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PARIS — France bears “serious and overwhelming” responsibility in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, according to a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron. However, the report cleared France of complicity in the genocide that led to the deaths of almost a million people.
The 1,200-page report, written by a group of academics given unprecedented access to the government’s archives, was commissioned two years ago by Macron, and presented to him Friday evening at the Elysée Palace.
The commission was tasked with examining the role of France in Rwanda between 1990 and 1994. Since becoming president, Macron has sought to confront France’s colonial past and post-colonial dealings in Africa, in the hope of relieving the burden, better advancing French interests and countering rising anti-French sentiment among many young Africans, by providing a more fact-based narrative of the period.
In their conclusions, the report’s authors found that there was a French political, military, diplomatic, administrative, intellectual and ethical failure in dealing with the genocide. They said the French presidency at the time was blinded by its proximity to the Rwandan Hutu leadership and by “an ethno-nationalist obsession.”
Almost a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu forces in the 1994 genocide and questions have persisted about the role France played in helping the Hutu authorities. Then-President Francois Mittérrand had a close personal relationship with his Rwandan counterpart Juvénal Habyarimana and the report finds that proximity “looms over [France’s] policy.”
Mittérrand’s son was his Africa adviser until 1992, a hugely important position given France’s colonial past and the central role played by Africa in French foreign policy.
“Is France an accomplice to the genocide of the Tutsi? If by this we mean a willingness to join a genocidal operation, nothing in the archives that were examined demonstrates this. Nevertheless, for a long time, France was involved with a regime that encouraged racist massacres. It remained blind to the preparation of a genocide by the most radical elements of this regime. It adopted a binary view opposing on the one hand the ‘Hutu ally’ embodied by President Habyarimana, and on the other hand the enemy described as ‘Ugandan-Tutsi’ for the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front]. It was slow to break with Rwanda’s interim government that carried out the genocide and continued to place the RPF threat at the top of its agenda,” the report said. “The research therefore establishes a set of responsibilities, both serious and overwhelming.”
Macron welcomed the conclusions of the report.
“The president saluted the remarkable scientific work accomplished by the commission and underlined that this report marked a considerable step forward in understanding and describing the involvement of France in Rwanda,” according to a press release from the French presidency on Friday night. “France will pursue its efforts in terms of fighting against the impunity of those responsible for genocide.”
Macron is the first French president born after the 1954 to 1962 war Algerians fought to gain their independence, and was a teenager during the Rwandan genocide, affording him enough distance from the events to start confronting them.
He has done so by allowing access to classified archives and starting to recognize the responsibility of the French state in crimes it had always denied. This has been particularly true with Algeria, which France brutally colonized for more than 130 years. These issues remain frought in French public discourse, with, for example, recurrent controversies about how to teach France’s colonial past.
While the commission on Rwanda was given greater access than previous researchers to state archives, the report notes that “the French state archives do not suffice in themselves to provide an exhaustive explanation of the history and role of France’s engagement in Rwanda,” among other things because some French documents disappeared or were never deposited into the archives.
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