France bears ‘overwhelming’ responsibility on Rwanda genocide, says report
- Around 800,000 people were slaughtered, mainly from the ethnic Tutsi minority, during the events of 1994
- The historical commission set up by President Macron added, however, that there was no evidence that Paris was complicit in the killings
France bears overwhelming responsibilities over the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and was “blind” to preparations for the massacres, a report by historians said Friday, while adding there was no evidence Paris was complicit in the killings.
A historical commission set up by President Emmanuel Macron concluded there had been a “failure” on the part of France under former leader Francois Mitterand over the genocide that saw around 800,000 people slaughtered, mainly from the ethnic Tutsi minority.
Historian Vincent Duclert, who heads the commission, handed over the damning report to Macron at the Elysee Palace after years of accusations France did not do enough to halt the massacres and was even complicit in the crimes.
The genocide between April and July of 1994 began after Rwanda’s Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana, with whom Paris had cultivated close ties, was killed when his plane was shot down over Kigali on April 6.
The issue still poisons modern relations a quarter of a century on between France and Rwanda under its controversial President Paul Kagame, a former Tutsi rebel who has ruled the mountainous nation in Africa’s Great Lakes region since the aftermath of the genocide.
“Is France an accomplice to the genocide of the Tutsi? If by this we mean a willingness to join a genocidal operation, nothing in the archives that were examined demonstrates this,” the report’s conclusions said.
“Nevertheless, for a long time, France was involved with a regime that encouraged racist massacres … It remained blind to the preparation of a genocide by the most radical elements of this regime.”