Posted on 03/16/2004 9:15:26 AM PST by Pikamax
France accused of genocide role
Kagame denies ordering the shooting down of the Rwandan president's plane in 1994 Rwandan President Paul Kagame has accused French people of "direct involvement" in the 1994 genocide. He told the French state-owned RFI radio that they provided weapons and training, and gave orders to those who killed some 800,000 people.
He said the "French elements" were acting on government orders.
The president was speaking a week after a French daily reported a police report that blamed him for a rocket attack that precipitated the massacre.
"Sooner or later they will have to account for their actions, either before a French court or the international court," Mr Kagame said.
Report
The report - extracts of which appeared in Le Monde - concludes that Mr Kagame gave direct orders for the rocket attack on then President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane. He has denied the claim.
Mr Kagame was head of the mainly-Tustsi rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) at the time.
Burundi's then President Cyprien Ntaryamira was also killed in the rocket attack.
Le Monde said the accusation against Mr Kagame is contained in a 220-page report drawn up by police acting for France's leading anti-terrorist judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere.
The police are investigating the deaths of several French citizens on the plane.
Since everything was going according to the plan, Clintoon PREVENTED other countries to intervene and stop bloodshed. The rest is history.
Since everything was going according to the plan, Clintoon PREVENTED other countries to intervene and stop bloodshed. The rest is history.
Since everything was going according to the plan, Clintoon PREVENTED other countries to intervene and stop bloodshed. The rest is history.
By Tim Butcher, Africa Correspondent
(Filed: 17/03/2004)
The Telegraph (UK)
President Paul Kagame of Rwanda yesterday accused France of direct responsibility for the 1994 genocide of at least 800,000 people in the central African country.
His remarks reignited a bitter diplomatic row bewteen Rwanda and France and threatened attempts to mark the 10th anniversary of the killings with dignity.
M Kagame claimed that the French government supplied weapons, logistical support and even senior military planners to the regime of militant ethnic Hutus responsible for the slaughter of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
Diplomats and witnesses to the genocide have often accused France of tacit involvement, but Mr Kagame's comments are the most explicit statement of the allegations.
He made them after a French police report, which took six years to prepare, blamed him for the shooting down of a plane carrying Juvenal Habyarimana, Rwanda's then president and an ethnic Hutu, on April 6, 1994.
Mr Habyarimana's death sparked 100 days of mass killing in Rwanda. Most historians, diplomats and journalists believe that militant Hutus shot down the plane as a deliberate pretext for their premeditated slaughter.
Mr Kagame, an ethnic Tutsi, flatly denied any involvement in Mr Habyarimana's death and launched a blistering counter-attack against France in an interview given to RFI, the French state-run radio station.
"The French supplied weapons; they gave orders and instructions to the perpetrators of genocide," he said.
"The French were there when the genocide took place. They trained those who carried it out.
"They had positions of command in the armed forces who committed the genocide.
"They also directly participated in operations by putting up roadblocks to identify people by ethnic origin, punishing the Tutsis and supporting the Hutus."
Journalists who covered Rwanda in the early 1990s reported that French peacekeepers appeared to side with the Hutu government and against the Tutsi-based Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by Mr Kagame, which had been responsible for an armed incursion into Rwanda in 1990 from exile.
In at least one case, French troops moved United Nations peacekeepers away from a college where they were protecting 2,000 Tutsis. After the peacekeepers were moved, the Tutsis were slaughtered. Mr Kagame said the police report blaming him for Mr Habyarimana's death was a politically motivated attempt to deflect blame from France.
"In '91 or '92 I was in Paris at the invitation of the authorities and an official said to me, 'If you do not stop the war, by the time you arrive in Kigali you will all be dead'.
"I never forgot those words which are proof of the involvement of the French government, or of certain elements."
The police report, compiled by a French judge on behalf of the French aircrew who died in the plane, was put together in France and no interviews were taken in Rwanda itself.
The exact details of the shooting down remain in doubt and only last week the UN admitted that it had failed to investigate properly the plane's black box voice recorder, recovered at the crash site.
The box was shipped back to the UN headquarters in New York where it remained overlooked in a filing cabinet until last week.
The UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, said it was a "first-class foul-up" but claimed there had been no cover-up. The black box will now be fully tested to glean as many details as possible about the doomed plane.
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