BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS
by Andrew Wallis
Reviewed By Rw Johnson

The Sunday Times, UK
Nov 12 2006

SILENT ACCOMPLICE: The Untold Story of France’s Role in the Rwandan Genocide

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 Wallis’s 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 Francafrique, and roping into it
Rwanda and Zaire, abandoned by the Belgians. Such attitudes are by
no means confined to Gaullists – it was Francois 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
Franc-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 Habyarimana’s 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 France’s client and instal an
Anglophone regime instead. Their opposition to such an outcome was such
that they were willing to encourage their Hutu proteges 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 d’Orsay, 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 wouldn’t float and in general preaching that
"if you let them (Tutsis) carry on producing children . . . you’ll
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 Habyarimana’s 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 Theoneste 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 proteges towards such an outcome, had to get clear of
the carnage. As the evidence of the holocaust thus unleashed became
overwhelming Bruno Delaye, the Elysee’s Africa boss, is reputed to
have said that "that’s the way Africans are". When asked how he could
have entertained genocidaires in his office, he seems to have replied
that he’d had 400 assassins and 2,000 drug dealers through his doors:
"You can’t deal with Africa without getting your hands dirty."

Mitterrand shrugged off the killings with "Dans ces pays-la, un
genocide ce n’est 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 can’t
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 proteges into
Zaire where they could reform and rearm for a fight that has thus far
cost 4m lives. Mitterrand angrily refused to invite Kagame’s Rwanda
to his last Francafrique 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 Mitterrand’s 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.

It is only in the past few years that French responsibility for
the deportation of 100,000 Jews in the second world war has been
acknowledged, and nobody yet admits that French eagerness to damage
Anglophone Nigeria by lending surreptitious support to Biafra cost
many hundreds of thousands of lives. But all this is dwarfed by the
enormity of what happened in Rwanda – an enormity so great that neither
Britain nor any of France’s partners seem keen to broach the matter.

This book (and the news that France is to declassify some documents
relating to the genocide) are at least a start. The leading
presidential contender, Nicolas Sarkozy, is fond of talking of the
need for a frank "rupture" with the past. There is no part of the
French past that needs honesty and a clean break more than this.

Read on…

websites: Human Rights Watch on Rwanda

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress