Nicolas Sarkozy acknowledged today that Paris had made serious mistakes over the 1994 Rwandan genocide as he made the first visit by a French head of state to the central African country for a quarter of a century.
In carefully worded comments at a press conference with his Rwandan counterpart, Paul Kagamé, the president reiterated his belief that the international community, including France, had suffered from “a kind of blindness” in its response to the bloodshed, which killed more than 800,000 people.
But, keeping to the line normally held by Paris, he refused to take the opportunity to apologise for “political errors” by his country.
“We are not here to have fun, to fiddle with vocabulary,” he said. “What happened here is unacceptable and what happened here forces the international community, including France, to reflect on the mistakes that prevented it from anticipating and stopping this terrible crime.”
Asked what he felt those mistakes had been, the president cited a seriously flawed assessment of the situation in Rwanda as the genocide unfolded and a UN-mandated French military intervention that was “too late and undoubtedly too little”.
But reflecting a thaw in relations, Sarkozy said he hoped the future would enable the two countries to “turn an extremely painful page” on a past fraught with mutual distrust. “Off the back of all these mistakes … we are going to try to build a bilateral relationship,” he said.
Diplomatic ties between Paris and Kigali were cut in 2006 after a French judge issued arrest warrants for nine allies of Kagamé alleged to have been involved in the assassination of the former president Juvénal Habyarimana in April 1994, the event that enraged his Hutu supporters and triggered the killing.
The former Belgian colony responded in 2008 by acting on a long-held conviction that France had been complicit in the genocide and had supported the previous regime against Kagamé’s opposition Front Patriotique Rwandais party. Paris has always vehemently denied those claims, and dismissed a report published by Kigali in 2008 which accused French political and military figures of having “participated in the execution” of the genocide. Diplomatic ties between the countries were only restored in November.
Today Sarkozy, who came to power in 2007 promising a “rupture” with his country’s past role in Africa, stayed silent when a tour guide at the national history museum in Kigali evoked the responsibility of the French in front of a photograph caption reading: “France played a role in arming and training the Rwandan military forces.”
Neither did the president react when the guide said of Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general: “Him, he asked for forgiveness.”
Sarkozy, who has often rejected any form of repentance for France’s role in its former colonies, chiefly Algeria, has come under pressure to adopt a more contrite attitude towards Rwanda. Both the US, under Bill Clinton, and Belgium have apologised for their failure to intervene more effectively in the bloodshed.
But the French president today insisted there was no need for such a move. Before the press conference, Joseph Habineza, the Rwandan culture minister, who observed a minute’s silence with Sarkozy at the memorial to the mostly Tutsi victims of the genocide, was quoted as saying: “If he apologised it would be a lot better.”
In recent years Rwanda has moved to reorient itself towards the Anglophone community, adopting English as its official language instead of French and joining the Commonwealth in the autumn, after which diplomatic ties were restored with Paris.
The Guardian
