PARIS – Authorities in Paris helped suspects in the 1994 Rwanda genocide to escape while under French military protection, according to a diplomatic cable, rekindling Kigali’s allegations France secretly supported Hutu forces behind the killings.
The document, written by France’s envoy to Rwanda and obtained by AFP Sunday from a lawyer researching France’s actions during the genocide, suggested that Paris knew suspects hid in a “humanitarian safe zone” controlled by French soldiers.
The soldiers had arrived in June 1994 as part of the UN-mandated Operation Turquoise to stop the massacres that left at least 800,000 people dead, mainly among the Tutsi ethnic minority.
Excerpts of the cable, first published by French investigative website Mediapart yesterday, centres around a communique found in the archives of then French president Francois Mitterrand.
The cable was discovered by Francois Graner, a lawyer who works with the victims’ rights group “Survie” (Survival) and who won a years-long battle last June to finally get access to Mitterrand’s archives.
It was signed by Bernard Emie, a former Foreign Ministry adviser who is now the head of France’s DGSE foreign intelligence service.
“It’s the missing written piece of evidence, an essential piece of the puzzle,” Graner told AFP.
Tensions remain between Rwanda and France, which has always denied claims that it sided with the Hutu regime and failed to stop the surge in anti-Tutsi hatred following the 1994 assassination of then-president Juvenal Habyarimana.
But in 2019, President Emmanuel Macron announced the creation of an expert panel of historians and researchers to look into the claims.
While Rwanda was never a French colony, successive French governments cultivated close ties after the country’s independence from Belgium in 1962, including training its top military leaders. – AFP, February 15, 2021
