Silent Accomplce: The Untold Story of Frances Role in the Rwandan Genocide
On Sat Nov 25, 2006 08:59 PM
Blood on their hands
Reviewed by RW Johnson
SILENT ACCOMPLICE: The Untold Story of Frances Role in the Rwandan Genocide
by Andrew Wallis
The Sunday Times
France has recently infuriated Turkey by making it illegal to deny the Turkish
massacre of the Armenians in 1915. But if Turkey is in denial, so is France,
which bears a central responsibility for the 1994 genocide of 937,000 Tutsis in
Rwanda. On occasion, as he tells this terrible story, Andrew Walliss
indignation gets the better of him, causing him to lapse into heavy-handed
infelicities. These do not, however, weaken the power of what he has to say.
For those unfamiliar with French policy in Africa, it may seem almost
incredible how far it is still driven by imperial rivalry with Britain and a
sort of bitter fury at the triumph of les Anglo-Saxons, producing a defensive
rallying of Françafrique, and roping into it Rwanda and Zaire, abandoned by the
Belgians. Such attitudes are by no means confined to Gaullists it was
François Mitterrand who, as minister of justice in 1957, explained French
problems with its West African colonies: It is British agents who have made
all our difficulties. So while Charles de Gaulle first welcomed Rwanda into
Franç-afrique, blithely ignoring the massacre of Tutsis carried out by
President Gregoire Kayibanda in 1963, so Mitterrand as president adopted
exactly the same attitude to President Juvenal Habyarimana, who had deposed
(and killed) Kayibanda in 1973. Habyarimana became his personal friend, and
Habyarimanas wife, Agathe, a sort of African Imelda Marcos, became a constant
visitor
to his household and close friend of the first lady, Danielle. Agathe is the
founder of the extremist Hutu society, Akazu, whose network (le clan de madame)
is credited with much of the responsibility for the genocide. Its power is
still greatly feared today.
After the earlier massacres, many Tutsis had fled into Uganda where, under Paul
Kagame, they fought alongside Yoweri Museveni against Idi Amin and Milton
Obote. When Museveni won, Kagame led the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) back
into Rwanda in 1990. It was immediately clear that the RPF was fully a match
for the Rwandan army (FAR), and French troops were promptly dispatched to prop
up Habyarimana for Kagame was Anglophone and American-educated. The French
insisted that Kagame was a CIA agent, that the RPF was really just the Ugandan
army, and that the plan was to evict Frances client and instal an Anglophone
regime instead. Their opposition to such an outcome was such that they were
willing to encourage their Hutu protégés to do anything, including genocide, to
stop it. Two Frenchmen in succession were put in as the effective heads of FAR
and, blithely ignoring EU directives about ethical arms sales, they arranged
huge supplies of arms for the Hutu regime, much of it
routed through Egypt with the help of their ally in the Cairo foreign office,
Boutros Boutros-Ghali. It was an even greater coup when, in 1991, Mitterrand
was able to push in Boutros-Ghali as UN secretary-general.
By this time, the first massacres of Tutsis had begun, and a furious Kagame
flew to Paris where Paul Dijoud, African affairs director at the Quai dOrsay,
seems to have threatened that, if he did not withdraw the RPF, you will not
see your brothers and your family again, because they will all have been
massacred. In fact, Wallis produces plentiful evidence that some French
officers were training the Hutus how to capture and tie up prisoners, how to
slit their bellies so that their bodies wouldnt float and in general preaching
that if you let them (Tutsis) carry on producing children . . . youll never
be done with them. And it seems there are many eyewitnesses of French troops
assisting at torture sessions and catching Tutsis and handing them over to
Hutus who hacked them to death before their eyes.
These early massacres were as nothing compared to the all-out genocide launched
upon Habyarimanas death in April 1994. The new government, with key
genocidaires, was, it appears, formed by the French ambassador at a meeting in
the French embassy. The man the French had put in charge, Colonel Théoneste
Bagosora, apparently made no secret of his plans: I have come back to declare
the apocalypse, he said. The French, well aware of what was about to happen,
then got out. The calculation was that any peace deal would mean a
power-sharing agreement with Kagame which was anathema. Better let the Hutus
continue the genocide to completion if that allowed them to stay in power, but
in that case France, having armed, trained and encouraged its protégés towards
such an outcome, had to get clear of the carnage. As the evidence of the
holocaust thus unleashed became overwhelming Bruno Delaye, the Elysées Africa
boss, is reputed to have said that thats the way Africans are. When
asked how he could have entertained genocidaires in his office, he seems to
have replied that hed had 400 assassins and 2,000 drug dealers through his
doors: You cant deal with Africa without getting your hands dirty.
Mitterrand shrugged off the killings with Dans ces pays-la, un genocide ce
nest pas trop important and cynically concocted the notion of a double
genocide, ie that the Tutsis were just as guilty, which was rather like saying
the Jews and the Nazis were as bad as one another. When the surrounding states
tried to hold an emergency meeting on the situation in Tanzania, Paris angrily
torpedoed it: We cant let Anglophone countries decide on the future of a
Francophone one.
And so it continued to its dreadful end. Ultimately, Kagame and the RPF won and
the French sent troops in to get their Hutu protégés into Zaire where they
could reform and rearm for a fight that has thus far cost 4m lives. Mitterrand
angrily refused to invite Kagames Rwanda to his last Françafrique summit and
made sure the genocide was not even discussed. Several genocidaires still live
happily in France where a parliamentary inquiry, headed by one of Mitterrands
former ministers, is accused of whitewashing the whole operation. Jacques
Chirac and Dominique de Villepin have wholly backed this all up, for the French
elite are as one in wishing to continue to celebrate France as the home of
democracy and human rights.
Sharangabo Rufagari
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