Eugene Kwibuka
27 November 2008
Kigali — French authorities had precise and convergent information about the roots of a Rwandan ethnical regime and risks of gross massacres, well before the 1994 genocide, L'Express journalist, Vincent Hugeux, observed on the online French publication.
Two French diplomats serving in Kigali in the 1990s alerted the former President of France, the late François Mitterand of the genocide against Tutsis when it was still at its peak.
Information reemerging as political pressure piles for the truth of the Tutsi genocide to be told.
Hugeux said that Georges Martre told Mitterand in January 1993 that there was a "risk of systematic genocide" in Rwanda after he had listened to testimonies from victims of the murders' group called 'Escadrons de la mort'.
The ambassador's alarm reached Mitterand, following another one from the Defense Attaché who had warned in a diplomatic telegraph that there were many arbitrary arrests against Tutsis.
The journalist, Hugeux, says that Mitterand continued to support long time ally Habyarimana in the fight to eliminate Tutsis.
This is why France under Mitterand, who was in office until May 1995, continued to provide both military and political support to the regime that committed genocide to its collapse and continued to de-campaign troops of the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) that stopped the Genocide, Hugeux further analyses.
Rwanda and France have since cut diplomatic ties with the former maintaining that French soldiers in the country at the time bore responsibility in the Tutsi Genocide, as they operated under the notorious UN mandated Opération Turquoise, to organise and give logistical support, to the interahamwe, in carrying out the genocide.
Consequently, Mitterrand and former Prime Ministers Dominique de Villepin and Alain Juppe, are senior politicians implicated in the 500 page Mucyo Commision report, whose findings on the French complicity in the Tutsi genocide were made public by the government of Rwanda, last August.
According to Hugeux from 1990 up to 1993, Martre who was the French ambassador to Kigali and his Defense Attaché, told Mitterand that genocide against Tutsis was under preparation by Hutu militias supported by the ruling party Mouvement Révolutionaire Nationale pour le Développement (MRND).
"In a confidential stamp labeled 'defense', The ambassador him-self Martre outlined operations of hunting Tutsis by Hutu peasant militias organised by the ruling party MRND," said Hugeux in his online analysis posted on L'Express's website last year.
This information has been known since October last year when French newspapers Le Monde Diplomatique and L'Express published it based on leaked documents that the French government had handed to French investigative judges, as part of a probe on the Tutsi 1994 genocide.
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Mitterand is on record for saying "What does it matter if there is genocide in a small African country like Rwanda" France seems to find it hard to break the habit of persecuting Tutsis. Her recent enthusiasm to send more UN troops to the Congo where the UN support the Congolese army who fight with the FDLR against Nkunda suggests more support for the same militia who committed 1994 genocide in Rwanda.