wandan Patriotic Front, made up mostly of Tutsis previously driven from their homeland by a series of earlier massacres, had invaded.
During the next three years Mitterrand had no compunction in sending in troops to save a brutal and corrupt regime. The Hutu army received millions of dollars of French weaponry; and the French elite training corps trained its Rwandan allies in how to dismember bodies, fire its new heavy artillery and use attack Gazelle helicopters.
Habyarimana was assassinated on April 6, 1994, when unknown assailants shot down his Falcon 50 jet, another present from the French taxpayer. The event ushered in possibly the hundred bloodiest days in history. Up to one million Tutsis were slaughtered.
As the body count grew, France welcomed ministers of the genocidal Government to an official reception in Paris. Meanwhile, its military continued to send arms to bolster its Hutu allies in power, regardless of the genocide they were perpetrating.
Since 1994 France has been adept at trying to hide this stain on la gloire. Its ministers, including the current Prime Minister, constantly repeat the “double genocide” myth, which alleged that while Hutu killed Tutsi, the Tutsi also killed Hutu. It is akin to claiming that Holocaust victims were also mass murderers.
So the latest French government attempt to cover its Rwandan shame is no surprise to observers of La Françafrique. The timing behind the sudden release of Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière’s report, which blames Kagame for Habyarimana’s death, is no coincidence. Four senior French military and political figures will shortly give testimony before the international war crimes tribunal in Arusha. They have been called by the defence team of Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, who faces charges of being the mastermind behind the genocide.
It is deeply embarrassing, like being called to defend Nazis at Nuremberg. Shortly, too, Kagame’s government of reconciliation, which drove the genocidaire out in 1994, will announce the findings of its own inquiry into the French involvement in the genocide. It promises to uncover even more explicit details of Mitterrand’s crime.
And what of those old allies of the French, the Hutus who were driven out of Rwanda into the Congo when Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front seized power, the Interhamwe? – or as they now style themselves, the Federation for the Liberation of Rwanda. Well, this – if you have a strong stomach – is what they’re up to nowadays.
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