Role of The International Community in The Rwandan Genocide - France

France

From October 1990 to December 1993, the French army led Opération Noroit, when the president of the French Republic responded to the Rwandan Republic. France openly supported the regime of Juvénal Habyarimana against the RPF rebels: "French presence to the limit of direct engagement" according to the title of a chapter of the report of the French parliamentary mission. This operation allowed the French to organize and train Rwandan troops, who subsequently formed the Interahamwe militias, or even future militiamen.

Oppositely, France, in agreement with the international community, endorsed the peace process of the negotiations of the Arusha accords between the Rwandan government, their opposition, and the exiles of the FPR.

In December 1993, France officially hid in front of the arrival of the UNAMIR, peace mission from the UN, who had come to the implementation of the Arusha accords. According to diverse sources, it seems that despite everything, some military technicians continued to operate in Rwanda. A couple of Frenchmen were notably assassinated, it seems by the RPF, in the hours that followed the attack. This couple set up sophisticated electronic equipment. Other leads of this type exist.

On April 8, 1994, two days after the attack against president Habyarimana, France launched Opération Amaryllis in order to permit the secured evacuation of 1500 residents, essentially westerners. The Rwandan survivors have strongly criticized that operation which, according to numerous testimonials, did not include the evacuation of the Rwandans threatened with the massacres, even when they were employed by the French authorities. France also evacuated dignitaries from the Habyarimana regime, and on 11 April, 97 children from the orphanage protected by Madame Habyarimana were evacuated. According to several sources, several dignitaries close to the Habyarimana family were also evacuated. Operation Amaryllis terminated on 14 April.

UNAMIR's Kigali sector commander, Belgian Col. Luc Marchal, reported to the BBC that one of the French planes supposedly participating in the evacuation operation arrived at 0345 hours on 9 April with several boxes of ammunition. The boxes, about 5 tons, were unloaded and transported by FAR vehicles to the Kanombe camp where the Rwandese Presidential Guard was quartered. The French government has categorially denied this shipment, saying that the planes carried only French military personnel and material for the evacuation.

France was very active at the UN in the discussions about the reinforcement of the UNAMIR in May 1994. In front of the inertia of the international community, France obtained the backing of the UN to lead Opération Turquoise from June 22 to August 22, 1994. The declared goal was to protect the "threatened populations," both by the genocide and by the military conflict between the FPR and the temporary Rwandan government. No hierarchy between the two types of threatened people was established. The two parties of the military conflict assimilated them and the system was organised to remain neutral between the two different groups. This system was humanitarian in some cases, notably during a cholera epidemic in refugee camps in Zaïre, the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, however it was the source of many distinct controversies surrounding the French role at the time of Operation Noroit and the criticism of having facilitated the desertion of those responsible for the genocide and a massive refugee movement of the population to Congo (around two million people). France has accused the FPR of having provoked half of these movements by refusing the advice of French authorities to not get involved in the north west of the country.

France, one of the five permanent members of the Security Council of the UN, has been accused of a role that some of those answerable to France refute and who claim that Operation Turquoise was an exemplarily humanitarian intervention. Some use as context that in supporting a group that would become genocidal, and who, according to the French parliamentary report, did not hide their genocidal intentions, France would have favoured the launching of the genocide.

As the outgrowth of a press campaign, especially the articles written by the journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry which appeared in 1994 and in 1998 in the French newspaper Le Figaro, the French parliament decided to examine the actions of France in Rwanda using a parliamentary information mission for Rwanda. Some French NGOs who specialise in Rwanda would have preferred a parliamentary enquiry mission whose judicial powers would have been more extensive in order to find the truth. After several months of work, the president of the parliamentary mission, the former Defence Minister Paul Quilès, concluded that France was "not guilty" (December 1998).

Ten years later, during the year 2004, books, films, radio programmes and television shows have brought the controversies surrounding France's role in Rwanda back to life. Unsatisfied by the conclusions of the report from the parliamentary mission for Rwanda, some citizens and NGOs have formed a citizens' enquiry commission. After a week of work in Paris, their "provisional conclusions" were read on 27 March 2004 at a conference that they organised the enclave of the French Assemblée nationale in the presence of one of two of the original people who had publicly stated the findings of the parliamentary mission, the former deputy Pierre Brana. On April 7, 2004 a serious diplomatic incident took place between France and Rwanda during the commemoration of the genocide in Kigali. In the course of the ceremonies, the Rwandan President publicly accused France of not having apologised for its role in Rwanda while desiring to participate in the ceremonies.

In July 2004, the ministers of Foreign Affairs from the two countries convened in order to "share the work of a memory piece " about the genocide. Rwanda announced several days later, according to a dispatch from Agence France-Presse from August 2, 2004, that "the council of ministers has adopted the organic law project to aid in the creation of the independent national commission charged with assembling proof of the implication of France in the genocide perpetrated in Rwanda in 1994." The French minister of Foreign Affairs "took action" for the creation of the Rwandan commission.

On October 22, 2004 the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda officially demanded that the "Republic of France" allow former ambassador Jean Michel Marlaud and one of his military representatives, officer Jean Jacques Maurin to respond to the demand of the defence of the presumed mastermind of the genocide: Colonel Bagosora pending judgement. Colonel Bagosra was the first Rwandan officer to have graduated from the French École des Officiers.

On November 27, 2004 in a televised debate on France 3, after the showing of the French film "Tuez les Tous" (English: Kill Them All), created by three students of political science, the president of the parliamentary mission for information for Rwanda, Paul Quilès stated for the first time that "France asks to be pardoned by the people of Rwanda, but not by their government".