Sarkozy admits France's role in Rwandan genocide

Bugs · February 26, 2010

France has, hesitatingly admitted that, well, yes ... they were drawn into the bit of nastiness in Rwanda and Burundi ... that spat between the Hutus and the Tutsis a few years back ...

After it was over, central Africa was full of recriminations, and secondary wars continue to this day. The whole thing seems to have bee blacked out by the media. But there was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda that took public testimony from any who cared to testify. The hearings went on for months, as thousands and thousands of people told their individual stories.

France responded by issuing arrest warrants against the Tutsis, including prominent members of the government ... They refused to testify, and the diplomatic relations were broken. None of this got in our news.

On the first visit by a French leader to Rwanda for 25 years, Mr Sarkozy did not formally apologise. Nor did he accept allegations that France had played an active role in training and arming the Hutu militias and troops who led massacres of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
But he suggested that the entire international community – and France in particular – should accept that its response had been culpably weak. "What happened here is a defeat for humanity," Mr Sarkozy said. "What happened here left an indelible stain. What happened here obliges the international community – including France – to reflect on the errors which prevented us from foreseeing, or stopping, this appalling crime."

France has blood in its hands. Kruschev, in a similar situation, had the sincerity to denounce Stalin for the gulags ... the French seem to lack that class, the sincerity required. They always acted as if they knew nothing of the buildup of the massacre. Strangely, though, the incident that started the incident was when a plane, carrying the leaders of both Rwanda and Burundi, crashed. It was hit by a missile that had been supplied by France. (Mitterand, the socialist President of France, had a son who was often described as an arms dealer in Africa.)

Testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation established that France was invovled in initiating the violence, and preparing for it. It flew in the weapons required, including machetes. They stood aside when the violence started, after the Belgium troops had withdrawn, in those crucial hours when Kofi Annan was refusing the Canadians the orders to act to prevent the violence. More testimony, from many sources, told of how Tutsis fled to the French for protection, and how the French turned them over to Hutus ... who, many times, hacked them to pieces.

France insisted that it could not have foreseen the genocide. In 2006, they responded to the information coming to light from the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, by issuing arrest warrants for eight Tutsi officials close to President Kagame, suggesting that they had deliberately provoked the genocide of their own people by assassinating a moderate Hutu president in May 1994.

The accusations brought renewed allegations from Mr Kagame's Tutsi-dominated government that France had armed and trained Hutu militias and soldiers knowing that genocidal attacks were likely or possible.
In 1998, a French parliamentary investigation ... admitted that the late President François Mitterrand and the then centre-right government in France had been blinded by supposed French interests in the region into siding with radical, and eventually murderous, Hutu groups.

Make no mistake. The evidence is clear, and France is simply ignoring it. They are going through this charade without acknowledging a scrap of guilt. I think it is contemptible. if this were the Americans, what would the French be saying? In fact, if this were the Americans, what would the world be saying? Truthfully, the world only cares about the corpses if they can be used in anti-American propaganda. France is the big imperial power in Africa, and makes mischief all through Africa and the Arab world, and it's time the world's media started telling us about it.

Before his press conference with President Kagame, Mr Sarkozy was taken on a tour of Kigali's genocide museum. On two occasions, the official guide made references to alleged French complicity in the massacres, including a photograph of a French military vehicle driving past armed Hutu civilians. President Sarkozy ignored the remarks.
He later placed a wreath on a memorial to the dead and said that "in the name of the people of France" he "bowed" to "victims of the genocide of the Tutsis". "Errors of appreciation, political errors, were committed here which had consequences which were absolutely tragic," Mr Sarkozy said. Although he spoke of the cumulative guilt of the international community, the implication was clear. France was – for the first time – admitting that its own actions had contributed to the calamity.

The whole article is at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/sarkozy-admits-frances-role-in-rwandan-genocide-1911272.html

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