Don't leave out France's role in Rwanda's genocides ....
or the UN's role of impotence :
Message 18795649
RIGHTS-FRANCE/RWANDA: France's Role In 1994 Genocide Probed
oneworld.org
By Angeline Oyog
PARIS, Apr 7 (IPS) - Determined to uncover the truth, human rights organisations and activists here are demanding an investigation into France's involvement in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
Marking Tuesday's fourth anniversary of the onset of the slaughter, Rwandans and supporters in Paris called on French premier Lionel Jospin and parliamentarians to set up a commission to investigate France's role in the events leading to up the genocide and the support Paris allegedly gave to its perpetrators.
''Please take the necessary steps so that the survivors will know the truth,'' said Yvonne G. whose family was died in the massacres. Machete-wielding Hutu extremists turned on their fellow Rwandans hours after Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana died in a still unexplained plane crash on Apr. 7, 1994.
In March, the French National Assembly set up an 'information mission' which, according to defence commission president Paul Quiles, is supposed to look into the ''role that the different foreign military forces and the United Nations could have played in the Rwandan crisis between 1990 and 1994''.
However humanitarian organisations and Rwandans continue the pressure for an investigative commission with more legal powers.
''It (the mission) was a first step forward,'' stressed Survie, a pressure group which is leading a campaign dubbed 'The Truth about Rwanda'.
But, it added in a statement, the French people ''have the right to demand certain guarantees'' that the truth is being told, given the reticence ''and the attempts of several sides to slip through or to conceal the truth''.
Survie notes that the present mission cannot subpoena witnesses. A real parliamentary investigative mission, it argued, with witnesses required to testify under oath, would clear up questions about the role played by certain French authorities in the events of 1994 and later.
According to various estimates, between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus perished in the massacres. The legacy of the killings continue to destabilise the country and the Central African region.
In 1993, organisations investigating reported human rights abuses following the launch of a Tutsi-led rebellion in 1990 had warned of bigger trouble brewing.
They accused France of arming and training the Hutu military and paramilitary groups that eventually led the mass killings of Tutsis that lasted until July.
''As early as March 1993, the anatomy of these massacres were already known by all the governments,'' claimed Brussels-based lawyer Eric Gillet of the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) while testifying last week before the information mission.
The organisations had reported their findings to the United Nations and to the governments of Belgium, France and the United States. ''There were contacts with the (French president's office, the) Elysee,'' Gillet added.
In the aftermath of the mass murders, and the collapse of the Hutu extremists' rule over Rwanda under assault from Tutsi rebel forces, France is alleged to have evacuated many of the Rwandan leaders behind the genocide.
French officials have always denied supporting the killers, but the allegations persist. Jose Kagabo, a historian at the School for Higher Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, said that he was going to bring his family to Kigali just before the genocide began.
''I believed that the peace accord signed in Arusha, Tanzania, meant a period of calm,'' he said. ''On Apr. 7, at 5 o'clock in the morning, I heard the first news reports. The Prime Minister and other Cabinet ministers who had played the game of peace had just been assassinated''.
Five months later, Kagabo counted the lost among his family. ''I lost my in-laws, five brothers, some of whom with their wives and children. Entire families like mine who perished are innumerable. The dogs of the country were fed with human flesh.''
Yvonne G. was in Kigali on April 6, 1994, with her husband. ''My entire family was wiped out. We were encircled by militias who wanted to kill me because I was a Tutsi.'' A technician working with a French cooperation project, Yvonne said she and her colleagues met to plead for help from their Paris partners.
''Everyone was on their knees pleading to be evacuated together with the French persons, but the French authorities decided to let them die,'' she told IPS.
''Since the genocide of 1994, the policy of France in Rwanda has been put in question by survivors, witnesses and international observers, the African public opinion and increasingly by French citizens,'' Survie noted.
''For the past four years, the genocide of Tutsis and democratic Hutus has damaged the image and the actions of France. Our country diplomatically has been more and more isolated in Africa, and morally criticised in the world. The refusal by the successive governments have only aggravated the discredit of France and the discomfort of our citizens.''
''Today, there is missing information and we all want light to be shed. The task of shedding light will be done by historians, slowly,'' said Kagabo.
''The missing information, I hope will be about the involvement of France in this tragedy. It is not the experts invited to the hearings who will provide the missing information, but by the military and political representatives who took the decisions.
''They know what they did and encouraged.'' (END/IPS/AO/MOM/RJ/98) |
