Rwandan president slams French reaction to 1994 genocide
Back in 2006, I had the opportunity to interview Rwandan President Paul Kagame, the man some blame for ordering the shooting down of an airplane carrying the then Rwandan and Burundi presidents and sparking the genocide that followed.
Rwanda’s genocide was one of the most hideous acts in history. Rwandan Hutus massacred 1.1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in just six weeks, a rate of destruction more deadly than even the Nazis, even though most of the perpetrators were armed with little more than machetes.
Interviewing Kagame was one of the highlights of my career to date. But my boss would not allow this story to run.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame fired a broadside at France, saying the French were directly involved in the African country’s 1994 genocide where over 1 million were slaughtered in just 100 days.
Kagame accused the French of actively supporting Juvenal Habyarimana’s Hutu government and the Interahamwe militia that massacred Tutsis and moderate Hutus 12 years ago.
“The criticism against the French is not about that of how they reacted, it’s about how they had a hand in it. There were different things. They were in Rwanda; they were supporting the regime that carried out the genocide. They were training the militia, they were training the army. They directly participated in the conflict. That’s what all the criticism is about,” Kagame told the Mainichi in an exclusive interview in Tokyo.
French officials have denied involvement in the mass slayings, but investigations probing French actions are going on in both countries. Rwanda last month convened a commission to determine France’s role in the bloodbath. More Rwandans have filed a claim with a French military tribunal, accusing the French military of luring tens of thousands Tutsis from hideouts in the hills in the western Rwandan region of Bisesero to city centers, where they were killed.
France was a strong supporter of Habyarimana during his rule that began in 1975 and ended in April 1994 when he was killed after his plane was shot down at the airport in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, sparking the atrocities.
Kagame, who was head of the military of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) at the time of the genocide, has been accused of responsibility for the downing of the plane — most notably by French judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere following a 1998 French probe into the incident — but strongly denied the accusations.
“It is dangerous and outright unreasonable for people to make allegations unless you have reasonable or undoubtable proof about what you are saying,” Kagame said.
An investigation into the crash — which also killed Cyprien Ntaryamira, president of neighboring Burundi — has never been carried out at the site where it occurred. Though Kagame has been criticized for not conducting a probe into the incident, he said flak should be directed toward the United Nations as it was “almost in power” in Rwanda at the time. The U.N. “lost” the black box from the plane for a decade, finding it in a desk drawer in 2004. The world body concluded in June that the recording device offered no clues to the downing of the plane.
Kagame also lashed out at the international community for its failure to combat the slaughter, saying “they had all the information, all the signals were indicating that there was going to be genocide and they did not do what they were supposed to do to try and prevent it.”
The genocide also dragged Rwanda into the quagmire of the two Congo conflicts that have tormented sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade, including a period in 1999 and 2000 when Rwandan and Ugandan troops skirmished in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Rwanda’s involvement in the conflicts started in 1996 when it invaded what was then called Zaire to track down the remnants of the Hutu army and Interahamwe militia that had fled there when the RPF took power in Kigali.
Most of these fugitives later formed the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR as the group is known by its French acronym, which fought Rwandan troops in the DRC. Though the FDLR remains a problem for Rwanda — and its neighbors — the situation in the DRC appears to be stabilizing with recent election results due to be announced very soon, offering hope to the country known as the Land of a Thousand Hills.
“At lot of positive changes have been taking place in the DRC,” Kagame said. “They are now having elections. The country will soon have elected leaders. And we are looking forward to working with these elected leaders.”
In another step away from conflict, Rwanda has recently become actively involved in promoting closer ties amongst African nations, taking part in the African Union-sponsored peacekeeping operations in Sudan and forming the East African Community with Kenya and Tanzania.
“Integration is part of a continent’s development. When you look at these countries of ours in sub-Saharan Africa, although the region is endowed with a lot of natural resources, you find the countries are small, both in terms of size and population, which is unsustainable,” said the leader of Rwanda, which has a population of about 9 million. “Integration is part of development in the sense that it combines these countries to form huge spaces and huge markets, as well as being able to speak in a strong voice when we are negotiating with our partners in different regions of the world. Such meetings are not necessarily fair to individual countries. When you are small, then you really lose, but if you are big you are able to stand up to this and legitimately fight for fairness.”
Though still one of the world’s poorest countries, Rwanda can boast of having pointed its economy in the right direction since the genocide, with annual GDP growth hovering in the 6 percent to 9 percent range since Kagame became president in 2000.
Kagame attributed the steady growth to “proper management of the economy and governance that has been beneficial to the country; hard work from the people of Rwanda.”
He added: “Productivity has gone up. 
People have been busy in the country. Because of peace and stability in the country, people have been able to concentrate on their work.”
Though Kagame remains at odds with France, the Tutsi leader has been given much of the credit for the country’s reconciliation process symbolized in one way by his emphasis on being a Rwandan ahead of any other affiliation.
“People in life have to make choices. If some people wanted to build a country that is stable, that has a future, that has it’s people together, then retribution, revenge, dividing people — all of these are not options, anyway,” Kagame said. “What you have to do is, indeed, try and focus on that future. And value the people of your country that you have to work for, that you have to work with, and try and bring them together for the common good. That’s the choice we made as Rwandans, that’s the choice I made personally. I’m sure many Rwandans have made the same choice.” (By Ryann Connell)
