RWANDA VS FRANCE: WHO’S HIDING ROLE IN GENOCIDE?
By Andrew M. Mwenda
The Independent
/column/guest-column/105-guest-column/526-rwanda-v s-franc-e-whos-hiding-role-in-genocide.html
Nov 27 2008
Uganda
In February 2007, I was invited by the Institute for African
Development at Cornell University in the United States to give a
lecture. My presentation was on "The in-humanitarian consequences
of humanitarian intervention; a case study of the UN humanitarian
intervention in Rwanda in 1994." The lecture was drawn from a chapter
in a book I was writing (currently on hold) on the unintended, yet
negative consequences of Western assistance to Africa, including
humanitarian aid.
Kigali Memorial where the remains of thousands of the 1994 genocide
victim are buried.
I delivered my lecture on the afternoon of February 1 after which I
was hosted to dinner by the director of the institute, Prof. Nicolas
van de Walle. I felt honoured because I developed respect for de Walle
after reading his book African Economies and the Politics of Permanent
Crisis in 2002. I had then searched him on the web, got in touch with
him at Michigan State University where he was at the time and invited
him on my radio show on Monitor FM now KFM, a request he accepted.
A number of lecturers on African studies and students from Africa
were invited to the dinner. Our discussion turned to the subject
of my presentation. I told Prof. de Walle that in the early 1990s,
the officials in the government of France used the French state to
actively aid the genocide in Rwanda. He asked how. I told him they
had helped train the Rwandan army, sometimes commanded it into battle,
then supplied it with weapons in contravention of the UN arms embargo
on the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana, and provided the
regime with moral, financial and diplomatic support, all of which
were vital in helping that government carry out genocide.
After listening to me, de Walle said that he cannot believe that a
"civilised" government and a "disciplined" army like that of France
could do such a thing. I tried to convince him with more evidence
but could not. Then a Rwandan student at the university came to
my rescue. He told us that during Operation Turquoise (the French
humanitarian effort that was largely a way of getting the genociders
to escape) his family and other Tutsi happened to be in the French
controlled zone. French army officers allowed the Hutu militia into
the camp and killed all Tutsis including his family.
It was a tense moment. Prof. de Walle (a Belgian citizen who grew
up in the USA) expressed his sympathy to the young student but
held his ground that "civilised France" could not aid and abate
genocide. I realised that continuation of the discussion would lead
us to a cultural/racial battle of "us" versus "them" and dropped the
debate. But it was an important learning experience for me because
in such matters, many people of European descent are likely to take
de Walle’s position although not with the frankness and honesty with
which he did.
This lesson was brought to me quite vividly when the German government
arrested Ms Rose Kabuye, a chief of protocol of the Rwandan government
as she arrived in the country ahead of Rwandan President Paul
Kagame’s visit. The arrest was on the basis of warrants issued by
the French government against the very Rwandan leaders who helped end
the genocide in that country in 1994. This strange twist of irony –
of the architects and perpetrators of genocide arresting those who
under great sacrifice ended it – has gone largely unchallenged by
the international community for cultural reasons.
What is the crime of the accused? That in April 1994, RPF shot down
the plane carrying Habyarimana on which there were French crew. Why
is France seeking to avenge the death of a president who organised
genocide of one million of his own citizens? Would France prosecute
President George Bush if American planes killed Osama bin Laden in an
air raid just because some French citizens working as his hostesses
happened to be with the al Qaeda leader in his hideout? Let us not
forget that bin Laden has not yet taken away even 10,000 lives. An
important question should be: What were French citizens doing with
a mass murderer?
I have never even wanted to listen to a defence from the RPF that
they did not kill Habyarimana. It would be extremely painful for me
to listen to victims of genocide defend themselves against allegations
that they killed a person who sought to exterminate them. I know that
every Jewish or even non Jewish organisation would have been hailed
as heroes had they killed Adolf Hitler. That France can force the
RPF leaders into a position of criminals and other European nations
acquiesce is an important lesson about Western pretentions about our
shared humanity.
I strongly believe that whoever killed Habyarimana did something good
because the former Rwandan president was the worst mass murderer
of the 20th century. His killing efficiency (one million people in
100 days) makes the Third Reich (six million people in 12 years)
look incompetent. Sadly, the likely killers don’t deserve the praise
themselves because it seems Habyarimana may have been killed by the
extremist wing of his own party in order to kick off the genocide
earlier than he had wanted. Therefore, the difference between him and
his extremist allies was not on the act of genocide but the timing
of its outbreak.
Some claim that it is the killing of Habyarimana that sparked off
the genocide. Yet as early as January 1994, the UN peace keeping
mission to Rwanda had informed the headquarters in New York that the
government had built a capability – in both human training and weapons
stockpiling – to kill 1,000 people every 20 minutes. The president
of Habyarimana’s political party – the MNRD, Mathieu Ngirumpatse,
was the man in charge of this deadly operation. Hutu militias had
certainly not been trained for a tea party.
It would be wrong to think that France issued these arrest warrants
because it wanted to conceal its own involvement in the genocide, or
even distract world attention from it. Far from that! Its role has
been documented in a number of accounts including the book, Shake
Hands with the Devil, by the French-speaking Canadian commander of
the UN mission to Rwanda at the time, Gen. Romeo Dallaire, and in a
1996 BBC documentary The Bloody Tricolour on its Panorama programme.
The French act with such impunity not just because of the power they
wield on the global scene. That is a small part of the explanation. It
is largely because of the cultural reasons as Prof. de Walle gave
me. Let us face it, the current global system promotes the cultural
hubris of the West against the Rest; the idea that the West decides
what is right, the Rest only have to accept and abide. Thus when
Western powers kill civilians indiscriminately through air raids,
it is called collateral damage. When non Western agents do the same,
it is called terrorism or crimes against humanity.
For example, the French parliament passed a law making it a crime to
deny the Armenian genocide by the Turks. Yet those who deny the Tutsi
genocide like Habyarimana’s widow and her family live and deny it in
France. Priests who committed genocide live and still administer Holy
Communion in France. And France is not alone in this. Only three weeks
ago, Germany released a former Rwandan priest accused of genocide,
Callixte Mbarushimana. Now, in a strange twist of logic, German
authorities are arresting those who actually stopped the genocide.
The French understand this Western cultural hubris. They can issue
arrest warrants aimed at avenging the death of a president who
organised genocide against his own citizens by arresting the very
people who were both victims of that genocide but also the people
who ended it. And they can depend on the Germans, Belgians, Dutch,
Italians – all European countries – to hide behind European Union law
to implement such an unjust and inhumane act – because Rwanda is poor,
is African (should I say non Western) and has little significance in
global politics.
As an African largely socialised, educated and schooled through
Western ideas and institutions, it took me long to come to terms
with this contradiction. The European mindset seems to me to carry a
ruthless will to dominate others; all the other values seem secondary
and expendable. Thus it seems to me that what we ("the Rest") see
as the best in Western values – liberty, freedom and social justice
have never been meant to inform real Western practice. Instead, the
purpose of these values has been the ancillary one of image-making to
make the West look good to others even when it is inflicting untold
harm on them.
This ruthless urge to dominate others seems the prime cultural value
that has made the Western attitude to all other values (liberty,
equality, social justice, democracy etc) strictly instrumental –
only called upon as and when they are expedient. That is why, during
the conquest of other peoples and lands, one European side called for
civilisation and Christianisation as the other carried out genocide
against native populations and pushed others off their lands, many
into forced labour, slavery and amputation akin to what Joseph Kony
has done northern Uganda today.
Of course when I generalise using the word "Western" or "European", I
do not mean that every individual in the West behaves in this ruthless
and callous style. There are many people of European descent who get
as revolted as the rest of us at this hypocrisy. The young generation
of Westerners, for example, reject this Manichean approach to world
politics. It is these that bolstered the coalition that elected Barack
Obama as the first non-pure Caucasian president of the United States.
Indeed, the history of Western civilisation is rife with this contest
– between those who defended values like social justice, freedom,
equality and liberty out of moral commitment and those who paid
lip-service to them and only used them instrumentally. However, the
coalition in support of these ideals has always been marginal to the
overall project of the West to dominate and subjugate the Rest. This
coalition has never captured power, and when some of its idealists
did, they were either foiled in their attempts to reform the system,
won over by its demands or, in mute despair or pragmatism, simply
embraced it. It is this fact that has made me sceptical about Obama’s
claims to "change."
Yet there is some hope that the young generation of people in
the West will continue to ally with those among their parents who
genuinely believe in the values of justice, liberty and equality to
push for change. In any case, it is not clear whether this urge to
dominate others has ever enjoyed majority support among the citizens
of Western democracies. Certainly it has been a dominant value among
those who control the power of the state. But states do not always
represent the values of the societies over which they preside. They
represent the values of the most dominant classes or interests –
which are often a minority.
The lessons from this are clear although the solutions are difficult
to organise. Africa needs to coalesce and speak with one voice. Yet
our leaders seem to be driven by ignorance, petty jealousies, Western
bribes of aid and other trinkets to unite – as happened in the 19th
century paving way for colonial conquest. The African Union condemned
the arrest of Kabuye. All African governments should have followed
Rwanda in packing German ambassadors out of the continent in a show
of moral defiance.
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