RWANDA: Rwanda commission opens probe into allegations of French involvement in the 1994 genocide

A Rwandan government-appointed commission launched a probe on Tuesday (October 25) into allegations French troops supported soldiers behind Rwanda's 1994 genocide and helped facilitate mass murder. Rwanda's Tutsi President Paul Kagame, whose government came to power after the genocide, has accused France of training and arming Hutu militias who were the main force behind a 100-day slaughter that killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. France had replaced ex-colonial power Belgium as Rwanda's main Western backer. When Kagame's Tutsi-dominated rebel army launched its war against the Hutu authorities in the early 1990s, France sent soldiers to Kigali. France helped stop the advance of Kagame's forces and then stayed on, as military advisers, up to the start of the genocide. Kigali says France backed the government of Rwanda's former President Juvenal Habyarimana, providing military training for government forces, despite knowing that some within the leadership were planning to use the troops to commit genocide. France, which sent in soldiers under a U.N.-authorised operation, has always denied any involvement in the killings. Officials said a seven-man commission, appointed by the government in April, will hear testimony from 20 witnesses over the next week. The testimony could be used as evidence in any legal action taken by Kigali against France. "This commission will show how France helped to prepare and perpetrate the 1994 genocide," said Commission chairman, Jean De Dieu Mucyo addressing the commission session. "We have the obligation to show 7 acts of French government and genocide is one of them," added Mucyo. A French parliamentary commission in 1998 cleared France of responsibility for the genocide but said "strategic errors" had been made. However in Kigali, genocide survivors have welcomed the commission saying the French played a key role during the genocide. "It has been seen by everybody who was here in Rwanda, these French military were checking identity cards with interahamwe militias and some officials, if they could see that you were Tutsi, they put you aside and you get some problems, some died," said genocide survivor Venuste Karasira. Karasira lost an arm and bears other scars from the genocide period. Twelve years on - people on the streets of Kigli are still eager to learn the truth even though to them it will not change much. "The French soldiers trained the militias to kill us, they have to accept it, I am ready to forgive them, it is too late now for all this," said Kasogo as he walked to work. Chaired by Rwanda's former justice minister, Jean de Dieu Mucyo, the panel is made up of legal experts, historians and a former army commander. In one case, French soldiers have been accused of facilitating the murder of up 50,000 Tutsis in Bisesero, a hilltop village in western Rwanda, by luring them out of hideouts. Survivors say the Tutsis were abandoned and left vulnerable to militia attacks. Six genocide survivors filed a complaint in a Paris court last year accusing French soldiers of complicity in crimes against humanity. Justice for many perpetrators in the genocide is still being meted out through the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Tanzania and village courts known as gacaca. The ICTR has indicted more than 80 people for genocide-related crimes since its establishment in 1994.

ITN Source | October 26, 2006

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