugu before spreading north to include the regions of Gikongoro and Kibuye. The clinching argument for this route was that at Nyarushishi camp, near Cyangugu, there were many Tutsi who had managed to flee the genocide and they would make ideal fodder for Western TV crews anxious to see ‘humanitarianism’ in action.
At the UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali ‘personally intervened in support of an authorization of Operation Turquoise.’19 In a letter to the president of the Security Council dated 20 June, Boutros-Ghali estimated that another three months would be needed to get UNAMIR II under way. ‘Meanwhile, the situation in Rwanda has continued to deteriorate and the killing of innocent civilians has not stopped.’ The letter recommended considering France’s offer to lead a multinational operation in Rwanda under a Chapter VII mandate to ‘assure the security and protection of displaced persons and civilians at risk’ – by ‘all necessary means’.20 This was despite Dallaire’s current UNAMIR force, and indeed UNAMIR II that was to follow, having only Chapter VI mandates. The following day, the French ambassador to the UN, Jean-Bernard Mérimée, wrote to Boutros-Ghali promising a French operation with assistance from francophone Senegal that could step into the gap caused by the delay in sending UNAMIR II, while adhering to the same objectives. The ambassador assured the UN secretary-general that ‘The objective naturally excludes any interference in the development of the balance of military forces between the parties involved in the conflict.’21
On 22 June, Resolution 929 gave France UN backing for its intervention, which it was agreed should last a maximum of two months. The vote for the resolution was far from unanimous. New Zealand, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil and China abstained. The New Zealand ambassador, Colin Keating, who along with the Czech Karel Kovanda had taken the greatest interest in the Rwandan situation and had attempted to initiate an earlier UN intervention, called for UNAMIR II to be urgently sent instead. The OAU also opposed Turquoise on the grounds that one of the parties involved in the conflict, the RPF, was unhappy about the French intervention. ‘For several African leaders, it was additional evidence that a major European power could manipulate the UN and humanitarian operations to demonstrate its own power in the region.’22
To divert criticism that it was once again launching a unilateral intervention for its own reasons, Paris was anxious Turquoise should be a ‘multinational’ operation. In fact, Senegal and Chad were the only countries to send troops and this only after pressure from France, which paid for its francophone allies to join the operation.23
In wartorn Kigali crowds of exuberant Hutu militiamen and Rwandan army soldiers openly celebrated the news of the French intervention as if their saviours were coming to keep them in power. Hutu mobs waved the French tricolour signifying ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. Dallaire, cooped up under mortar fire at his headquarters in the capital, reported that ‘“Vive la France” was heard more often in Kigali than it was in Paris. RTLM continued to tell the population that the French were on their way to join them to fight the RPF.’24 He added, ‘It seemed to me that for every life that Operation Turquoise would save, it would cost at least another because of the resurgence of the genocide.’ The real fear for those Tutsis who had survived nearly three months of the genocide was that the twin push of the RPF and French would force the militia ‘into a final killing spree’.
The Canadian UNAMIR force commander left his bosses at the UN in no doubt that he was against any French presence in Kigali, threatening to resign from his post and even shoot down French planes if they landed at the airport in the capital.25
In the event France did not wait for the UN mandate to be passed before Operation Turquoise moved into action. An armada of giant air cargo planes, including an Airbus, Hercules, Transall, Antonov AN-124 and Illuyshin IL-76 flew equipment and crack French troops into Goma in Zaire. It had been impossible to find enough transport planes to carry the expedition’s equipment. The USA turned down a French request to use its planes, and in the end Lanxade had to do a deal with Russia and Ukraine to make use of their old Soviet transporters to fly in the bulk of the men and armaments. It was finally agreed it would be tactically foolish to attempt any landing of French forces in Kigali, given the certain fight against the RPF that would follow. Zaire became the main base from which the operation would move forward. In total, the French forces mustered 2924 troops and 510 support staff, as well as air and logistical cover. Paris also decided its soldiers would not wear the blue helmets of the UN but the red berets of the French elite paratroopers and marines.
The French Special Operations Group, the COS, were involved in phase one, moving from the base in Bukau on 23 June into Rwanda. Here the group was led by Colonel Rosier, a man with plenty of Rwandan experience having led Operation Noroit from June to November 1992. The COS was detailed with preparation for the main force to enter the country. The North Inter-arms group, including the prefecture of Kibuye, was put under the control of Colonel Patrice Sartre and three units of marine corps. In the south, Colonel Jacques Hogard had 400 legionnaires and a military medical unit under his command. Janvier, a leading militiaman testified,
In June 1994, the French arrived in our country. They came in through the Congo [Zaire]. They put up at the Hôtel Résidence which was where I saw them for the first time, on the occasion of a meeting with the prefect and the commander of the region to organize for their entry into the country, via this town. This hotel is on the Congo side, at Bukavu.
More precisely, I went to the Hôtel Résidence with Yusufu Munyakazi [an Interahamwe leader] in a Suzuki jeep. We left the car there and took a minibus, accompanied by the prefect and the military commander as well as the député [MP] Félicien Barigira. They had a small meeting at the hotel.
We went back in the evening with two Frenchmen who accompanied us to the bridge that marks the border. It had been decided that they’d enter the next day, but they didn’t wait for the next day. They returned that night, at around 8 p.m., with knitted Ninja masks over their faces! These are a type of black mask that covers the face, with holes for the eyes and mouth. It’s black in colour. They [the French] entered at night over the bridge with their jeeps and equipment. They said there wasn’t any equipment left [for our work]; they supplied us with rifles, ammunition, grenades and all the rest.26
The intervention force was comprised of some troops that had already taken part in the earlier campaigns in Rwanda from 1990 to 1993. However, the French paratroopers were, for public purposes anyway, meant to ignore the Rwandan army (FAR) and presidential guard with which they had spent three years training, fighting along-side and socializing, as they headed for certain defeat to an anglophone ‘Ugandan’ invader. It made for an uncomfortable test of loyalties.27 If Janvier is to be believed, such sympathies between the French and their ‘pupils’ resulted in the Rwandan army, now desperately short of ammunition, being rearmed by some of Turquoise’s men.
Turquoise had more than 100 armoured vehicles, a battery of 120mm mortars, Gazelle helicopters, four Jaguar fighter-bombers, four Mirage F1CT ground attack planes and four Mirage F1Cs for reconnaissance purposes. A whole array of transport planes flew in the arms and troops ready for immediate deployment.28 The troops included elite special forces not normally seen in such ‘humanitarian’ roles. Detachments from the 1st RPIMA (Régiment parachutiste d’Infanterie de Marine d’Assault) in Bayonne, were joined by commandos from Trepel de Lorient, a force of EICA (Escadron d’Intervention des Commandos de l’Air) air force commandos based in Nimes, plus secret service police from the GIGN and special service operatives from CRAP. It was an extremely powerful force for a mandated peacekeeping operation.
Yet, this much heralded and impressively armed ‘humanitarian’ mission had very few trucks with which to move the displaced people or survivors it had supposedly come to rescue. Armoured personnel carriers, which could move the odd two or three survivors, were no good faced with the dozens who came out of hiding when they sensed the French might save them. As a result, many more Tutsis were killed in remote areas because Turquoise did not have the resources it needed to take them to safety. It was a failure that commanders in the field did not attempt to redress even after initial reconnaissance had shown the scale of the problem with which they were dealing. Unlike Operation Amaryllis, when trucks were taken from UNAMIR to help move survivors out of the conflict, this time there was no other transport to requisition or, indeed, were there any plans to fly in such vehicles.
Hutu crowds and Interahamwe killers received the troops from Turquoise with unabashed joy as they passed through villages, and drove along the potholed red dirt roads. Journalist Scott Peterson was shocked at the welcome given to the Turquoise troops:
The French … were met as liberators. They were heroes to the Hutus. The welcome party was outrageous, because it was clear that these European soldiers were saving the killers from all the demons that their violence and murder against the Tutsis had stored within their psyches. Freshly made tricolores waved from every hand; men chanted and danced with their machetes and bottles of beer. The crime had been committed, and now it was being absolved; they would be safe. Banners proclaimed ‘Vive la France!’ and praised President Mitterrand for his mercy and care.
Militia checkpoints evaporated when the convoy of troops passed. Confetti was thrown. I was jostled by the crowd, as they tried to humour me and ply me with beer.29
Guardian reporter Chris McGreal passed through 24 roadblocks on the stretch of road from Gisenyi to Kibuye, each guarded by a motley collection of militiamen armed with the occasional gun, but mostly clubs and machetes. He found any white person was usually regarded as a French soldier and given a warm welcome.
The barricades are frequently decorated with hastily fashioned French flags and signs praising President Mitterrand for intervening. Others denounce Belgium and Uganda for supporting the rebels. In areas where French troops have passed through they have often met with a rapturous reception from people who believe the soldiers are not there to rescue the remaining Tutsis but to shield the Hutu majority from the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front.30
Journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry described the welcome as having the ambience of a football match as tricolours were waved and crowds screamed their support for the paratroopers. He reported a pickup truck, crammed with militia killers shouting ‘Vive la France’ and ‘Vive les Français’. It was, ‘as if the Americans had been welcomed by a fan-fare by the [Nazi] guards at Treblinka in 1945’.31 In Gikongoro, scene of some of the worst butchery, the prefect even had his employees rehearse their warm welcome by practising ‘spontaneous’ cheers, while in the Hutu heartland of Gisenyi the authorities deployed entire schools of children to wave little French flags.
One young Hutu priest called Étienne summed up the feelings of many of his fellow extremists.
In Rwanda you are not able to choose your side, after lulling the fears of the international community, France must fight on our side. She must not become the toy of the RPF as the blue helmets of UNAMIR have. It is known that national reconciliation is not possible and that only a military solution is possible to put an end to the conflict. We have gone too far.
He justified the genocide of the Tutsis by saying, ‘they were preparing to kill all of us; they had lists … if the French army betrays us the country will sink even further into catastrophe.’32
Aloys Mutabingwa was certain the French were there to help the Hutu stay in power – after all during the previous three years he had been taught by his French trainers how to kill, a message he then relayed to his own Interahamwe recruits.
In 1994, when the genocide took place, the Interahamwe put into practice what we had taught them, and what we ourselves had learned from the French. They set about killing the Tutsis. They didn’t stop killing them. Eventually, the French came to our aid. The men in charge locally had told us this would happen; they’d asked us not to worry, as they’d summoned help, and the French were going to come to our aid since they’d learned that the Tutsis were otherwise going to take over the country.
It was towards the end of June. We learnt that the French were on their way; the men in charge told us as much and urged us to prepare a warm welcome for them. We went to Russizi; it’s not at all far from here. We really celebrated their arrival in style, as was only proper! There were all the leaders, Manishimwe and the prefect, Bagambiki. There was also a shopkeeper, very active on the Interahamwe side: his name was Édouard Bandetse. They made it clear they were very satisfied. We said ‘thank you’ to the French, as they were going to come and save us from the Tutsi menace.33
The crowds that flocked round the French APCs and jeeps had been encouraged to give Turquoise an enthusiastic reception by both the official Radio Rwanda and Hutu hate radio RTLM, which began broadcasting in July 1993.
Transcripts of RTLM’s broadcasts, obtained from the ‘media’ trial in Arusha of Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza and Hassan Ngeze in 2003, showed how much control DJs exercised over the Hutu population. Witnesses at the trial in Arusha said that the two main objects the killers had at roadblocks were weapons and radios. Mixing current pop sounds with damning indictments of all the interim regime’s enemies, RTLM was more responsible than anything else for fixing in the minds of ordinary Rwandans the need to take an active role in the genocide for the ‘good’ of the nation. Constant references aimed at dehumanizing the inyenzi and inkotanyi Tutsi and their sympathizers contrasted starkly with the praise heaped on the great friend of the regime – France.
Habimana Kantano, one of the leading DJs, specialized in whipping up anti-Tutsi hatred. On 28 May, eight weeks into the genocide, he proclaimed on air that
if you are a cockroach you must be killed, you cannot change anything; if you are Inkotanyi (RPF) you cannot change anything. No one can say that he has captured a cockroach and the latter gave him money, as a price for his life, this cannot be accepted … don’t accept anything in exchange [for his life] he must be killed.34
The radio presenters went into particular overdrive when news of the French intervention became known. Kantano announced on 19 June that:
2000 men [French troops] will be coming and this is not [a] negligible number of soldiers. The French troops were here before; they came to support us or rather help us restore peace in the country, and then thanks to the Ibyitso [Tutsis living in Rwanda, literally ‘traitors’] governments, the Inkotanyi of course said: ‘the French must leave the country’. The French went packing and left for good. And this was beyond comprehension, but that was a trick by the Belgians to replace them. … Therefore it goes without saying that the Inyenzi do not want those French troops; but this changes nothing; whether they like it or not, the French will come to Rwanda at all costs.
We should be ready to welcome them [the French]. Let’s be ready … prepare to welcome our French guests; there is no other way to get about it. I think that we should smile when we meet them in the street … if necessary, we should offer them flowers, extend a cordial welcome to them … and then later, even some of our Sederikazi [Hutu women/girls] should approach them and chat with them, talk to them and then er … if necessary, they also will get foreign currency from the troops. You know that when the French were here, the RPF-Inkotanyi told the very beautiful Tutsi girls to accost the French and poison them. From then, the French started discovering what the Tutsi women were; I saw it myself. When the prostitutes went to expose themselves near the hotels, the French first asked, ‘is that one not Tutsi?’ Upon discovering that a girl was Tutsi, they abandoned her. We want those French troops; they should come and arrest those criminals [the RPF]. Let them come and prevent those wicked fellows from killing Rwandans.
I believe the French troops will be here by Wednesday at the latest. Let us prepare a rousing welcome for them. We have no conflict with them. They are our fellow men coming to help us stop the Inkotanyi from pushing us around. We must therefore receive the French cordially, embrace them and chat with them, especially as we share the French language. Even if someone tries saying ‘bonjour’ to them, it is different from the Inkotanyi who do not even know how to say ‘bonjour’. Let us take the example of Corporal Kagame who cannot even say ‘bonjour’. So, be ready to welcome the French troops properly; where possible, prepare sorghum wine for them, coconut banana liquor for them; get Primus beer with which to welcome the French troops. This will make them happy and they will feel at home.35
Even as the RPF surrounded the capital, Kantano was still putting his faith in a French intervention to save the interim government. He implored his listeners:
I am asking you to get ready to welcome the French. How can we get ready to welcome them? We have to start writing on clothing and on any material we can find … we have to write nice words to welcome those French. We will write this: ‘Long live the humanitarian action!’ ‘Long live France!’ ‘Long live Mitterrand!’ ‘Long live the UN!’ ‘Inkotanyi = assassins’, ‘Inyenzi = animals’ … every writing that can show the French how things should be conducted. This can be written on mother’s traditional crowns. It can be written on big placards that we will use to welcome those French. Where there are flowers we have to search for them and throw them in their cars. Children should also prepare dances for them. And there are words to be used like: ‘bonjour’, ‘merci’. … Our young women should try to approach them [the French] and lift their spirits.36
So, as the French troops moved along into the south of the country at the end of June they were left in no doubt that they were both wanted and needed. It was indeed after Operation Noroît, the much anticipated ‘second coming’, to bail out the Hutu extremists yet again. First up for the French was the immediate ‘rescue’ of 8000 Tutsis at Nyarushishi camp near the southern border town of Cyangugu. This was the necessary ‘media gift’ showing the ‘humanitarian’ nature of the operation and proving that French President Mitterrand was indeed a man of heart and deed. The truth was much less pleasant.
The pro-Hutu stance of many French officers now in the field was obvious. Colonel Didier Thibault, a senior officer in the Cyangugu area, gave vent to the frustration many Turquoise troops felt about their supposed ‘neutral’ role. Thibault was an alias for Tauzin, a French secret service operative who had previously worked as a military adviser to Habyarimana and was credited with having ‘spectacularly saved the situation’ in holding up the RPF offensive in February 1993. Not surprisingly, his loyalties lay with the Rwandan army and he was unsympathetic to an RPF victory. He had a close working relationship with the local prefect Emanuel Bagambiki who was in charge of the refugee camp at Cyangugu stadium to which 8000 Tutsis had fled for protection. Tauzin told the waiting media that he had no authority to disarm the militia or dismantle their roadblocks, which the French intervention force found were there to greet them and which were still in place every kilometre or two to catch the remaining Tutsis.
The media were told that Bagambiki was a key organizer of the killings and enjoyed choosing his victims with Nazi-style ‘selection squads’. Genocidaires under his command would sporadically enter the stadium to drag off to their deaths people regarded as traitors or dangerous to the local authority. One witness, Pierre Canisuius, said that at one such selection Bagambiki had picked out his father and 14 others to take away and kill. When questioned about working with a man who was directly implicated in the killing, Tauzin replied, ‘we are not at war against the Rwandan [interim] government or the Rwandan armed forces [FAR]. They are legal organizations. Some members might have blood on their hands, but not all. It is not my task and not my mandate to replace these people.’ He went on to say that in his opinion these were ‘political’ questions and not for him to consider.37
Allegations that individual French troops were not only in league with the Interahamwe but also raped, murdered and stole Tutsi cattle make salutary reading. The refugee camp at Nyarushishi was surrounded by militia who had arrived too late to massacre its terrified inhabitants without outraging the media scrum that accompanied the newly arrived French force. Inside the camp conditions were appalling. There was very little food and the inhabitants were totally dependent on people outside, including the French, for sustenance and water. One 15 year-old Tutsi, Beatrice, had fled to the refugee camps to escape the massacres in the surrounding area, along with her young brother, Gilles Rurangangabo.
Then, one moment, the French arrived. [Gilles] … went to work for the French. We liked to go and see him where he was working for the French – they paid him in canned food and he gave us some to eat. Some of us children would go over in groups to the French to pick up the cans they’d thrown away. At other times, they didn’t give them to us, they threw them to us as if we were dogs – we’d stand there and gaze enviously at them. When they threw the stuff to us, we’d go back home.
One day Gilles did not return home. When Beatrice went to enquire what had happened to him, she was told that he had gone to work for other French troops further north. After further questioning, which clearly annoyed the French, they admitted that the Tutsi child had been handed over to the Interahamwe who had killed him. Then:
[T]hey chased us away with teargas, telling us that they were well aware of the deceitfulness of the Inyenzis. We ran away, and they pursued us, insulting us and throwing stones at us.
When they realized they weren’t going to catch him [the boy who had enquired about Beatrice’s brother], they were really put out, and they started to take it out on other children who were going to fetch water for example. They chased them away and refused to grant them access to the water. They shut off the water and forbade anyone to go looking for kindling wood. So eventually we no longer had anything to eat, since we didn’t have any water or wood to do the cooking. In the end, the men got together and decided they should accompany the little groups of children who were going to fetch wood or water outside the camp. The women and girls couldn’t risk going outside. If a girl dared to venture out she was rapidly spotted, shackled and forced to sleep with them; she was raped.
We realized that this couldn’t go on, that those men hadn’t really come to rescue us or protect us. The [Tutsi] men got together and it was decided that from now on they would be the ones who carried out the chore of fetching wood and water. No women or young boys would dare to do it any more. The men gathered and set off in quite a big group to fetch wood. After that, we didn’t dare ask the least question and we never found him [Gilles], not even after the French had gone. We don’t know how he died; we haven’t any idea of what became of him or where he fell.
That’s what I can tell you about the French right now – they brought us nothing but grief, and I certainly can’t say that they did anything positive for us at all. They didn’t come to our aid. Furthermore, if someone dies when he’s in your care, it’s only right that you should explain everything you know about the matter!
We thought that they’d come to protect the people who were in danger, but in fact they watched the Interahamwe enter the camp and seize people they led off to kill. But they were there. Another thing: even when the Interahamwe didn’t enter, the French entered and they would beckon over a person they then took away, as if that person was going to come back. They left with the Interahamwe and the people they’d taken away never did come back.
The Interahamwe accompanied the French when they came into the camp. They didn’t kill the people in the camp – they took them away and went off to kill them in the military zone, where no civilians were admitted. That’s where they killed the ones they’d taken away. Even when people ran after them to try and do something, they were stopped by the barrier, so they couldn’t go any further and were helpless.
There’s another girl I know who was raped by the French in the camp, a girl called Clémentine; she’d be able to tell you a great deal about the French. She went to live in Kigali, and she drives someone’s car – I don’t know whose. But I’ve forgotten her surname.
What they did, from what I’ve heard, was this: they went outside the camp to look for cows to slaughter; it was there that the Interahamwe carved up the cows they’d taken from the Tutsis. But I know one case of a cow that the French took from a peasant who was living near the camp, promising they’d pay him the day he went to get his money. But when he went to the camp, he was chased away and they never paid him. The only answer he got was that this cow was Tutsi property and that nobody paid for Tutsi property.
I’m also one of those who went round begging for meat to grill, but in vain. The French were happy to open the barrier and those who went across into that zone were then obliged to come back to our camp as fast as they could, but those who entered their [the militia’s] encampment didn’t usually return. They were never seen again; they must have been killed immediately, right where they were.
In my view, I’d say the French came to kill along with the Interahamwe; they were there to kill. I can cite the example of my brother whom they killed while he was working for them, so they were responsible. There’s another case of a man from Mibilizi who had gone to work for them – he suffered the same fate as my brother.
What I would demand from France is that, seeing that they brought immense grief to Rwanda, like the gaoled Interahamwe who acknowledge their actions – Rwanda should bring these French here to acknowledge what they did together with the Interahamwe. They’d led the whole world to think that were coming to rescue the people here, they’d signed an agreement saying as much; but instead of rescuing us, they came from outside the country to kill us, together with the Interahamwe from inside.
The Interahamwe acknowledge their crimes and some of them are coming out [of prison]; why shouldn’t they [the French] acknowledge what they have done, as the Interahamwe have? They should have protected us and on this point, like Bagambiki our killer, they refuse to admit a thing. It’s worse than the Interahamwe. They should have stopped those Interahamwe from killing us, they were their bosses. The French were responsible for the Interahamwe, they need to explain themselves.38
Beatrice was not the only survivor to testify about the French troops’ actions. In 2005, 11 years after the genocide, a French army investigation was launched when six Rwandans filed charges of ‘complicity to genocide and/or crimes against humanity’ against the French forces. Auréa Mukakalisa, who was 27 years-old at the time, testified that the Interahmawe at Murambi refugee camp raped her while French soldiers controlled it.
‘Hutu militiamen came into the camp and pointed out the Tutsis who the French soldiers then forced to leave. I saw the militiamen kill them – I saw French soldiers themselves kill Tutsis using gleaming big knives.’39
Janvier, a 25 year-old member of the Interahamwe testified that the ‘worst’ of the French soldiers
seized the surviving women and forced them to become their wives. They took them into the camps and did what they wanted to them. Of course those women were forced into it. What do you expect a woman survivor to say? Everyone had abandoned the survivors; their only hope of rescue lay with those whites! A Frenchman would make her an object of his pleasure, and then, shortly after, he’d abandon her and take up another. That often happened at Nyarushishi, in our area too in Bugarama, wherever they went. When you were a Tutsi, you had to die, and that was that.40
When the French arrived, we greeted them as our longstanding allies, people we knew really well. It’s true, they proved as much to us – they never forbade us to do or say anything on this point. As for them, they were pleased with us and never did anything to hinder the work of those who were doing all those things. Who was the enemy? They too knew that the enemy were the Tutsis. When they came to a place where there were Tutsis … and at that time the Tutsis were starving, some of them had gone for many days without eating, as they hid out in the bush. … The French had some fortified biscuits, canned food. Instead of giving it to those starving people, no, they gave it to the Hutus and the Interahamwe. When they left those places, they would fire into the air – this was the signal that the coast was clear and we could go in and kill them.
One example I can give, you see, is this: the first jeep to arrive at Mibilizi, the first place they came to a halt was Mibilizi; this was where the first Frenchmen stopped. There were Tutsis who had survived there. But as a result of what had been decided at the meeting – which I myself did not attend – when the French left Mibilizi to return to Kamembe, those people were imme-diately killed. There were almost 3000 people there. They were all killed.
At that period, there were a lot of corpses in the country; it was yet again the French who advised us to throw the bodies into the water or to bury them instead of leaving them there in the open for everyone to see. At that period, people were killed and aban-doned where they lay. It can be awkward if you leave bodies out in the open, the French asked us to bury them or to throw them into the water. We threw them into the river Rusizi. At home in Bugarama, the bodies were all thrown into the waters of the Rusizi, and they were swept away.41
Aloys, now in prison charged with genocide, testified to the collaboration between the Interahamwe and Operation Turquoise at Nyarushishi camp.
The French came, and at the border they discussed the situation with Bagambiki and Manishimwe, the lieutenant in command of the region. Eventually, the French went straight to Nyarushishi, a place where they’d brought the Tutsis from the Kamarampaka stadium. Two days after they arrived, we received a message asking us to get the Interahamwe together so they could go to Nyarushishi to kill the Tutsis.
So we assembled the Interahamwe and went up to Nyarushishi and encircled the camp. We’d just encircled it when a French-man arrived, I don’t know if he was the superior officer of the others, but he said to us that, ‘given that there are many people gathered here, the satellite photos must have picked them up, the international community might well have detected their whereabouts, it’s no longer possible for you to kill them here. But you can flush out and liquidate all the ones that are hiding.’ As we came back down, we systematically burnt and destroyed the houses that had so far been unaffected. When we came across anyone with a bit of a long nose, we killed them without even checking their identity; ‘even the French have signed your death warrant,’ we told them. This is what we told them everywhere, that even the French had given us a licence to kill.
Before leaving Nyarushishi, the French had given us grenades and combat rations. We came back eating, feeling really cheerful. The events carried on. At the border, we continued killing people and throwing them into Lake Kivu. Under the eyes of the French, of course! At one moment the French told us, ‘you Rwandan Hutus aren’t very bright! You’re killing people and throwing them into the water and not doing anything else! Don’t you realize they’ll eventually float up to the surface and they’ll be seen by satellites? You really don’t have a clue!’ It was the French who taught us how to slit their bellies after we’d killed them and throw them into the water without there being any risk of them rising to the surface. We learnt our lesson and started to put it into practice.
Even afterwards, when they found us destroying and looting a house, they asked us if we knew where the owner of the house was. If you were so unwise as to say that you’d heard he’d fled and that you didn’t know what had become of him, they’d practically kill you themselves. They’d lay into you, call you stupid. ‘So instead of first eliminating the owner before attacking his house, you’re doing things the other way round! What do you think you’ll have to say to him later? This is the ethnic group you’re fighting, right?’
They said this to us looking us right in the eyes and wondering why we were so stupid. ‘First you begin by eliminating the owner and then you can see to the destruction of his house,’ they said.
They were the ones who taught us all this. So, the truth of the matter is that the French came along to help carry out the genocide, clearly and visibly so, since they supported us in various ways.42
On 30 June Dallaire travelled to meet Turquoise commander General Lafourcade at his Goma headquarters to hammer out a ‘French zone’ beyond which the French operation would not progress. He was impressed with the operational readiness of what he saw, all the more poignant given his own threadbare UNAMIR resources of a handful of poorly armed, little-trained troops in Kigali, ferried about in much-repaired APCs.
The French had obviously not skimped on their own logistics, billets and military equipment, and had carefully deployed around the airfield and in the town [Goma]. Witnessing the size and level of the outfitting of the camp vividly put into relief my own lack of support. Money and resources were no problem when the full weight of a world power is put behind the effort … [the] elite units … [from] the French foreign legion, para-troopers, marines and special forces … were equipped with state-of-the-art weapons, command and control communications, HQ assets, over one hundred armoured vehicles, batteries of heavy mortars [and] a squadron of light-armed reconnaissance and medium troop-lift helicopters.43
The smartly dressed French officers, in their grey-green field uniform, reacted curiously to Dallaire’s opinions on how the two UN forces should work together. It became obvious that there was a split in his French military audience, betraying underlying tensions and sentiments within Turquoise itself.
While I was talking about stopping the ongoing genocide, his [Lafourcade’s] staff were raising points about the loyalty France owed its old friends. … They thought that UNAMIR should help prevent the RPF from defeating the RGF (FAR), which was not our job … my French interlocutors continued to express their displeasure with UNAMIR’s poor handling of the military aspects of the civil war. They refused to accept the reality of the genocide and the fact that the extremist leaders, the perpetrators and some of their old colleagues were all the same people. They showed overt signs of wishing to fight the RPF. Some of these officers came from the colonial tradition of military intervention in the domestic affairs of former client states; they saw no reason to change their views over what they billed as one more interethnic squabble.44
Dallaire’s impression was that ‘the French never did reconcile which attitude was supreme in Turquoise.’
While the official Turquoise mission continued to move up from Cyangugu in the south, the situation in the northwest, homeland to Habyarimana and the Hutu extremists, was kept from the prying eyes of the droves of media now alerted to the ‘newsworthiness’ of the Rwandan plight. According to the one foreign reporter who covered this ‘undercover’ campaign, 200 elite French troops arrived near Gisenyi to carry out reconnaissance operations. Supplies were brought up from Goma and camps made around Gisenyi and 15 miles east at Mukamira, a former French training base in previous years. Barril was nearby at Bigogwe camp, training recruits for his ‘insecticide’ programme. Tauzin even declared the French were prepared to advance to Ruhengeri, which was besieged by the RPF.
Certainly, there was a growing air of desperation in Gisenyi among interim ministers who knew that without immediate French support they risked ending up alongside President Habyarimana, whose corpse Hutu extremists were hiding in the fridge of a local café. Human Rights Watch concluded that this operation by the French in the northwest was part of the ‘military secrets’ going on in parallel with the public mission of Turquoise.45
At the UN and in diplomatic and press circles, French government representatives were working overtime to justify the operation. Mitterrand had embarked on a high-profile tour of South Africa to meet newly installed President Nelson Mandela. The visit was important, with big economic stakes to play for in the new post-apartheid country and massive financial contracts that scores of French commercial and cultural representatives were eyeing amid fierce Western competition. Mitterrand hoped to persuade this typical anglophone country to do business with France and to get important media credit for appearing with one of the icons of the twentieth century. Mandela ensured that the controversial Rwandan policy of his guests remained on the agenda, telling reporters,
If it is no longer possible to solve things peacefully, that is a decision that should be taken by the United Nations as a whole and not by one nation individually. Problems of this nature, which happen in other countries, should not be the subject of unilateral action as far as I am concerned. … I neither condemn nor approve what has been done [in Rwanda]. I have my own views, but I will express them to the OAU.46
At the G-7 summit on 9 July in Naples, Mitterrand delivered a speech calling for ‘a development contract, based on a new international ethical-moral code’ between the West and the ‘developing world’. The aim, the French president preached, should be to get the poorer countries ‘off the fringes’ and into the midst of countries that had a greater amount of the world’s riches. The Financial Post commented:
Under normal circumstances Mitterrand’s little lecture might be expected to drag out of the G-7 some ringing declaration of intent which – like so much that emerges from their annual get-togethers – will turn out to be absolutely meaningless. But coming as it does from a statesman who is currently showing his concern for the travails of the Third World by a highly ‘questionable’ intervention in Rwanda, Mitterrand’s proposal may provoke only hollow, if concealed, laughter.
It’s true, of course, that French troops in Rwanda have rescued a handful of nuns and taken under their protective wing a few pathetic Tutsi survivors straggling out of the bush to escape their French-armed and, some of them, French-trained Hutu attackers. But overall, their actions have tended to confirm that their overriding objective is exactly what sceptics suspected all along – to protect and preserve their client Rwandan government of Hutu extremists.47