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1990-1994: The genocide and war in Rwanda and French role in genocide.
Between half a million and a million people out of Rwanda´s total population of 8 million, died in a few weeks between April and June 1994. This article gives a brief account of how, and why and what role Western governments played
The United Nations is often condemned for its role during the genocide. Usually the UN is accused of a cowardly reluctance to act forcefully enough to prevent the killings. In truth the United Nations was complicit in key stages of a monumental crime against humanity. The accusation of cowardice comes because UN troops were withdrawn from the country just as the massacres were beginning, and a later contingent of French forces, mandated by the UN to intervene, arrived in Rwanda only as the slaughter was tailing off.
The real problem however is that these French troops were aiding the Rwandan army and its Hutu militia allies, the very forces butchering Rwanda´s minority Tutsi population. France had been arming, training and funding the Habyarimana regime in Rwanda for years, years during which the Tutsi minority had already been subjected to ferocious persecution. The UN and great powers behind it must have known this very well before they endorsed the French intervention.
In 1994 the Rwandan regime was rapidly crumbling before a rebel army – the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) - which, as it advanced, was putting a stop to the genocide in one region of the country after another. The speed of the rebels´ advance meant life or death for tens of thousands of Tutsis. France intervened to create ´safe havens´, supposedly to protect the lives of civilians from the majority Hutu group from Tutsi revenge. In reality they were attempting to slow the rebels´ advance and protecting the remains of the Rwandan regime from them.
As it turned out the French could not save the regime but did save the organisers of the genocide from capture. The ´safe havens´ became a base from which these people engineered the flight of almost two million Hutus into neighbouring countries, where they have since languished in disease-ridden squalor under the control of the soldiers and militias of the fallen Government.
These refugee camps then served as a springboard for armed incursions into Rwanda in which great numbers of Tutsis and anti-racist Hutus have died or been mutilated.
There are remarkable parallels between the atrocities in Rwanda and East Timor: in the genocides themselves, planned at governmental level and carried out by an army and government-organised militias, and in the role played by USA and other western powers in arming these murderous regimes. And just as Australia was at the forefront in supplying and training Indonesia´s military and in pushing the diplomatic cause of Suharto and Habibie worldwide, France acted as benefactor and international champion for the bestial regime in Rwanda.
The Rwandan Patriotic Front
Just as an economic crisis was breaking in the late 1980s the Habyarimana Government faced a new armed threat. In neighbouring Uganda the National Resistance Army led by Yoweri Museveni had taken power in 1986. Many Tutsis, refugees from persecution in the early 1960s, had fought with the rebels. They now formed the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF). Although led by Tutsis the RPF was 40% Hutu in composition.
In September 1990 it conquered territory in the north of the country and quickly gained support from Hutu farmers
France arms and trains the killers
Habyarimana would soon have fallen to the the well armed and trained RPF but for French military intervention. In October 1990 French forces seized Rwanda´s international airport and turned the tide against the rebels.
The battle with the RPF was used as a pretext to arrest up to 8,000 people in the capital Kigali, mostly Tutsis, and to launch pogroms in the countryside.
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“There were beatings, rapes and murders. Rwandan intelligence distributed Kalashnikovs to municipal authorities in selected villages. They gathered with ruling party militants, most of whom carried staves, clubs and machetes... they went from field to field in search of Tutsis, killing thousands... "Civilians were killed, as in any war" said Colonel Bernard Cussac, France´s ranking military commander in Kigali.” (Frank Smyth, The Australian 10.6.94)
French arms and military advisors poured into the country. In the following two years the Rwandan army grew from 5,000 to 30,000.
The BBC´s Panorama program said that the Rwandan Government ´thanked France for help which was "invaluable in combat situations" and recommended 15 French soldiers for medals after one engagement in 1991.´ (Reuters World Service 21.8.95)
In 1992 Lieutenant Colonel Chollet, commander of the French forces in Rwanda, became President Habyarimana´s defacto army chief of staff. In February 1993 French forces again beat back an RPF attack.
Cutting across all this were pressure from Belgium and from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) for Rwanda to agree to a power sharing deal with the RPF. The OAU wanted to assert its own tattered authority and to prevent the conflict destabilising central Africa.
Under this pressure Habyarimana allowed the reintroduction multi-party politics in June 1991, and brought moderate Hutu opponents into his Cabinet in 1992.
This seems to have hardened sections of the ruling elite around a violently racist solution to the crisis. They now stepped up the organisation of the Hutu militias.
The United Nation´s human rights investigator for Rwanda, Rene Degni-Segui, later recounted
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“a radio and television campaign inciting violence, distribution of arms to civilians and militias at year-end, military training of militias between November 1993 and March 1994 and lists of opposition leaders to execute... Mr Degni-Segui laid responsibility on high-ranking political officials, including "certain ministers" of the interim government, the presidential guard, the armed forces and paramilitary police as well as certain local authorities.” (The Age 2.7.94)
French forces superintended the organisation of the militias, known as the Interahamwe. Janvier Africa, son of a Rwandan diplomat, and a former Interahamwe member, described French involvement:
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“We had two French military who helped train the Interahamwe. A lot of other Interahamwe were sent for training in Egypt. The French military taught us how to catch people and tie them. It was at the Affichier Central base in the centre of Kigali. It´s where people were tortured. That´s where the French military office was... The French also went with us Interahamwe to Mount Kigali, where they gave us training with guns. We didn´t know how to use the arms which had been brought from France so the French military were obliged to show us.” (Quoted in The Age, 23.6.94 p12)
Amnesty International has made similar allegations against the French government (Financial Times 12.7.94).
Another bad record for France he ? we can make a long list like this....
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