Rwanda on Tuesday opened public hearings into an alleged French role in the 1994 genocide that left at least 800Â 000 people dead in the Central African nation.
A former senior Rwandan official testified that Paris had indeed supported the perpetrators of the genocide in order to protect a French-speaking nation from rebels backed by an English-speaking country.
Testifying before the first public hearing in a probe into alleged French complicity in the massacres, the ex-official said Paris opposed the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) of the time because of its ties to Uganda.
Jacques Bihozagara — a founding member of the Tutsi-led RPF, which is now the country’s ruling party, and later Rwanda’s ambassador to France — said French policy was then driven by concerns about losing influence in Africa.
“France conducted a denigration and demonisation campaign against the RPF and its leaders,” he told the panel in testimony aired live by Rwandan radio. The public hearings are the second phase of the probe.
Bihozagara said the policy aim was to support the French-speaking majority Hutu-led government in Rwanda against the RPF, which had bases in Uganda, an English-speaking former British protectorate.
“They thought a francophone country was being attacked by an Anglophone country” and believed “they had to rush to the rescue”, Bihozagara told the panel in the one-time Belgian colony.
Bihozagara was the first of 25 witnesses due to appear at public sessions over the next week as the commission weighs whether Rwanda should sue France for genocide-related damages at the world court.
The government-appointed panel of historians, legal experts and a senior military officer in the former Rwandan army has been working since April to investigate claims of French involvement in the genocide.
The panel is looking into claims that France trained and armed those responsible for the genocide, when about 800Â 000 people were slaughtered in a 100-day killing spree from April to July 1994, and helped some flee.
Kigali has repeatedly accused Paris of abetting the genocide, but France has denied any role in the massacres of mainly minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus by Hutu extremists.
In three hours of testimony in the Kinyarwanda language, Bihozagara questioned France’s motive in leading a United Nations military and humanitarian mission known as Operation Turquoise in the last two months of the genocide.
“Operation Turquoise was aimed only at protecting genocide perpetrators, because the genocide continued even within the Turquoise zone,” he said.
French soldiers were deployed to south-western Rwanda in the operation to set up and secure a humanitarian zone, but have been accused of allowing radical Hutus to enter Tutsi camps.
Bihozagara noted that France has yet to apologise for its alleged actions.
“France has not expressed regret,” he said, adding that French officials insisted there had been a “twin genocide” of both Tutsis and Hutus and that Paris “continues to protect genocide suspects” on its soil.
Commission chairperson and former Rwandan justice minister Jean de Dieu Mucyo has said the panel will finish its work within six months, having been given a six-month extension in its mandate earlier this month.
“This is an important inquiry that should be witnessed by everyone interested in this important episode of our history,” he told Agence France-Presse on the weekend.
Although France denies the allegations against it, a former French soldier last year alleged that French troops had trained Rwandan militia responsible for the killings in the two years leading up to the genocide.
A French military tribunal is currently investigating claims by six Rwandan Tutsis who filed a complaint accusing French troops of being complicit “in genocide and/or crimes against humanity”.
The witnesses hail from the mountainous western region of Bisesero, where survivors claim French forces deployed there lured Tutsis from hideouts in the hills to village centres where they were killed. — AFP