Chapter 8

Bisesero and Withdrawal

The road that winds slowly upwards by the side of Lake Kivu, through the small pretty lakeside town of Kibuye, is one of the most scenic stretches in Rwanda. One’s eyes are held by the incredible greenery of sorghum, banana and mango groves, and the steep-sided ravines that drop down precipitously to the blue-grey waters of the lake. In 1994 this area, known as Bisesero, became a major killing field and, by July, it was difficult to move more than a few yards without stumbling across a badly decomposing or half eaten body, left to the elements and scavenging dogs. It had been a particularly wet period, with incessant and torrential rains lasting for days. For Tutsis who were still alive in late June, sheltering in holes and hiding amid the soaking green foliage of the plantations, life was made even worse by being attacked by swarms of mosquitoes and insects.

Of the 70,000 Tutsi inhabitants of Bisesero at the start of April, fewer than 2000 were left three months later. This hilly region had seen massacres before. Some remembered the 1959 pogroms when Hutu killers stalked the region and hundreds were beaten to death. But unlike in the rest of Rwanda, in Bisesero the Tutsis fought back. There they had a reputation for being warriors who would not allow an enemy to force them from their lands.

When Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on 6 April many Tutsis from the surrounding areas fled to the hills of Bisesero, including Anastase Kalisa, a 21 year-old labourer at the nearby Gisovu tea factory who took refuge on the slopes. ‘The bourgmestre of Gisovu, Alfred Musema,¹ who was the director of the Gisovu tea factory, together with local teachers drove around everywhere in their cars, making Hutus aware that their President had been killed by the Tutsi and that they had to start taking revenge. They also said that the Tutsi intended to exterminate the Hutus.’²

The massacres began once the militia had taken many Tutsis’ machetes, clubs or spears from them at gunpoint. Houses were burnt and cows slaughtered. Vans brought killers along the two-hour trek by road from Kigali. The Prefect of Kibuye Clement Kayishema, Director of Mugonero hospital Gérard Ntakirutimana, and local businessman Obed Ruzindana,³ used their authority to organize and lead the genocide. Like an immense game of cat and mouse, attackers – ‘as many as the grass in the bush’ – mounted repeated operations to hunt down families and individual Tutsis taking refuge in the hills.

The Tutsis fought back. Unlike elsewhere in Rwanda where they sought refuge in their homes, churches or local community buildings and were slaughtered with little resistance, at Bisesero they used what weapons they had kept from the militia to counter the Interahamwe. However, after living in the open, being soaked by the rains, with insufficient food and drinking water, under constant fear of attack and without any facilities to treat machete and bullet wounds, by June the survivors were in a desperate state.

With more than 65,000 decomposing bodies on the hillside, the exhausted survivors had to endure the daily nightmare of seeing dogs and crows slowly devour the bodies of their murdered kin. As the survivors fought desperately through April and May, the killers, who came in buses and were paid for their ‘labour’ by men like Obed Ruzindana, became increasingly concerned to finish the ‘work.’ Genocide made good business sense; it took away rivals and a fat profit could be made from seizing Tutsi homes, possessions and money.

For the 2000 survivors left hiding in holes, mine shafts and amid the heavily wooded slopes, the news on the radio at the end of June that French soldiers from Operation Turquoise had arrived in the Kibuye area to stop the genocide was both unexpected and immeasurably welcome. It is difficult to imagine how it must have felt to be hunted for two months, to be on ‘death row’ waiting for a machete or club to end your life in the most brutal way and then hear an announcement on the radio of your salvation. It was the same feeling the Jews inside the gates of the remaining concentration camps must have had in the summer of 1944 as rumours of the advance of the Allies reached them. There was a glimmer of light in the form of the green and red berets of the Gallic soldiers. Anastase said:

We had a horrific time from April to June. It was the first time I learned how terribly hard life can be. We had nothing to eat or to drink. I had no one to protect me and was very frightened what would happen. It was the first time I had ever seen a man kill another. I was alone and there was no one to help me. The three months were like 100 years. The first time I saw the French soldiers, I felt at last some hope, as if I was not dead after all and that there could still be a new life.⁴

On 27 June a well-armed advance party of Operation Turquoise discovered the survivors. Its base was only a matter of minutes away in Kibuye, which on 17 and 18 April had been the scene of two appalling crimes when, at the church of St John and in the town stadium, a large group of killers, directed by local government officials, had slaughtered crowds of Tutsi civilians who had fled there for safety. Afterwards, the Hutu authorities brought in Caterpillar trucks to move the 13,000 mutilated bodies into mass graves.

The foreign troops were easily spotted making their way up the hillside. Witnesses speak of four to six vehicles, with 20–25 troops. Megaphones were used to call the Tutsis from their hiding places with promises of food and safety. When the French stopped, wounded, ill and frantic Tutsis began coming out of hiding towards them.

According to another survivor, Damascène, ‘The French arrived, but we saw when we came out that they were accompanied by some of the militia killers – men like Alfred Musema, Nzarora, Mika and others whose names I did not know. The French soldiers seemed aggressive and not pleased to be here.’ Charles Seromba told the same story. ‘There were about 20 French soldiers, who seemed ill at ease and not happy to be here. We asked for food and drink. We saw them arrive with the militia, but though this made us very anxious we still came out of hiding to meet them. We were desperate and at the very end of our strength.’

François witnessed the French force using helicopters that kept an eye on what was happening on the ground.

They were the ones who summoned us with microphones, asking us to reveal ourselves and come out of our hiding places – we’d been hiding in some of the mine holes in Bisesero. They told us we had to come out since they were coming to rescue us, and intended to transport us to a place of shelter, in zones occupied by the [Rwandan] Patriotic Front where there was no risk of us being killed.

Some people came by helicopter with the French, there were, among other things, three helicopters, three that I saw with my own eyes. The others arrived by jeep, there were three of them also, I didn’t see another one – they were jeeps that belonged to the French with Interahamwe who were disguised in clothes from the Red Cross. This was a trick to stop us recognizing them; they were with some soldiers in the jeeps.

As regards those who arrived by helicopter and those who arrived by land, they used the microphone to tell us they were coming to rescue us, that this was an opportunity the French were giving them to rescue us. ‘Show yourselves so that the French can take you to a safe place.’ They spoke to us in Kinyarwanda, since the French don’t speak that language.⁵

Anastase continued:

The French soldiers did not look happy, instead very military and aggressive. All we [survivors] were armed with were bows, arrows, some lances and clubs, but no guns. The French road-block meant we survivors came out to see them, but we had to give them our arms. But they had come with the militia. I recognized Jean Baptiste Twagirayezu [a known Interahamwe killer] there with them.

Eric Nzabahimana was another survivor who came out of the bush where he had been hiding to speak to the soldiers and to persuade them to help him and his fellow survivors. He was aware that the French were with Twagirayezu who assured the troops that the victims here were the Hutus, and that they alone were threatened. Eric said:

As I could see that these French men were really listening to this teacher (Twagirayezu), I called out to the Tutsis who were in the bushes. I even showed them the Tutsis who had received machete blows and who had been shot. I also showed them the corpses that were there. After that, the French listened to me. The soldiers looked at us and asked us to continue hiding. They told us that they would come back in three days.

Colonel Jean-René Duval – known as ‘Diego’ – led the French special service commandos. They discovered the survivors after two nuns at a convent further down the slopes had alerted them to the fact that terrible events were happening in the hills. The French soldiers had picked up a guide from a village to take them to an area where the survivors were expected to be found. Unknown to them, this guide was himself a well-known killer whose appearance with the French caused panic, fear and confusion when they reached the survivors.

The French troops took photos of the nightmare scenario in front of them. Even for most of the soldiers, not used to the ravages of Africa, it cannot have taken too much common sense or initiative to know who was telling the truth: those who came out from the bushes, emaciated, fatigued beyond reason, cut, wounded and with desperation written on their faces, or the Interahamwe in their own convoy, dressed in clean clothes, or disguised in Red Cross uniforms, looking well fed and watered. The fear of the survivors was palpable.

However, having come across the desperate Tutsis and having heard their tales of daily death and slaughter at the hands of the militia, Diego decided to leave and return in ‘two or three days’ time’ to recover those who were in mortal danger. It is unclear why this specific period of three days was decided upon if in fact help could have been sent earlier – within hours or certainly within a single day – had the will been there. Journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, who accompanied Diego on this initial mission, states that the entire Turquoise operation was put together – men equipment, aircraft and supplies – and flown several thousand miles to Rwanda in a mere nine days.⁶ It is scarcely believable that it would then take a further three days to move a few kilometres unless there was a lack of will to do so at a higher political and military level. It seems that Diego had expected to return earlier than the stipulated two or three days, but in the event had been prevented from doing so by orders from superiors.

The result of the three-day French withdrawal was as predictable as it was terrible. The waiting militia, who had been searching for surviving Tutsis, suddenly found them in front of them. Anastase commented: ‘When they [the French] said they were going my life again became a nightmare. The militia returned the next day.’ Another survivor, Jérôme, recalled how ‘immediately after their [the French] departure Dr Gérard [Ntakirutimana] came with his militiamen; they wiped out many of the people who had been hidden before the arrival of the French.’⁷

Vincent Kayigema, who was eight years old at the time, testified that the French had assembled around 200 Tutsis who had come out of hiding on a hill; facing them were crowds of armed militia. When the French then turned their armoured vehicles round and left, the militia stepped in ‘and killed more than half of the Tutsis who were there’. In the intervening three days before the French returned about 1000 Tutsis were slaughtered. Damascène put the figure at 2000. Many Tutsis were too exhausted to run and hide again. Emotionally, too, many gave up. Their last hope of salvation had proved a ruse.

While the militia resumed its ‘work’ with enthusiasm, the French patrol went back to base. According to Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, Diego spent the next three days making numerous calls on his satellite phone to Paris to alert higher command about the imminent danger to the hundreds of Tutsis they had seen on the hills. At the later 1998 inquiry, a clash of different dates for the eventual rescue of the survivors hints at some form of cover up. While de Saint-Exupéry is clear that the initial discovery was on 27 June, the French commanding officer, Marin Gillier, told the inquiry that his men came across the ‘Rwandan tragedy for the first time’ on 30 June, which would have meant no delay before the rescue came, rather than the three-day wait, which was the reality.⁸ In fact, on 26 June, the day before Diego and his men discovered the survivors, three journalists – Hugeux, Kiley and Bonner – had informed Gillier that massacres were taking place. For the next three days Gillier, like Diego, made repeated calls to his superiors to ask for action to be taken to assist those at risk, but failed to receive clearance. Gillier’s testimony to the 1998 inquiry smacks of an attempt to cover up his own failure to act – when action was taken it was by his troops ‘on their own’ initiative against specific orders not to intervene – and to protect those senior military figures who had refused Gillier permission to mount a rescue.

Diego eventually tired of talking to superiors in Paris who, despite Turquoise’s alleged humanitarian mandate, seemed inclined to resist intervention. After waiting around for orders to move that never came Diego, according to de Saint-Exupéry, set off back into the hills with his men. This time Colonel Jacques Rosier, head of the special force attached to Turquoise, directly intervened to stop him. This veteran of Operation Noroît landed his helicopter on the road in front of Diego’s troop convoy. Signalling to Diego to come over, the two officers had then been involved in a 30-minute discussion before Diego ordered his troops to turn round and return to their base. Rosier, who had been in Rwanda from June to November 1992 as head of the pro-FAR military cooperation operations in Kigali, had told him that they could go no further.⁹ He still seemed to regard all Tutsis as possible RPF ‘enemy’, even if in this case they were desperate genocide survivors.

The fact was that army chiefs did not see this rescue mission as a priority. Instead, they fell back on the formulaic response that possibly ‘the hills were alive with RPF infiltrators’ as the reason for not taking the initiative in allowing a rescue mission. This was despite reconnaissance patrols having found no evidence of the RPF and, although they had flown over the Bisesero survivors, overhead aerial operators had received no orders to try to spot alleged RPF movement in the area.¹⁰ Rosier and other commanders in Paris were refusing to countenance a rescue mission even though the French had a base full of special service commandos, the equivalent of the British SAS, ready and willing to return to help the survivors and stop the genocide. Moreover, Operation Turquoise was trumpeted as a UN-mandated ‘neutral’ expedition, so any meeting with Kagame’s RPF should now have made no difference. The French foreign office was in contact with the RPF through Dallaire and it would have been perfectly feasible to have negotiated an expedition to rescue the survivors. This was not 1992 and the French were not ‘at war’ defending the FAR and Rwandan government. The continued antipathy towards the RPF in the minds of some senior officers who had served in Rwanda during Operation Noroît, however, and their failure to delineate what was now a totally different situation was a real Achilles heel in the ability of Turquoise to fulfil its ‘humanitarian’ remit. At Bisesero this attitude allowed the genocide to continue and the genocidaires to stroll around unhindered.

On 29 June Defence Minister François Léotard visited the area on a public relations mission to ensure that the media gave full coverage to the ‘humanitarian’ operation and that Mitterrand’s government received all the plaudits it deserved for its Rwandan intervention. Léotard’s officers had fully briefed him on the likelihood of the killing nearby continuing, for the journalists with Operation Turquoise had asked for action to be taken to help those they had seen being massacred on the hills. According to Raymond Bonner of the New York Times, ‘Léotard rejected any operation to evacuate or protect the embattled Tutsi at Bisesero saying that the French “did not have enough troops to protect everyone”.’¹¹

Under continued pressure, Léotard gave in before he left, though the subsequent mission, which Captain Marin Gillier was detailed to provide on 30 June, was first and foremost aimed at rescuing a French priest from a church near Bisesero. In fact, after learning of the plight of the survivors on 29 June, Sergeant-Major Thierry Prungnaud told Gillier, his commanding officer, that he and his companions in the 13th RDP (Régiment des dragons parachutistes) would be heading into the hills to rescue the survivors the next day. Gillier made no effort to stop them, even although they were effectively breaking a direct order not to leave base. Once the Tutsi survivors were rediscovered, further help was sent for and the rescue began in earnest.¹²

The Tutsi survivors greeted the belated return of the French troops with a wide range of emotions. Many wondered if they were in league with the killers. After all, they had previously arrived with militiamen and then left, perhaps to allow the genocide to continue. When Damascène saw the French returning, he feared they would face imminent death. ‘We asked them to kill us instead of continuing to side with the Interahamwe. And we felt hate towards them and feelings of wanting vengeance on them and their Interwahamwe compatriots.’

This time the French used drums to persuade the survivors to come out again from hiding and, as before, it took place in front of groups of armed militia who stood watching on a nearby hill. The survivors, now fewer than 1000 in number, were put into a group and given biscuits, water and medical attention. Most were in a terrible condition.

One woman, Anathalie Usabyimbabazi, who had lived in the undergrowth for two months and kept herself alive by eating raw potatoes, had to endure seeing dogs ripping up and eating the mutilated bodies around her. She was so emotionally disturbed that the French at first refused to take her on the grounds that she was a ‘mad woman’. Eventually, persuaded that she had been normal before the genocide, she was taken away for treatment. Prungnaud described coming across a valley in which 10,000 people had been killed and in which the survivors were in a truly ‘lamentable condition’.¹³ French troops had then combed the area for more survivors among the scattered debris of mangled, machetted, decomposing and half-eaten bodies. The French force found no evidence of RPF infiltration.¹⁴

Charles Seromba remembered the French action well. ‘They did not apologize even when we showed them the bodies of those killed when they left three days before. But we were so hungry and thirsty we had to come out of hiding again even though we were unsure what would happen.’

With other traumatized Tutsis, Damascène was taken down the steep slopes to the bottom of Muyira hill at the centre of Bisesero. The survivors did not speak to the soldiers, partly because many could not speak French and partly because many who could did not want anything to do with them.

The traumatized survivors were given a choice. They could depart for the RPF-controlled area or be moved into the self-declared ‘safe zone’ held by the French. Not surprisingly, given the previous actions of the French and their continuing open ambivalence to the killers who walked about with the foreign troops and were clearly still anxious to ‘finish the job’ of killing the remaining Tutsis, the survivors opted for the former.

Anastase said he had seen Alfred Musema twice at Bisesero while the French were there.

He [Musema] told the French soldiers that there was no need to protect these Tutsis because the country was safe … I was there when he came the second time. Every one [of the survivors] screamed and told the French that he should not be allowed to come into the camp. Despite our shouts that he was a killer the French let him go.

Other witnesses said he asked the French to hand over the survivors to them. Eric testified:

The French protected us but they did nothing to punish the Interahamwe who had killed us. On the contrary, these assassins had many conversations with the French. He [Musema] told these soldiers to leave and not to protect the people who were the cause of insecurity in the region. He was in a red Peugeot. The survivors who saw Musema wanted to attack him but the French calmed the situation and Musema left.

Seeing the killers of your family and neighbours driving around the French camp and talking to the foreign troops, it was perhaps not surprising that the survivors opted to be taken to the RPF zone rather than stay in the French SHZ (safe humanitarian zone). This sparked an angry reaction from their French ‘saviours’, which many of the survivors witnessed.

Damascène said, ‘For the first days they treated us very well, but later they reacted badly against us because we asked to be moved to the [RPF] area that was close to us. They refused us food to eat and drink, as well as the clothes they had promised us.’ Philimon Nshimiyimana described the soldiers as angry ‘so much so that they stopped giving us food’, while seven survivors, with Anastase acting as spokesman, commented:

While negotiations went on with the French and RPF as to whether we would be allowed to go to the RPF zone, we were not allowed food or drink for long periods. The French were not happy when we said we wanted to go to the RPF zone. To make their point the kids and adults were chucked into the back of trucks for the journey to the RPF zone like things that don’t matter.

Today, inside a corrugated metal shed on a Bisesero hillside, only metres away from where the French convoy arrived, are several long wide tables. Layed out on each table are line upon line of skulls, perhaps 2000 in all, of all sizes, from those of tiny babies to elderly adults. At the far end, 15 metres away, are more piles of bones. The light filters through holes in the metal ceiling and rudimentary walls. Each skull, each head, each person, all with a tale of calamitous suffering, all with a story of anguish and pain they can no longer shout out. The empty eye sockets look blindly out into the dark. Ten years after the genocide bodies are still uncovered each week on the mountain and the remains brought here to this grim charnel house.

Charles commented, ‘I feel nothing towards the French now. I think the French soldiers are like the Interahamwe.’ For the only time in our conversation he raised his voice in anger and emotion, a voice that up until then had remained soft and low despite the appalling story he offered. ‘If a French soldier stood in front of me now I would accuse those soldiers of being criminals. They killed my family.’ Charles’s brother was murdered during the three-day period when Turquoise left the Tutsi of Bisesero to their fate.

Anastase said he wished the paratroopers had never arrived, for with the RPF rapidly approaching the survivors could have been saved.

If the French soldiers had not come here we would have stayed in hiding and only come out when the RPF arrived, which would have been soon. Because of the French many came out and were killed. I’m sure more would have survived if they had not come. I think of the French like I do the Interahamwe – that is together.

They came up, after all, with the militia, and they travelled together with them to Gikongoro, Kibuye and Cyangugu. The French have a great responsibility for what happened here.

The 1998 inquiry into France’s role in Rwanda devoted a meagre 20 lines to the incident at Bisesero. It put the lack of action firmly down to Gillier, although the real reason for the failure to intervene was that Diego and Gillier were given direct orders not to mount a rescue mission. That such a rescue eventually came at all was because individuals like Prungnaud had enough courage to break ranks and disobey orders to put humanity before politics and military pride.

* * *

Bisesero proved to be a watershed for many French soldiers, especially those drafted in from bases in Africa or serving on the continent for the first time. Prungnaud later described how, at the five-minute briefing session the troops were given when they initially arrived at Turquoise headquarters in Goma, they were specifically told that Tutsis were killing Hutus. This deliberate disinformation about the genocide clearly came from high up in the French military from those who still wanted to ‘beat the RPF’. Prungnaud reckoned that the officer who gave the briefing to his men was unaware of who was killing who and was just reiterating what higher command had told him. It took most of the soldiers several days, indeed weeks, to recognize that this was a deliberate falsification. With Hutu crowds and militia cheering their arrival in the country, and orders to work alongside the Hutu police, prefects and bourgmestres, most of whom were genocidaire, it was not surprising that ordinary soldiers with no previous experience of Rwanda or any axe to grind about continuing the fight against the RPF, assumed that they were the ‘good guys’. The French forces at first also took the vast swaths of Hutu refugees as a sign that they were the victims of some appalling RPF/Tutsi terror.

After events like Bisesero, the truth of who was killing who became all too evident, leaving men like Prungnaud to feel that they had been deliberately manipulated by both the Hutu killers who had warmly welcomed them and fed them lies and by their own higher command. He complained, ‘We thought the Hutu were the good guys and the victims.’ Another soldier spoke with disgust of how he had had enough of ‘being cheered by murderers’.¹⁵ French journalist Thierry Cruvellier commented that many of the soldiers he saw were sickened and upset by the slaughter into which they had stepped.¹⁶

It was as if there were several different French armies in the area during Operation Turquoise. There were the brothers in arms with the FAR during Noroît in 1990–93 as well as those that had recently arrived in Rwanda with no preconceptions. The approaches of men like Diego and Marin Gillier were totally different, for example, from that of Tauzin who headed the 1st RPIMA. Unsurprisingly, units that had previously fought alongside the FAR, such as Foreign Legion regiments like the regiments étrangers parachutists, or the RPIMA, were more hostile than others to the RPF and its ‘Tutsi sympathizers’. They found it difficult to accept that their FAR allies had been defeated and were now in retreat. The war against the RPF took precedence in their minds over the ongoing genocide. It was as if Turquoise was still an extension of Noroît and its aim to repel and undermine the RPF was paramount. Colonel Rosier and others who shared his hardline anti-RPF stance in Paris, such as Generals Quesnot and Huchon, along with mercenaries and secret servicemen already in the country, were working to an agenda far removed from the UN-mandated intervention that was publicly lauded by the Élysée. The sole objective was to defeat Kagame.

Equally, many French troops acted with immense courage and integrity to help save Tutsis and to make the horror of the genocide fully known. Some like Prungnaud, who had helped train the presidential guard in 1992 and was horrified to learn of its involvement in the genocide, chose to disobey orders to help the survivors at Bisesero.¹⁷ Others, with no previous involvement in Rwanda, were soon able to dismiss the disinformation they had received about who was killing who and got on with the practicalities of saving life and feeding refugees.

Captain Gillier, for example, is said to have urged a media cameraman to film the site where hundreds of corpses were found when the French returned to Bisesero on the grounds that ‘people must see this’. He described the killing as ‘intolerable’.¹⁸ Though criticized for being a ‘desk man’ who was afraid to take risks, Gillier’s reaction to the difficult situation in which he was put at Bisesero was understandable. Caught between soldiers who wanted to save life and his commanders who had a different agenda, it is not surprising he ‘froze’.

Lafourcade, like other officers in the command structure, did his best to pull the various strands of his mission together, but there was always a political and military extremist bandwagon in the French camp that made Turquoise an uneasy mix of views and action.

Near Cyangugu, in the south, a journalist described how

bodies of Tutsis, no more than two hours dead, lie among the banana groves. The houses they once lived in stand half empty, looted even while the life drained from their owners’ veins. French soldiers from the Special Forces, the first of 2500 troops … arrive at the scene. There is little the reconnaissance team can do. They are two hours too late. Nearby, Hutu militiamen armed with modern automatic rifles and Stone Age clubs, the sort of men, if not the very ones, who have carried out massacres like this, stand about smiling and waving at the French soldiers. Many wear bandanas in the red, white and blue of France. A Rwandan army jeep races through the countryside similarly decked out.¹⁹

Such French troops cannot have taken long to realize that their briefing on who was killing who had been a complete fabrication.

* * *

Throughout Rwanda the genocide and chaos continued into July. The RPF advance continued to quicken, to deny any advantage to the incoming French force. The Rwandan army and militia sustained their killing spree and the tactic of pushing the Hutu population into retreat with them. Up to 300,000 refugees began moving towards the borders in an attempt to flee the RPF advance.

On 1 July Jean-Bernard Mérimée, the French representative at the UN, sent a letter from Mitterrand’s government to Boutros-Ghali informing the secretary-general of the need to establish an SHZ in southwest Rwanda. It cited earlier Resolutions 925 and 929 as authorizing such a zone.²⁰ This was despite Prime Minister Balladur telling the world before Turquoise began that France would on no account become a ‘force d’imposition’. Yet, the area of the proposed zone, which precluded any RPF presence, was clearly one of demarcation, cutting Rwanda in two and depriving one side of total victory.

However, the Security Council showed no will to readdress a debate on Turquoise. While internationally the new SHZ was perceived as a way the remnants of the Hutu army, militia and government could escape RPF retribution, no country wanted to get politically involved in the UN Security Council by contesting its setup. Instead, it was silently permitted.

Bastille Day, 14 July, provided Mitterrand with an excellent opportunity to justify the French action in Rwanda with some impressive-sounding ‘spin’. In a televized interview on Channel France 2, he claimed that Habyarimana had been a real advocate of the ‘La Baule principles’ that France could not intervene in Rwanda during the genocide because this was the job of the United Nations and that if the present Rwandan crisis restored the power of President Mobutu Sese Seko (in Zaire), this was due to unforeseen circumstances. According to Prunier, any informed observer of such ‘machiavellian statesmanship’ would have ‘hesitated between involuntary admiration for the President’s constructive capacity for lying and disgust at the degree of contempt it implied for the citizen-spectator’.²¹

With the fall of Kigali on 4 July and the setting up of the SHZ, Operation Turquoise entered its second stage. After further negotiations with Kagame, using Dallaire and UN representative Shaharyar Khan as intermediaries, General Lafourcade withdrew his forces to an area of 70 square kilometres in southwest Rwanda. It included the town of Cyangugu, the district of Gikongoro and reached up to Kibuye on Lake Kivu.

Such a zone was only made possible after the finalization of talks with the RPF. According to newspaper reports, an agreement between the two forces was reached on 6 July.²² A day earlier, Turquoise had withdrawn from the Hutu heartland and the interim government HQ at Gisenyi, a signal that the northwest was finished as a base for the FAR. It was also an acceptance that Kagame had won the war. An uneasy peace came into effect between the two sides, with the RPF tolerating the SHZ, while the French in turn restrained the more belligerent members of their staff who wanted a crack at Kagame’s men. At the start of July, Colonel Tauzin had announced, from his position near Gikongoro, that if the RPF challenged the ‘line in the sand’ the French had drawn, he would ‘open fire against them without any hesitation … and we have the means’.²³ Lafourcade issued a statement rebuking the gung-ho Tauzin, declaring that ‘we will not permit any exactions in the HPZ [SHZ] against anybody and we will refuse the intrusion of any armed elements.’²⁴ For the sceptical Kagame, the question was which of Lafourcade or Tauzin best represented the true sympathies of Turquoise.²⁵ Lafourcade, wisely sensing that Tauzin was a liability to this immensely sensitive operation, had him replaced as head of his unit and returned to Paris.

Other French officers were in agreement with Tauzin and complained ‘off camera’ about the role they were playing. Prunier overheard a senior officer moaning after the fall of Kigali, that ‘the worst is yet to come. Those bastards will go all the way to Kinshasa now. And how in God’s name am I going to explain to our friends [francophone heads of state] that we have let down one of our own.’²⁶

Aloys, the Rwandan army recruit and Interahamwe trainer, was certain about what he witnessed.

They [the French] told us they were heading off to Gikongoro and Kibuye to bar the route to the RPF, so they wouldn’t set foot in Gikongoro. They assured us it was inconceivable the RPF could come and find us in Cyangugu. They asked us to ensure we found all the Tutsis still in the region so that we could exterminate them. They promised that our zone would, thanks to them, become a Turquoise Zone. It was Frenchmen who spoke in those terms. Then they told us it was too late, the RPF had forces they hadn’t suspected; we’d waited too long before appealing to them; it was too late.

They were telling us all this when things were taking a turn for the worse for them and they’d started exchanging fire with the RPF at Gikongoro. They told us there was no other way round it; we all had to escape to the Congo without exception. Anyone who tried to stay behind would be considered to be a cockroach himself. It was the French themselves who said all this.

They asked us to flee wherever they went; in the small trading centres they urged people to flee from the RPF. Like in those small centres, they asked everyone they encountered, ‘Tutsi or Hutu?’ If you answered ‘Hutu’, they gave you the thumbs-up, saying ‘Yes!’ But to recognize a Hutu, they relied on this sign: the fact he was carrying a cudgel. Some of the cudgels had studs in them – we called them ‘no possible ransom to redeem an enemy’s life’; this had really impressed the French. They told us that, on this point, they recognized that the Rwandans had a sense of creativity and that they would never have imagined such a weapon for killing with. We’d killed with those things several times, right in front of their eyes, and they did nothing to prevent us.

Frankly, if they’d come to save people, they’d never have let us continue killing the Tutsis in front of them, let alone given us some of the equipment that we were using.

Another thing, if the French hadn’t lied in saying they were coming to save them, there wouldn’t have been so many Tutsis killed from among those who had survived up until then. When the French arrived, the surviving Tutsis had every chance to get away, first and foremost since the RPF was coming up fast. And what did the French do? They advanced so as to hold up the RPF troops and prevent them coming to rescue the Tutsis who were still in Cyangugu. This is what aggravated things in that prefecture.

Yes, once the RPF were held up by the French, we found the time and the patience to flush out the ones who’d managed to hide. We’d already been doing that but we were frightened of encountering an RPF soldier. We knew they were going to arrive from one day to the next and we’d seen some of our soldiers running away. You told yourself that if you risked nosing around in the bushes, you also risked finding an Inkotanyi who wouldn’t forgive you.

But once the French had told us ‘don’t worry, we’re on our way!’ we felt secure and we started to go deeper into the bushes to flush people out – we were full of confidence and determination since we had the blessing of the French and knew we were even going to reconquer the whole country.

Not only did they advise us, but they even ensured we had enough food. And they took the initiative and came to us. Sometimes they would meet the prefect, Manichimwe, who sent a soldier called Bikumanywa, a sergeant major in charge of the stocks at the Karambo camp. He would come and give us the instructions that he’d received from the French. ‘You can go wherever you want, without fear – we’ve got the French supporting us, and they certainly don’t want to see the country in the hands of the cockroaches.’

As for the roadblocks, there too the French weren’t exactly complimentary about our work. They told us the barriers would give us away and they advised us to remove them and inspect everything by the roadside. We took away the tree trunks that were blocking the road and we kept an eye on everything, at least along the road. They explained to us that when the international community keeps things under surveillance, if the satellites see barriers, it creates a really bad impression; so they advised us to keep watch on the road without erecting barriers.

No, there was never the slightest problem or misunderstanding in our relations with the French. They distributed weapons even outside Nyarushishi [a refugee camp just inside the Rwandan–Zaire border] at the customs post for instance, when they entered the country.²⁷

In some areas of the Gikongoro sector, French forces had set up their own roadblocks to stop not Hutu militia, Rwandan army and interim government ministers and officials from entering the SHZ, but the perceived real ‘enemy’ – possible RPF infiltrators.

French paratroopers at one such roadblock stopped Alphonse, a Hutu from Butare, as he was travelling back to his village near Gikongoro. They insisted he remain with them to help spot possible RPF infiltrators trying to get into the SHZ. Alphonse remembered,

the biggest problem at the roadblock was them wanting me to point out who people were. ‘Even you could be an RPF member’ they said to me. ‘How do we distinguish them?’ They said they had come to help but could not distinguish now who to help. By this time the government troops [FAR] and militia had changed into civilian clothes. The RPF were infiltrating the safe zone by using FAR and militia uniforms to get into the zone for reconnaissance purposes. It was almost impossible for me to distinguish the RPF and FAR from each other. But I was left in no doubt that the RPF were still very much seen by the French as ‘the enemy’.²⁸

While in Butare, Alphonse said he had seen the genocidaire Georges Rutaganda, vice-president of the Interahamwe, leaving Hotel Ibis with French troops to go to Gikongoro, before the RPF arrived in the town.²⁹

The French troops said what was happening was just ‘trouble among the people’ and that it was Rwandans fighting Rwandans, even though they must have known genocide was happening. I think they knew what was happening but did not care. They just called it ‘killings’. There were journalists from the BBC and other media also around to research and see what had happened, but no soldiers seemed interested.³⁰

The fear of RPF infiltration and destabilization of the SHZ was a pressing concern for the French troops. A cartoon published in Le Canard Enchâiné during Operation Amaryllis summed up the phobia French soldiers now felt towards the RPF and Tutsis. It depicted a furious and exasperated looking French officer looking from one Rwandan to another shouting, ‘Have you ever tried to distinguish a big Hutu from a small Tutsi?’³¹ It was a near-impossible task. Even native Rwandans could not tell their ethnic group by just looking at a person, hence the killers’ need for identity cards.

Désiré Ngezahayo, the bourgmestre of Karama commune in Gikongoro where a French command post was situated, was a close collaborator of French soldiers. He was later arrested and pleaded guilty to genocide. According to his testimony: during his trial in which he pleaded guilty to genocide:

‘Towards 3 July 1994, the French convened a meeting of all burgomasters at SOS Gikongoro. It was chaired by a colonel whose name I do not remember. He told us that the French had come to collaborate with us in order to ensure the security of the population. He added that he did not wish to see Inkotanyi infiltrate the Turquoise zone. For that purpose, he showed us a map indicating the boundaries of the Turquoise zone. He ordered us to tell people to do anything possible to stop the infiltration of the Inkotanyi in the zone. He specified that they were already in Butare near the Mwogo stream bridge and that it was possible for them to infiltrate. He ordered us to inform people to continue with the checking at different roadblocks and night patrols. He gave three criteria for recognising an Inkotanyi: the first was to check his identity card. In other words looking for the Tutsis as we had been doing before and killing the ones we found. The second criterion was to check for gun or ammunition strap marks on the shoulders of those we checked. The third was to check the tibia, because he said Inkotanyi were wearing gumboots which left marks on their legs. He said that if we found anyone who matched the criteria, we had to immediately kill him/her without any other form of interrogation. At the end of the meeting, we left to go to implement the instructions that we had received from the French. We reinforced checking at roadblocks, and verified among displaced persons to make sure there were no Inkotanyi infiltrators. Whenever Tutsis were found, they were immediately killed. Killings continued even though the French were officially saying that they had come to rescue people.’³²

Pierre, a member of the retreating Rwandan army commented, ‘It was said that the Inkotanyis [RPF] were coming in civilian dress but were still armed. So they [the French] disarmed all civilians so as to stop any Inkotanyis getting past. I don’t know what they might have done to an Inkotanyi they caught. I’d left beforehand and up until I left they hadn’t caught a single one.’³³

* * *

A vital decision faced the Turquoise leadership once the SHZ was declared at the start of July – namely how to deal with the armed militia, FAR members and interim government ministers now fleeing into the zone. As the RPF swept across the remaining area of Rwanda, Hutu peasants decided on flight away from both the conflict zone and any RPF repercussions. RTLM played on the fear and guilt, putting out messages that the RPF was slaughtering whole villages and committing genocide against the Hutu population. The prefect in Ruhengeri warned that anyone who stayed would be massacred.³⁴

For the interim government now preparing to flee from Gisenyi the best possible outcome was for Kagame to inherit a deserted country. With the fall of Kigali, around 1.5 million refugees fled with what belongings they could muster towards ‘safety’ in the SHZ. With the fall of the northern towns of Ruhengeri on 13 July and Gisenyi a few days later the southern French zone became a magnet for both the innocent and guilty.

UNAMIR commander Dallaire commented,

as predicted, the creation of the HPZ (SHZ) lured masses of displaced people out of central Rwanda and into the French zone. This was the terrible downside of Operation Turquoise. Having made public pronouncements about their desire to protect Rwandans from genocide, the French were caught by their own rhetoric and the glare of an active international media presence, and now had to organize the feeding and care of them … the trap the French had rushed into would inevitably begin to close. Either they would pull out as soon as they could – even before the sixty day limit of their mandate – or they would be cast in the role of protectors of the perpetrators of one of the most severe genocides in history.³⁵

Despite its public banner of humanitarianism, the problems Operation Turquoise faced were largely political. Should its officers disarm the militia and FAR contingent in the SHZ? Should they arrest and imprison, to await later investigation, those who were named as carrying out the genocide? And should they arrest the architects of the slaughter, the members of the interim government now fleeing into the SHZ? As with so much French policy on Rwanda, the answers that came from politicians in Paris and military leaders on the ground were confused. Judging from the solitary sheet of paper on which the initial plan for Turquoise had been written, it did not look as if the matter had been given much thought.

The need to please the world’s press and uphold Turquoise as a great French success meant statements affirming the capture of genocidaires and the disarming of the militia were vital for the operation’s ‘humanitarian’ credibility. Politically, however, such a strategy could badly damage French influence over other francophone African dictators, would fly in the face of its previous policy of complete support for the Rwandan army and interim government, and was deeply unpopular with hardened French Africanist politicians and military figures.

The result was confusion. Even before Turquoise began, Foreign Minister Juppé declared in mid-June that ‘France will make no accommodation with the killers and their commanders … [and] demands that those responsible for these genocides [note plural] be judged.’³⁶ The deputy director of African and Malagasay affairs at the foreign office, Yannick Gérard, advised cutting off French support for the interim government. ‘Their collective responsibility in calls to murder over Radio Mille Collines during these months seems to me to be well established. Members of this government cannot, in any case, be considered valid interlocutors for a political settlement. Their usefulness lay in facilitating the good operation of Operation Turquoise. Now they will only try to complicate our task.’³⁷ He added that such ‘discredited authorities’ were useless and harmful. The only statement the French government should now give to them should be to ‘get lost as fast as possible’.³⁸

Elsewhere the message was far more supportive of the genocidaires. On 11 July General Lafourcade welcomed the interim government ministers fleeing to the SHZ as Gisenyi fell, telling them they could seek asylum in France.³⁹ By 15 July, realizing what a public outcry this statement was causing, the decision was reversed, with the foreign office in Paris declaring that such ministers entering the SHZ would be arrested.⁴⁰ The reality was that France had dealt with this ‘band of killers’ for several years. To arrest them now was both to fly in the face of friendship and loyalty and to admit publicly that it had supported men it now knew were mass murderers.

Dallaire received a memo from Lafourcade confirming that the French commander and his government ‘had no mandate to disarm the RGF’, though he would prevent it from taking action in the humanitarian zone. His memo stated that

Turquoise was not going to disarm the militias and the RGF in the HPZ (safe zone) unless they posed a threat to the people his force was protecting. As a result the extremists would be able to move about freely in the zone, safe from any interference from the French, and also safe from retribution from, or clashes with, the RPF.⁴¹

On 15 July, having learnt that several members of the interim government were now in Cyangugu in the south of the SHZ, Ambassador Gérard wrote to Paris of his concerns: ‘Since we consider their presence undesirable in the secure humanitarian zone and knowing as we do that the [interim government] authorities bear a heavy responsibility for the genocide, we have no other choice, whatever the difficulties, but arresting them or putting them immediately under house arrest until a competent international judicial authority decides their case.’⁴²

Instead, in the confusion of the mass of humanity now crowding into a tiny area of southern Rwanda, the interim government’s prefects, mayors, ministers and militia continued to go about unchecked. Lafourcade found he needed to talk to such ministers to try to resolve the refugee crisis because the militia and Hutu radio still effectively controlled the mass of people fleeing towards Zaire. Dallaire, along with UN envoy Shaharyar Khan and Lafourcade, went to Gisenyi to meet interim foreign minister Jérôme Bicamumpaka, FAR leader General Augustin Bizimungu and other ministers. Dallaire suspected the genocidaires were planning to re-form over the border in Mobutu’s Zaire, and were even now making bargains with local power dealers in Goma and the surrounding area ‘to retain their weapons and political structure, thus setting up to come back into Rwanda in force within a couple of years and start the war all over again’. The UNAMIR commander also made a tacit reference to ‘sympathetic senior French officers inside the [refugee] camps’, where the mass of displaced people had settled, colluding with such deals.

On 16 July Lafourcade met Bizimungu again at the French HQ in Goma.⁴³ The French general asked Dallaire to keep the meeting private, fearing media embarrassment if his conference with this genocidaire became known. On his return by helicopter to Bukavu, a major French base for Turquoise, Dallaire became increasingly aware of quite how much human misery now swarmed around the border area between Rwanda and Zaire. ‘I was surprised at the lack of NGO or UN agency presence in the town, but I already knew that Turquoise did not have a solid humanitarian plan. There had been major looting in Cyangugu under the noses of the French. This was not looking good at all.’⁴⁴

The wrangling over the possible arrest of the genocidaires continued. The French government decided to ignore the advice of its ambassador Gérard about the genocidaire problem. Bruno Delaye, Mitterrand’s African adviser, commented that the French mandate for Turquoise ‘does not authorise us to arrest them on our own authority. Such a task could undermine our neutrality, the best guarantee of our effectiveness.’⁴⁵ On 18 July Admiral Lanxade reiterated that ‘France has no mandate to arrest the members of the former government.’⁴⁶ Though keen to change the mandate to allow the safe zone to be set up, Mitterrand was less than keen to push for it to allow the arrest of the leading killers.

The OAU surmised that France was failing to arrest the genocidaires for political and highly cynical reasons. First, to claim that it would harm French neutrality to arrest the perpetrators was nonsense. France had never been neutral in Rwanda and even now was resettling Akazu members in Paris. Second, France had never asked for the mandate to be modified, which it could have done if this were a sticking point. No mandate was ever set in stone – witness the setting up of the safe zone. Third, France tended to act unilaterally anyway; it had not bothered with mandates for Operations Noroît and Amaryllis, and had started Turquoise without waiting for UN ‘permission’. Finally, the real mandate was the Genocide Convention, which France had signed up to in Geneva on 12 August 1949. Under Article IV, ‘persons committing genocide … shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.’ The French government was keen to announce that it registered the happenings in Rwanda as genocide before the rest of the world wanted to use the word. Now it backed away from enacting the convention, where the mandate to arrest and bring to justice those who had committed such horrific crimes was obvious.

The French arrested just nine alleged genocidaires, but even they were not handed over to UN custody, as originally promised.⁴⁷ Two other suspects, known as ‘Prima’ and ‘Sebastial’, were arrested by local officials and given to the French. They were later escorted to Zaire in French vehicles when Turquoise pulled out of Rwanda, and released.⁴⁸ Journalist Sam Kiley reported that on 2 July the French military evacuated Théoneste Bagosora, the Rwanda genocide’s chief architect, to safety from Butare along with other ‘persons’.⁴⁹ His information came from a high-ranking French officer who knew Bagosora well. In an article entitled ‘France’s killing fields’, The Times accused the French of using the SHZ as a place that was ‘safe from the advancing RPF and thus safe for the murderers’.⁵⁰ Former President Giscard d’Estaing reinforced this view when he condemned the zone for merely protecting some of those who had carried out the massacres.⁵¹

Former Interahamwe Janvier was blunt in his appraisal of what he witnessed.

The French came to finish off what had been prearranged in agreement with Habyarimana, even if he was now dead. They gave no assistance to the victims. If they claim that they did, let them show us a single killer who they arrested. They killed maybe between one and five Interahamwe. If this was the objective, why didn’t they kill Munyakazi for instance, since he was the commander of an entire battalion of killers? This simple question requires an answer from them, so ask them on our behalf. Why didn’t they arrest Yusufu our [leading Interahamwe] commander?⁵²

Disarming the militia and Rwandan army as they retreated was another problem Turquoise needed to address. In practice, in the rare event it happened, it meant collecting antiquated rifles while the real killing weapons of the genocide – machetes, hoes, axes and clubs – were left in the killers’ hands. Colonel Tauzin insisted that up to 7 July he had collected around 100 weapons, but that most of the other armaments had already been destroyed in fighting with the RPF A later French inquiry concluded that it was ‘uncertain’ if any methodical and systematic disarmament had taken place. As a result, militia and FAR activity was ‘not stopped completely in the SHZ’.⁵³ According to Pierre, who was fighting with the FAR as they retreated towards Zaire:

Turquoise was aimed at containing the Inkotanyis [RPF] and preventing them crossing over and coming here to Gikongoro. On one occasion, for instance, they’d tried to pass through Mwogo to enter Gikongoro. That time they fought them and the Inkotanyis had to beat a retreat under heavy French fire. The French had prepared their attack but the RPF must have lost a lot of their men.

When the French saw men fleeing, they took special care to protect the fugitives fleeing for the Congo. The ex-FAR were in cahoots with the French. For instance, when the FAR crossed the border with their weapons, the French didn’t disarm them; they let them through without hassling them.⁵⁴

Turquoise also failed to close down RTLM, the hate radio station that, though continually having to move its broadcasting centre, managed to stay on air propagating its mission to see the killers ‘work’ harder and faster to fill the graves with Tutsi dead. Dallaire had protested for some time about RTLM, but his words fell on especially deaf ears. Francois Léotard alleged that jamming the radio’s frequency or destroying its transmitters was not part of the mandate given to the French by the UN.⁵⁵ The issue was one of free speech, and while the interim government was still recognized as ‘legitimate’ the radio station should be allowed to express its opinions. This again was despite Article IIIc of the Genocide Convention, which made punishable any ‘direct and public incitement to commit genocide’. Bruno Delaye also claimed that the French operation was unable to find the transmitters RTLM was using, despite the impressive air reconnaissance power, satellites and modern ground surveillance systems in use.

Any enthusiasm to jam RTLM was not helped by the friendship of its founder, Ferdinand Nahimana, with members of the French government. Indeed, former ambassador Georges Martres was even alleged to have described Nahimana as ‘a fine little Frenchman’.⁵⁶ This former history professor and Hutu extremist propaganda chief, whom Operation Amaryllis had airlifted to France in early April, later returned to Rwanda to ensure that his radio station was still in robust health and continuing its killer broadcasts. Nahimana also acted as an emissary between the interim government and Turquoise.

The French safe zone had, by mid-July, become a stepping off point for terrified Hutu peasants aiming to cross into Zaire, where refugee camps were already being set up. For the interim government the policy was to get to Zaire to re-form and rearm. To make this possible it needed the collusion of the French operation. While Hervé Ladsous, the French chargé d’affaires, issued a statement prohibiting any armed people from entering the SHZ, it was obvious that this applied only to the RPF. French troops allowed, and even actively assisted, the retreating Rwandan army and militia to cross into Zaire with their equipment and weaponry intact. Human Rights Watch reported one foreign soldier who testified to seeing Turquoise military refuelling Rwandan army trucks before they left for Zaire with looted goods.⁵⁷ As it was, FAR troops walked about openly in the safe zone with their weapons, many the gift of previous French assistance. The OAU reported that Rwandan army soldiers were receiving whole cargoes of weapons in the camps, organizing military exercises and recruiting new troops to prepare to return for a final victory in Rwanda.

Not surprisingly, RPF commander Paul Kagame was unhappy about genocidaires re-forming a few kilometres the other side of the Rwandan border. The RPF expressed disquiet to Lafourcade about this, while shelling Goma airport on 17 July from positions inside Rwanda, with explosives hitting the runway while planes loaded with equipment came and went. The effect on the refugees piling into the town from Gisenyi across the border was, according to Dallaire, ‘debilitating’. French commanders accused the RPF of attacking its forces near Kibuye and a statement was issued from Paris to say that Turquoise would no longer tolerate intrusions into the SHZ.

On 18 July, the day after taking control of the Hutu stronghold of Gisenyi, the RPF announced it was calling its own ceasefire. On 19 July a new broad-based government was sworn into office in Kigali with Hutu moderate Pasteur Bizimungu as president and Paul Kagame as vice-president.

* * *

Diogène, a former FAR member, sat and sipped his Primus beer by the hotel pool where we met. It was a humid day and Diogène, now a high-ranking officer in the new unified post-genocide Rwandan army, spoke of the events he had witnessed ten years before in the spring and summer of 1994. As a FAR battalion commander in Kigali from 1991 to 1993 he made many trips to the northern Volcano region where the RPF attacks were most acute.

I knew some senior French officers, for example Colonel Chollet, who taught tactics to the FAR in Rwanda, and had been appointed special adviser to the Rwandan army staff. He seemed to be both a military man, but also a politician. I saw him often on the ground advising the commanders about operations, especially when fighting in the northern Volcano area.

The French officers were sure that the RPF would never win. They were disappointed in 1994 by the RPF victory. They wanted to bring in military support on the ground but it was too late. By this time half the territory was in the hands of the RPF and the FAR soldiers had lost morale.

When Operation Turquoise entered Rwanda via Zaire both the [interim] government and [Hutu] people were unsure if they had come to fight the RPF. But in fact the only firefight was near Butare, when two French soldiers [later released by the RPF] were captured in an ambush. France did not stop the genocide near Gikongoro, which continued despite the French presence.

French soldiers provided the FAR with help with the heavy artillery and mortars. Ammunition also had to be replenished from French stocks, but lack of money often meant weapons were taken back to the armoury as there was no ammunition for them. The French seemed happy to be here but shocked by the amount of death. The army [FAR] and [interim] government disappeared when the French didn’t fight. It was very important what the French did – the Rwandan government was lucky that for the past seven years the RPF could not win the war or advance [because of the French military presence].

Everyone saw that politically France was supporting the interim government. When the French arrived in Gikongoro [during Operation Turquoise] they were very well welcomed – with flags and happy sentiments as if the war was now over.

My family and I and other families were taken to Zaire in helicopters in July, along with other [FAR] officers – about five in total; when we got there, after about three or four days we issued a statement condemning the genocide. After that we had our guns taken off us; we were escorted at gunpoint from our tents by French soldiers and thrown out of the camp, which was near the airport. We were accused of being against the [interim] government and working for the RPF. We had issued a communiqué asking the government to stop the genocide. Two senior officers and a general were dismissed. After I was thrown out of the camp – with French soldiers escorting me away – I then went to Bukavu camp and back to Rwanda where the RPF authorities received me, and I ended up joining them.

The FAR officers were divided in their opinion over the genocide. Some from the north saw it as OK as they did not want to lose power but many officers from the south tried to stop the killing. For example one FAR officer from Cyangugu helped to save Tutsis by putting them in a camp under his protection. He is now dead. Many Tutsis survived because of this. Many of the [FAR] soldiers from the south were not happy fighting when their own side was killing innocent people.

For us in the FAR, we used French soldiers as both military and political advisers. Though Rwandan commanders gave the orders, there were many French advisers on hand. In terms of numbers, there were far more militia than the FAR, and many were trained by the presidential guard, who had themselves been trained by the French DAMI.⁵⁸

According to Diogène’s important testimony, there were French soldiers in the military camps in Zaire still acting on behalf of the interim government. French soldiers from Turquoise were responsible for ejecting him and fellow complainants from the FAR base, and were supporting Bagosora and his henchmen. It was another case of some members of Turquoise failing to see the bigger picture, and putting past and present loyalty to their FAR and interim government friends and allies before matters of justice and humanity.

In the localities, Hutu villagers in the Gikongoro region were reassured to see the French forces. ‘We could hear the sounds of the gunfire near Gitarama on the other side of the river but when the French arrived they put a roadblock up to stop the RPF coming. We were happy to see the French soldiers as after they came we knew the war would not enter this area,’ an old man commented while sucking on his pipe pushed into a bottle of banana wine. ‘Apart from the genocide, there was no war in this area.’⁵⁹

Aloys Mutabingwa testified that the French had singled him out for punishment for failing in his duties, but not because he was a genocidaire.

One day I’d been denounced by the man in charge as my group hadn’t done the night patrol. The French made me get into a helicopter, and they told me, ‘You press-gang people and stop them working, we’re going to throw you into the Nyungwe forest.’ They took me as far as Dendezi, and there they released me telling me this had better be the very last time that I got in the way of other people’s work. But they’d punished me; they’d completely stripped me; they didn’t even leave me with any underwear. They told me, ‘Now clear off, you can just scarper.’ This was in broad daylight. It was 1994, in July. At that time I was a member of the Interahamwe, but I was also still a member of the army since I hadn’t been dismissed.⁶⁰

The French used such helicopter trips, it seemed, to discipline individuals they felt were stepping out of line. Rumours circulated widely in the villages about such action and helped foster a view that the French were in control of events. Several villagers testified that they had heard about such flights, though they were split over whether they were to punish the Hutu or surviving Tutsi population. Whatever the answer, the Geneva Convention would not have condoned them. At Murambi, just outside Gikongoro, thousands of Tutsis were slaughtered after having been transported to an unfinished technical school by the militia. At a memorial rally in April 1997, a survivor spoke of how French troops from Operation Turquoise had helped to bury the bodies when they arrived. The soldiers then made themselves a volley ball court on the ground above the mass grave.⁶¹

Operation Turquoise soldiers were increasingly having to deal with malnourished refugees and the devastating effects of cholera on those who had fled to the SHZ or to camps over the border in Zaire. They were ill-prepared for their role and unable to handle the pressure of organizing food for hundreds of thousands of displaced people, a situation, ironically, that Turquoise had helped to create. The actual humanitarian stage of the operation suffered from a lack of resources and poor relationships with aid organizations on the ground. Such bodies wanted to assess the needs and numbers of refugees properly before planning a response. They reacted angrily to French military personnel randomly telling them to hand out food as and when it became available; also, the food was often of questionable value, such as tonnes of sardines.

Moreover, the aid agencies were reluctant to be drawn into the complex political manoeuvres that were taking place. To help the French effort was to risk the ire of the RPF and, as a result, organizations like MSF, Oxfam and the International Red Cross refused to work alongside Operation Turquoise. Most of them were afraid that Paris would hijack their cooperation for propaganda purposes. In fact, one organization responded to pleas to help distribute sardines and high protein biscuits only to find France announcing its cooperation publicly; the agency immediately stopped assisting the military mission.⁶²

Major Jean-Yves St-Denis, who flew in to help assess the situation in Goma for the UN, reported seeing ‘a pile of bodies at least twenty feet high’ and ‘hundreds of bodies … littering the roads. All of them … had succumbed to cholera. For a while we followed a dumper truck filled with bodies that had been picked up by French soldiers. … I remember the soldiers’ eyes; they were lifeless and full of sadness.’⁶³ Turquoise had become overwhelmed by the tragedy it witnessed. Never equipped as a humanitarian mission, the soldiers ended up acting as morticians and death-cart drivers. Dallaire commented, ‘Lafourcade had come into the country heavy with combat assets and light on the tools of humanitarian relief. Frozen in its tracks by the spread of cholera and by the knowledge of the health risks its troops would be exposed to due to the high infection rate of HIV/AIDS among Rwandans, Turquoise remained limited.’⁶⁴

The important shift by the world media away from the genocide inside Rwanda to the refugees’ plight was a godsend for Paris. News coverage of French military personnel working tirelessly with orphans and cholera victims in refugee camps was just what the politicians who had heralded Turquoise as a humanitarian mission wanted to see. The smokescreen behind which the killers lurked was to stay in place long enough for the world to forget from what it was that the refugees were fleeing. Members of the French public could again feel proud that their government had saved people who were dying in Goma while other Western powers looked on. The suffering, as Prunier noted, was ‘mixed up’, making it churlish to ask who was in most pain – the victims of genocide or of cholera. As the suffering and its causes became confused, so too did the whole political debate over how it came about, France’s role and who was responsibile for the events in Rwanda.

On 21 July it was revealed that, despite the pictures being broadcast of malnourished desperate refugees begging for scraps on which to survive, the French military had given ten tons of food to the FAR soldiers near Goma. French diplomats seemed more concerned that the media would pick up on this appalling misuse of humanitarian aid than the fact that it showed again the complicity of some of Turquoise military with the FAR and genocidaire.⁶⁵ It certainly did not smack of the ‘neutral’ stance Mitterrand publicly insisted was being enacted by his forces.

Such impartiality was, according to one Interahamwe leader, far from the truth. He alleged that once the militiamen had reached Zaire, the French had allowed them to keep their weapons, and

they had established a military base for us [at Mpanzi]. Once we’d put up our tents, the French arrived and went to find General Kabiligi; they immediately set up a group to attack Rwanda and destabilize the inyenzis. Once this base had been set up, it was divided into subgroups placed along the border. So they started attacking and a lot of damage was done as a result of this criminal complicity between the French present in the camps and General Kabiligi. When we were in the camps, the weapons were brought in by the French, every sort of weapon, on lorries, even TVs arrived.⁶⁶

Colonel Evariste Murenzi, a FAR officer now in Zaire, reported the high level involvement between the French military and the exiled Rwandan army as it tried to arm, regroup and reinvade.

I crossed the Rwandan border on 17 July 1994, passing through Goma. I settled in Mugunga camp. That is where I saw the French soldiers of Turquoise, some of them had worked in Rwanda before. I recognized among them Colonel Canovas who was the founder of CRAP at Kanombe. During Operation Turquoise, Colonel Canovas continued collaborating and working with FAR military headquarters. I found him with General Bizimungu at Mugunga, at Keshero precisely in an orphanage run by a white pastor, which had been requisitioned to accommodate FAR. FAR military headquarters was at that particular place, and that was where Canovas and Bizimungu used to meet. After 1994, the activities that Canovas and de Saint-Quentin were carrying out at Keshero did not really stop.⁶⁷

It is interesting to note that de Saint-Quentin, the man who had stood guard over the site of the plane crash and acted as a personal bodyguard to the Habyarimana family and friends in April, was now again in the midst of his old FAR colleagues.

Operation Turquoise finally began its planned retreat from Rwanda on 19 August. French troops moved from their base near Gikongoro and were replaced by Ghanaian UNAMIR II soldiers. The result was panic for those who feared RPF reprisals. Tens of thousands of refugees continued to move into the SHZ and from there into Zaire. Official French statements on this sea of human misery tried to ‘spin’ the situation to their own benefit. Two days before Turquoise ended, Defence Minister François Léotard declared that:

we did all that was possible to stabilize and reassure the population … it is now up to the RPF to make the necessary gestures. … I don’t think it is fair to say that our intervention has only saved people temporarily. … Let us not forget that the safe humanitarian zone now contains more population than all the rest of Rwanda put together.⁶⁸

In fact, while the SHZ had around 1.5 million people, the rest of Rwanda still contained about 3.2 million.

The number of people Operation Turquoise saved is variously put at between 10,000 and 17,000.⁶⁹ Dallaire’s poorly-armed UNAMIR force of fewer than 500 men, by contrast, probably saved twice that many. With the distinction becoming hazier between the genocide on the one hand and refugees suffering in Bukavu and Goma on the other, images of French soldiers engaging in active humanitarian work had begun to obscure the political purpose of the intervention. It now became possible to consign to the bin of history pictures of militia killers waving French flags to greet their allies, survivors at Bisesero despairing after French forces had abandoned them and the RTLM welcoming the sons of Mitterrand to continue the fight against the RPF.

Fittingly, Operation Turquoise ended as it had begun. As the last of its troops left Cyangugu to cross to Bukavu in Zaire, Hutu crowds cheered them on their way.

* * *

Was Turquoise a success? While Prime Minister Balladur probably counted down the days until it finished, Mitterrand and Juppé justified the operation on the political stage, and military men like Lanxade and Hogard wrote glowingly about its strategic achievements. Writing six months after the operation, Admiral Lanxade declared that they had ‘launched Turquoise as an urgent priority’ and that it ‘today presents a very positive balance sheet. Analysis of this operation should allow us to identify and strengthen, for the future, an operational concept adapted to actions with a humanitarian goal’.⁷⁰ The French chief of the armed forces had declared in July 1994 that the force had no mandate to arrest those responsible for the genocide, a position he felt was compatible with Turquoise being a ‘fundamentally humanitarian’ operation. Prunier, by contrast, described it as a ‘public relations device with some political undertones. It was sold to the public as a humanitarian operation, which of course it was not.’

The timing of the intervention raises several issues. France knew that the genocide was killing thousands of people each day in early April, but its foreign minister only referred to the massacres as ‘genocide’ in mid-May, which was also when the vote went in favour of UNAMIR II intervention. Yet, while the UN was begging Western nations to donate troops and financial aid to this newly mandated force so that it could be sent as quickly as possible, Mitterrand chose to ignore its requests. One month and hundreds of thousands of deaths later the French president recommended sending an intervention force, this time UN mandated but effectively manned almost entirely by French troops. If France were so interested in stopping the genocide, why had it not backed the UN resolution to set up UNAMIR II in mid-May?

Having two separate UN missions acting under different mandates in the same country at the same time also presented a problem. It meant that Dallaire’s under-resourced force ended up by having to mediate between the RPF and the other UN-mandated mission, Operation Turquoise, which, as an independent inquiry later noted, ‘must be considered awkward to say the least’.⁷¹

In fact, the French intervention could well be referred to as Operations Turquoise, given that at any one time several different French missions seemed to be taking place with varying military and political aims according to who was in charge. While Barril and other operatives worked behind RPF lines on Operation Insecticide in an attempt to defeat Kagame, others, like Lafourcade, were negotiating with them. While Thierry Prungnaud was breaking rank to save Tutsis, high ranking officers like Rosier and Tauzin were happy to put a stop to any French intervention while their FAR and militia allies were busy completing their ‘work’. Other French officers and troops, in sympathy with the FAR and militia, are alleged to have colluded in helping their allies continue the campaign against the RPF and even Tutsi refugees. On the political front some, like Prime Minister Balladur, had not wanted the operation to take place at all. In fact, Yannick Gérard at the foreign office had put forward a strong case for breaking all ties with the interim government and arresting the perpetrators of the genocide. Yet other politicians like Defence Minister François Léotard and of course Mitterrand, anxious to reap as much political capital as possible from their humanitarian expedition, would lace their speeches at home and abroad with references to how France alone had saved the Tutsis. The testimonies of former militia members and Tutsi survivors alleging that Operation Turquoise forces were complicit in rape, murder and looting need to be fully investigated.

On a wider canvas, the failure to disarm the FAR – in fact there is evidence of French complicity in feeding and rearming these forces even after the UN embargo was announced – plunged the region into a vicious, protracted war. For a whole decade Interahamwe, Hutu extremists and ex-FAR members continued to attack Rwanda from the safety of their bases in Zaire. The Red Cross estimates that at least four million people have died in this forgotten war since 1994. In 1999 Abdoulaye Yerodia, the foreign minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire), blamed Turquoise for ‘bringing Rwandan Hutu militiamen into the Congo … it was France which carried out Operation Turquoise … an Operation which brought a lot of people into Congo, and one could clearly see armed men among them. Those who brought the armed men should assume their responsibility and organize another Operation Turquoise to take them away.’⁷² The continuing presence of armed Interahamwe repeatedly derailed peace talks and prolonged Africa’s most bloody conflict.

Thierry Prungnaud returned to France where, a few months after Turquoise had ended, a general in the ministry of defence called him in for a debriefing session. He asked him what he had seen and done during Operation Turquoise. Prungnaud told him, among other things, that he had recovered ‘a list of 500 names of notables and others who had participated in or organized massacres’. The general’s reply to this information shocked the Rwandan veteran who, in no uncertain terms was then told, ‘listen, you forget everything, you recall nothing. … He insisted I keep my mouth shut … he was very precise that I must forget everything.’⁷³ In the eyes of such generals, anyone who fought against the RPF and Kagame could not be accused of any misdemeanour. It is a devastating indictment of the French military if their most senior officers are prepared to collude with mass killers merely because they are seen to be on the same military and political side.

By the end of August, politicians in Paris, especially Balladur, could settle back relieved to know that Turquoise was over and that the media were obsessed with the refugee camps. The medium and long-term tasks of rebuilding a shattered country, returning millions of its inhabitants, and dealing with the hundreds of thousands of genocidaires, ex-militia, FAR and those still eager to renew the civil war and genocide were all now problems that France could leave to the new Kigali government. Juppé tried to turn even this nightmare legacy and disastrous state of affairs in the region to France’s benefit, claiming in a radio interview that, ‘We have taken all the necessary precautions. We did not merely leave in the night, putting the key under the doormat.’⁷⁴ The French government’s behaviour over the coming months proved that, as far as the new Kigali regime was concerned, it was quite happy to stand on the doormat and not give any clues on where to find the key to recovery.