French
justice minister will not attend commemorations marking 20th anniversary of
genocide, after Paul Kagame's comments
theguardian.com,
Anne Penketh in Paris, Sunday 6 April 2014
France has reacted with fury after the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, renewed accusations of direct French involvement in the 1994 genocide, on the eve of ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary.
Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/ Getty Images |
France has reacted with fury after the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, renewed accusations of direct French involvement in the 1994 genocide, on the eve of ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary.
The French
government announced that the justice minister, Christiane Taubira, would not
attend the commemorations in Kigali after Kagame, in an interview with the
weekly magazine Jeune Afrique, accused both France and Belgium of having a
"direct role" in the genocide.
A total
800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in the four-month
killing spree triggered by the assassination of Rwanda's Hutu president Juvénal
Habyarimana.
The
spirited French reaction highlights France's tormented relations with Rwanda
since Kagame, the former leader of the Tutsi rebels who swept to power after
the genocide, became president.
Didier
Reynders, the foreign minister of Belgium, the former colonial power in Rwanda,
said he still intended to travel to Kigali to pay homage to the victims and
their families. "We are not going to pay homage to the current Rwandan
government," Reynders said on Sunday.
The French
foreign minister at the time of the 1994 massacres, Alain Juppé, said Kagame's
comments were a "falsification of history".
Kagame
notably said that France had not "done enough to save lives" by
mounting Operation Turquoise in the west of the country, and had not only been
complicit but "an actor" in the massacre of Tutsis.
He pointed
to "the direct role of Belgium and France in the political preparation of
the genocide, and the participation of the latter in its actual
execution".
Juppé said
it was "intolerable that we are being designated as the main
culprits." He urged the French president, François Hollande, and the
government to "defend without ambiguity the honour of France, and of its
army and diplomats".
France's
financial and military support of the Hutu authorities in Rwanda are at the
root of Kagame's suspicions. After two decades of mistrust, including a
three-year break in diplomatic relations, there had been a tentative
fence-mending in recent months. Last month France sentenced a Hutu former army
captain, Pascal Simbikangwa, to 25 years in jail on genocide charges in the
first such trial, and it has arrested a second suspect.
But Kagame
shrugged off the verdict against Simbikangwa. "We'll see what becomes of
this sentence on appeal," he told Jeune Afrique.
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