France seeks reconciliation with Africa by assuming its share of responsibility for Tutsi genocide

• FACTS. Following the publication of two investigation reports commissioned respectively by France and Rwanda, President Macron assumes in a historic speech France's responsibility for siding "with a genocidal regime", but without admitting any complicity of its troops in the massacres.
• RELEVANCE. The acknowledgement comes as part of reconciliation efforts by the two countries after more than 30 years of diplomatic and judicial disputes over France's true role in the massacres in which 800,000 people were killed. 
• PROSPECTIVE. The assumption of responsibility and the restoration of diplomatic relations with Kigali is part of the broader policy of boosting African ties promoted by the Elysée. Since coming to power, Macron has launched a very clear strategy aimed at going beyond the concept of Françafrique, promoting a new style of relations with the African continent that will allow him to confront the growing Russian, Turkish and Chinese presence on the ground.

This July marks 27 years since the end of the Tutsi genocide in which 800,000 Rwandans, including Tutsis, Twas and moderate Hutus, were killed. On 27 May, French President Emmanuel Macron made a long-awaited speech at the Genocide Memorial in Kigali, taking responsibility for the French state's role in the genocidal acts of 1994.

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With all the solemnity demanded by the setting, the head of state embodied France's regret for not having "listened to the voice of those who warned us" of the atrocities that were taking place. While denying the Hexagon's complicity in such massacres, he asserted that "France has a role, a history and a political responsibility in Rwanda" and explained that "by pretending to stop a regional conflict or a civil war, it has in fact sided with a genocidal regime". 

With this speech, Macron seeks to put an end to more than three decades of controversy over France's actual involvement in the Tutsi genocide and its preparatory acts, which at times even led to the severing of diplomatic relations. Not surprisingly, from the beginning of his term in office, the president expressed his desire to clarify once and for all Paris's role in the massacres and the need for reconciliation between the two countries.

Context of the catastrophe

Rwanda is a small territory (26,338 km2, slightly larger than North Macedonia) that was under European colonial administration for decades. Initially attributed to Germany at the Berlin Conference of 1886, it finally came under Belgian control after the First World War. Following practices in other territories such as the Congo, Brussels favoured a differentiation of the native population according to ethnicity: Hutu (80 per cent), Tutsi and Twa. It thus decided to entrust the management of the country to the minority Tutsi elite, heirs to the old pre-colonial kingdoms.

In the 1950s, however, Tutsi leaders began to call more and more strongly for decolonisation and the start of an independence process, but Brussels decided to reverse the balance and began to support the Hutu majority. After several years of revolt, the metropolis finally gave in and granted independence, marked by the death of the Tutsi king Mutara III and the coming to power of the Hutus in 1961. From that moment on, the first massacres began - which would be repeated in the 1960s and 1970s - and the mass flight of more than half of the Tutsis, who were forced to take refuge in the newly independent countries around them: Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

Juvenal Habyarimana

The pressure received in these receiving countries led the Tutsi diaspora (mostly Rwandan-born) to ask the new President Juvenal Habyarimana (JH) about the possibility of returning to their territory of origin. The latter, who came to power in 1973 after a bloody coup in which he deposed and imprisoned President Kayibanda, soon implemented a policy of marginalisation of the Tutsis, who were banned from joining the army or holding positions in the administration. Moreover, the president's MNRD party publicly rejected the possibility of collective repatriation, citing lack of space. 

Such rejection prompted refugees to consider war as the only means to return to their homelands. Many of them had joined Museveni's NRA (National Resistance Army), which put an end to the Obote regime in Uganda, and after he came to power they had remained in the NRA as middle management. On this basis, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was created in 1987, bringing together mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus in exile. In October 1990, the RPF decided to go on the offensive and launched an attack in the north with thousands of soldiers. 

French involvement

France became involved in Rwanda almost as soon as it gained independence. Although it was not a former colony, Paris considered Kigali to be a bastion of Francophonie in a region largely subject to the influence of other powers, especially the United Kingdom and Germany. It is for this reason that France conceived of Rwanda as part of the so-called "Françafrique", i.e. countries in its orbit as former colonies or enclaves essential to the development of a post-colonial influence, to which it promised military protection and economic investment in exchange for Paris' policy support in international fora and priority access to resources for French companies.

In the case of Rwanda, agreements were signed between the two capitals that included cooperation in a number of areas, most notably in the training of armed forces. The relationship was greatly strengthened with the proclamation of President François Mitterrand who, despite his declared policy of ending the colonial era, wished to favour a strategic relationship with the countries of Françafrique. Thus, during the Franco-African summit in La Boule in 1990, the French president promised to increase cooperation (including military cooperation) with those countries that moved towards democratic forms of government. It was this commitment and Mitterrand's personal friendship with JH that eventually led to France's support when the RPF attacked the north in October 1990.

Although the Elysée's objective at the time with the so-called Operation Noroît was officially to protect French nationals, the de facto result was to defend JH's regime by having a deterrent effect on RPF commanders. With the frontist advance halted and the October fighting over, Admiral Lanxade (who was part of Mitterrand's private staff) advised withdrawing troops so that France would not appear "too involved in sustaining Rwandan forces if serious abuses of the population occur". However, Mitterrand rejected the proposal and maintained a large contingent in the country, as well as continuing to supply military equipment.

As later revealed, the first massacres of Tutsis began to take place during the October offensive and from January 1991 onwards. Indeed, the Hutu population's fear of the return of the Tutsi leaders, seen as foreign elements - some French reports from the field insisted on the term "Ugandan-Tutsis", as this is how they were perceived by the Hutu population under the influence of JH's government and the radical Hutu parties - and the racist hatred propagated by the official media were the triggers for the first massacres of Tutsis in the interior of the country. 

1993 saw a fundamental change in the orientation of French policy towards Rwanda. The legislative elections resulted in the so-called "cohabitation" when the conservative Edouard Balladur became Prime Minister and demanded that President Mitterrand share the foreign policy decisions hitherto monopolised by the head of state. The French administration's priorities in Rwanda thus changed, as did the perception of the RPF, which began to be seen in Paris as a possible peace negotiator. Thus, in August 1993, the Arusha Accords were signed, establishing a truce between the warring parties, appointing a parity government with Tutsi participation under JH's presidency, and authorising the presence of an RPF contingent in Kigali. The Accords also led to the departure of the bulk of the French armed forces from the country in December of the same year. 

However, the fragile peace was to last only a few months. On 6 April 1994, the plane carrying JH and the President of Burundi - also a Hutu - Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down as they were returning from meetings in Dar es Salaam on the implementation of the Arusha Accords. The assassination triggers a catastrophe: the Presidential Guard, made up of numerous Hutu extremists, assassinates the prime minister and the Belgian soldiers protecting her. An interim government is formed, composed of representatives of all Hutu parties, but de facto power is exercised by members of the Akazu - the first Hutu power circle, which is deeply racist - who, during the JH government, had already monopolised the important positions in the administration. From then on, the extremist Hutu militias, armed by the army in the previous months, embarked on a genocidal spree that in 100 days would kill 800,000 people, including Tutsis, Twas and moderate Hutus.

User:Lemurbaby, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

With the start of the genocide, the RPF crosses the border and in a swift campaign manages to take Kigali. Meanwhile, the international reaction was too slow, for although on 16 May French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé had already described what was happening as genocide, it was not until 1 July that the UN Security Council backed him in Resolution 935. France, which had begun Operation Amaryllis on 7 April to remove its nationals, other foreigners and Rwandans considered in danger (including JH's wife) from the country, had the UN entrust it with the mission of halting the massacres. He thus launched Operation Turquoise, through which he established a Safe Humanitarian Zone in the extreme southwest of the country (bordering Zaire and equivalent to one fifth of the territory), where he sheltered the population - mostly Hutu - displaced by the RPF offensive. A frontist diplomat claimed years later that it was precisely the SHZ that allowed the genocidal leaders to continue the massacres, and it has also been claimed that they took advantage of French protection to move freely into Zaire in order to rearm - causing the militarisation of the refugee camps that is at the origin of the first Congo War.

Two reports to shed light on the involvement 

In April 2019, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the genocide, President Emmanuel Macron commissioned Vincent Duclert, a researcher and professor at the renowned SciencesPo university, to set up a commission of enquiry to analyse all available French archives on Rwanda in order to shed light once and for all on the Hexagon's involvement in the Tutsi genocide. In doing so, it was intended to fulfil a commitment made to President Paul Kagame in 2018 during his visit to Paris. 

The Duclert commission, which involved up to 17 experts from different specialities - jurists, archivists, historians - for almost two years, had access to a large number of previously classified archives - including, for example, those of former president Mitterrand - although, as the report itself acknowledges, it encountered some obstacles and the impossibility of accessing essential records despite the presidential commission. The result was a 1200-page report in which, in great detail and quoting verbatim from numerous notes and letters exchanged between Paris and the diplomatic and military personnel on the ground, the Commission describes the reasons for, and the precise involvement of the French administration in, the nefarious events.

First, it explains that decisions on French involvement in Rwanda between 1990 and 1993 were taken personally by President Mitterrand and his private staff. Thus, although demands for democratic progress were reiterated by Paris, President JH's requests for support in the face of RPF attacks were always responded to and dealt with urgently and as a matter of priority. 

According to the report, in addition to the acknowledged "strong, personal and direct relationship" between the two presidents, there were three reasons for Mitterrand's policy of support:

(i) First, pressure from the RPF and the fear of the Rwandan state collapsing into a Tutsi minority dictatorship, as well as the maintenance of defence promises made to other African allies in a context of growing influence of other powers. Both factors generated an urgency that prevented Paris from reflecting on an alternative policy, at least until the advent of cohabitation with Balladur in 1993. 

(ii) Secondly, the conception of external aggression, whereby the RPF was given an "Ugandan-Tutsi" nature, so that the legitimacy of supplying arms to the regime could be more easily defended in the eyes of international and French domestic opinion. 

(iii) Finally, the defence of Francophonie and French influence in a territory that had not even been a colony and in a largely English-speaking region, making Rwanda a "laboratory for French action that is both effective and discreet". 

In any case, the report concludes that there was no French complicity in the catastrophe, as there is no evidence to the contrary, if this is understood as "a willingness to associate itself with the genocidal intent".

However, after a thorough analysis of the facts, the commission states that France engaged in certain reprehensible behaviour: 

1. Siding with a regime that promoted racist massacres; 

2. Remaining blind to the preparation of a genocide by the most radical elements of the regime;

3. Adopting a binary logic of Hutu friend versus Ugandan-Tutsi enemy; and 

4. Being slow to break with the interim regime once the genocide began and keeping the RPF as its main concern. 

Such behaviours led France to incur what the report describes as "overwhelming responsibilities", which are eminently and primarily political, stemming from its "blindness in the face of a corrupt, racist and violent regime" that failed to take the steps towards democracy that Paris had hoped for and its indifference to complaints from French ministers, parliamentarians, institutions and senior officials about what was happening. 

But the report also deduces from its investigation other types of responsibility incurred by Paris, which are interlinked and which it describes as institutional (irregular practices by the administration, parallel channels of communication and command, acts of intimidation and opaque decisions), intellectual (the administration allowed itself to be led by an ethnicist reading that did not correspond to reality), ethical (the truth of the facts was downgraded in favour of ideological constructs and decisions were taken even when information to the contrary was available), cognitive (arising from the mental inability to think of genocide in its true definition and to distinguish it from mass slaughter) and, finally, moral (questioning of universal values when faced with the preparation and execution of genocide). 

Rwanda's response: the Muse Report

Parallel to the Duclert Commission's work, Paul Kagame's Rwandan government commissioned an American law firm - specifically one of its partners, Robert F. Muse - to conduct an investigation into France's true involvement in the genocide after several years of disagreements between the two countries.

A first version of the report had already seen the light of day in 2017, generating much controversy by concluding that French forces provided strategic and military support to the genocidaires, supplied them with weapons despite knowing about the massacres since 1990, and gave them cover under the umbrella of a UN humanitarian mission in the final moments of the genocide.

The final report, published a few weeks after the Duclert report, acknowledges that it agrees in many respects with its conclusions, while appreciating the effort made to explain the role of the French state in a more honest and transparent manner. However, he considers that they differ in some aspects, and above all, he emphasises the Duclert Commission's silence with regard to the events that took place after the genocide. 

Thus, unlike the Duclert Commission, which he accuses of proclaiming abstract responsibilities, he concludes that France "bears significant responsibility for having enabled a foreseeable genocide". He thus disagrees with the French state's alleged "blindness" to the genocide, as its knowledge of the serious massacres committed beforehand by the JH regime as well as the "daily dehumanization" of the Tutsis carried out by media close to the regime (such as the 'Radio des Mille Collines'), combined with the diplomatic warnings and other information coming from Rwanda, the report argues that Paris was in a position to know that a genocide was foreseeable, so that "the French government was neither blind nor unconscious".

Finally, the Muse Report denounces what it considers to be a "coverup" during the 25 years following the genocide, in which the French state maintained a logic of "obstruction" of any investigative activity aimed at clarifying its role in the events. Not surprisingly, he claims that three requests for access to certain archives were made in 2019, 2020 and 2021, to which France acknowledged receipt but no response was provided. 

Paris-Kigali: difficult relationship

As early as 1994, in the months following the catastrophe, the RPF accused Paris of complicity in the genocide, which is why Rwanda was not invited to the Franco-African summit in Biarritz in November of that year, apparently by President Mitterrand's personal decision.

The Parliamentary Fact-Finding Mission constituted in the National Assembly in 1998 failed to quell hostilities, proclaiming that although the French intervention under the UN umbrella came late, France had no involvement in the genocide and furthermore took the lead in the international reaction by deploying Operation Turquoise. 

Years later, in 2006, a judicial investigation into the attack on JH's presidential plane began in France, in which several Rwandan leaders from President Kagame's entourage were indicted. This led to the severing of diplomatic relations between the two countries until 2009. 

In 2010, an attempt at reconciliation was made with Nicolas Sarkozy's visit to the Genocide Memorial, coinciding with declarations of recognition by the US, Belgium and the UN of their responsibility for the inaction during the months of massacres. However, President Sarkozy did not go so far as to apologise or acknowledge any responsibility beyond "political mistakes" and "a form of blindness". 

Another of Kigali's major grievances has been Paris's inaction in pursuing and prosecuting, or extraditing, genocidal leaders who have fled to France. A special unit was set up in 2013 to investigate crimes committed by Rwandans living in the Hexagon, but so far only a handful of the 30 or so Rwandans claimed by Rwanda have been prosecuted. The Rwandan government further accuses France of impeding the investigation of its nationals, as it has not only failed to respond to requests to interrogate 22 military commanders, but its courts have shut down any attempt to prosecute two senior commanders. 

In 2017, the controversy was reignited when the magazine 'Revue XXI' claimed, in an article signed by Patrick de Saint-Exupery, that the French authorities knowingly ordered the rearming of those responsible for the massacres that crossed the border into Zaire, in violation of the UN embargo. 

Foresight. Macron's efforts to overcome "Françafrique" 

The coming to power of the young French leader has marked a clear turning point in relations between France and Rwanda. Certainly, the closure in 2018 of the judicial proceedings for the murder of JH against seven RPF militants began to pave the way for reconciliation. In the same year, Macron made another important gesture by supporting the election of a Rwandan woman as head of the International Organisation of La Francophonie, which earned him strong domestic criticism as Rwanda is a country that prioritises teaching in English. The subsequent presentation this year of the Duclert report and, especially, the solemn acceptance of responsibility delivered at the Genocide Memorial seem to have put an end to the thorny issue, as President Kagame himself has been satisfied despite the "slight divergences" between the two reports and, not surprisingly, described Macron's speech as "an immense act of courage".

The reconciliation efforts with Kigali seem to be part of a broader strategy promoted by the Elysée, which aims to inaugurate a new way of relating to the African continent. Thus, Macron's plan - as was the case with his predecessors Hollande and Sarkozy - seeks to overcome the traditional concept of 'Françafrique', understood as the neo-colonialist practice of taking advantage of the extractive dynamics carried out from Paris through the instrumentalisation of relations with the leaders - normally dictators and autocrats - of former colonies and other territories of influence. 

Macron himself proclaimed in his extensive speech in November 2017 at the University of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) that "there is no longer an African policy of France", making clear his desire to break with the reviled concept. However, some analysts highlight the difficulties the president will face in getting rid of a deeply rooted phenomenon that involves a resilient network of economic interests woven between large industrial families and African autocratic heads of state, and believe that the initiative could become a real 'African trap' for the president, especially with a view to his eventual re-election in 2022. 

What is certain is that the practices linked to Françafrique (support for autocrats and repressive regimes for the political and economic benefit of Paris) have generated in the former colonies, especially among their civil societies, a feeling of disconnection at the very least and a serious deterioration of the French image, so that the Hexagon is observing how in recent years it is losing its traditional position throughout Africa, both in the economic field (where French companies are no longer always the first option, as in the mining sector, for example, in favour of Canadian or Australian companies) and in the field of geopolitical influence, where China and Russia are penetrating by leaps and bounds through their unlimited supplies of capital and military resources.  

In this sense, the president faces a clear choice: on the one hand, to privilege relations with civil societies and new businessmen, encouraging the creation of partnerships and the promotion of democratic development and freedoms in these countries; on the other hand, to be driven by a "realpolitik" that forces him to continue supporting autocratic regimes (such as those in Chad, Mali, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Republic of Congo or Djibouti) in pursuit of pressing objectives such as the fight against terrorism (especially in the Sahel and Central Africa) or limiting the growing influence of Moscow and Beijing (and lately Ankara) on the ground. 

Although for the moment he seems incapable of completely abandoning the second option, the president is clearly inclined to promote the first path by all means, relying on a policy of gestures as significant as the assumption of responsibility for the Tutsi genocide. Thus, recently he has promoted the opening of archives to shed light on the death of Burkinabe President Thomas Sankara (the so-called "African Che Guevara") and the formation of a memory commission on the Algerian war (which issued its first report last January). It has also encouraged the restitution of cultural heritage to certain African countries (such as the recent return of several pieces to Benin or the long-term loan to Senegal of a historic sword).

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On the social front, he has called on the large African diaspora to become more involved in the development of their countries of origin by investing in the growing local ecosystems, and intends to give its members a greater role by integrating them into the "Presidential Council for Africa" created by Macron himself. Although the real effectiveness of this Council, which is accused of lacking real links with the countries of origin, has been questioned, the president intends to use its young members to change not only the perception of France in Africa, but also the perception of Africa among the French. 

On the economic front, he has made clear moves such as the organisation of a post-COVID Africa financing summit in May (which brought together some 30 African, European, G7, G20 and international institutions' leaders in Paris), has been open to reforming the CFA franc (two currencies used in 14 African countries and fixed to the euro through a French Treasury guarantee), and has financed the "Digital Africa" initiative as a platform for technological development and digitalisation of the continent.

It remains to be seen, therefore, whether this policy of gestures by President Macron will be enough to overcome the past in a continent wary after many years of French colonialism and post-colonialism. It remains to be seen whether Africans will finally follow in the footsteps of Rwandan leader Kagame and offer the ex-metropolis its intended redemption, thus ushering in a new era of Franco-African relations. For as Macron said at the Genocide Memorial: "Only those who have gone through the night can, perhaps, forgive, grant us forgiveness".