Tit for tat

Yesterday evening I had an hour to spare before dinner with some friends, and I thought I’d do a quick post about a funny story that happened to us recently. A nice change from the focus of my recent posts about the news in DRC, something a bit more personal and cheerful, I thought. Ha!

I then got distracted reading the news online, particularly an article discussing French involvement in the Rwandan genocide. Yesterday, two Rwandan women who had sought refuge in the French camps during the 1994 genocide testified against their French ‘saviours’; one said she had been raped by a French soldier, and the other said a French soldier looked on as she was raped by a Rwandan man.

These are only two of a string of testimonies heard by the Rwandan Commission of Independent Enquiry since April when it started investigating French involvement in the Rwandan genocide. Some of the more damning testimonies were made by ex-Interahamwe militia returned from the DRC after years of exile, who said they had been trained and armed by the French.

The controversy is essentially about ‘Opération Turquoise’, a military operation run by the French from June to August 2004. In an interview with RFI, the operation’s commander Christophe Boisbouvier assured that France had been mandated by the UN and remained impartial throughout the operation. He said that the Hutus received no ammunition from the French, and that the only fighting between France and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) occurred immediately outside the “secure humanitarian zone” and was marginal.

Boisbouvier then went on to allege that the RPF could have intervened sooner to stop the genocide.

To the charge that the French troops helped the ‘génocidaires’ to escape, Boisbouvier said that on the contrary they tried to stop them from escaping but that at the time they only had 150 soldiers and couldn’t do much. About the charges of crimes against humanity made against some of those soldiers he says that the accusations are a political manipulation. « L’Opération Turquoise a été complètement conforme au mandat de l’ONU et réalisée dans un esprit humain de la part d’exécutants remarquables. »

To add to the controversy, France’s leading anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguière recently issued international arrest warrants against nine of Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s key aides, and in an incendiary report recommended that the President himself face trial by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The accusation is that he ordered the shooting down on 6 April 1994 of the plane that was being used by the then President Habyarimana, an event which the judge says triggered the genocide. “The final order to attack the Presidential plane was given by Paul Kagame himself during a meeting held in Mulindi on March 31st 1994,” the report charges. The judge had been seized in 1998 by the parents of the French pilots who died when the plane crashed.

Paul Kagame responded angrily that there was absolutely no foundation to the judge’s allegations, and that he would never accept to face trial on the indictment of a country which was seriously implicated in the Rwandan genocide, not even to prove his innocence. Rwandan Foreign Affairs Minister Charles Murigande subsequently told Reuters that “the French are trying to appease their conscience for their role in the genocide and are now trying to find someone else to hold responsible for their acts here.” And Rwanda recalled its Ambassador in Paris, broke off all diplomatic ties with France, while in Kigali 25,000 people demonstrated against France.

Judge Bruguière says he has some seventy pages worth of documentary evidence proving Kagame’s guilt. On BBC Hard Talk last week, Kagame responded that those were seventy pages worth of trash, based on the testimony of people indicted by the Tanzania-based ICTR, people whom the Tribunal has not been able to bring to justice because they enjoy France’s protection. He said the French judge was trying to pin the genocide on the assassination of Habyarimana, when in fact there were months of preparation: “they bought arms, they trained the people, they got arms from France, money paid by the French government to the government of Habyarimana to prepare for the genocide,” none of which has anything to do with bringing down a plane, he believes.

When the BBC’s man Stephen Sackur confronted Kagame with the challenge that Rwanda could not move on until the real responsibility for the assassination of the President of Rwanda in 1994 was established, Kagame’s response was, “I’m not responsible for Habyarimana’s death, and I don’t care”. Rwanda is moving on irrespective of not knowing who killed Habyarimana, he said, because Habyarimana’s death is inconsequential compared to losing one million people to genocide – a genocide in which France is indicted, he added.

More damaging to Judge Bruguière’s report than Kagame’s unsurprising response is the accusation by Emmanuel Ruzigana, one of two key witnesses quoted in the report, who wrote a letter to the magistrate to complain that his testimony had been distorted. He said he had been read a text which he was asked to confirm or deny. He added that sometimes he didn’t understand the question.

On BBC Hard Talk Kagame asks why Judge Bruguière doesn’t investigate the involvement of French officers and government officials in the Rwandan genocide. He says it is public knowledge that the French authorities were actively involved in the killing of one million people in Rwanda: “they supplied arms, they fought against those who were trying to stop the genocide, they supported a President who was leading a section of his people to kill another section of the people, they trained the militia who committed the genocide…” So, will the Rwandans indict the French authorities, asks Sackur? Kagame is adamant: If a French judge can indict the Rwandan Head of State, why can’t the Rwandan judges indict, say, the current French Prime Minister, who at the time was the Foreign Minister’s Director of Cabinet? “We will play on the same field with France. What [the French] did to us, we will do to them,” said Kagame in an interview with i-TELE.

The Commission of Independent Enquiry resumed its public hearings yesterday, and will eventually take a position on a possible procedure against France in front of the International Court of Justice. The saga promises to be riveting; let’s hope it sheds a bit more light one way or the other on this murky part of France’s history.