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Pastimes : From A to Zeev" -- SI Sacks Zeev -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Douglas V. Fant who wrote (211)	1/25/1998 10:12:00 AM
From: Zeev Hed	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 708

Doug I would be interested in your comments on the following: The following is intended for private use only and cannot be construed as commerical use. (C) the International Herald Tribune, Saturday, January 17, 1998 An Active French Role in the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By William Pfaff Los Angeles Times Syndicate, International Herald Tribune -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PARIS - The rumors were right. A devastating series of articles just published in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro by its Africa specialist, Patrick de Saint-Exup‚ry, documents French official implication in the genocide committed in Rwanda in 1994. Le Figaro quotes aid workers, officials and soldiers, together with evidence acquired by the United Nations in Rwanda and by a comprehensive Belgian parliamentary investigation whose damning results were published last month. The newspaper says French forces took an active but secret part in fighting rebel Tutsi infiltration of Rwanda from 1992 forward, operating at front-line level. They were present during the 1994 genocide, and did not intervene. They helped the authors of genocide to escape. The Tutsi invasion of Rwanda began in 1990, launched from English-speaking Uganda and supported by the Ugandan government. It was an attempt by this ethnic minority (some 10 percent of the Rwandan population) to reconquer a country they had ruled for the better part of the last two centuries. Most Tutsi leaders had been driven into exile in the 1960s and 1970s. The Hutu numerical predominance in Rwanda and presumed democratic legitimacy are why France originally backed them against the invaders. But France was also motivated by what Mr. de Saint-Exup‚ry calls the ''Fashoda syndrome'' - President Fran‡ois Mitterrand's conviction that the Tutsi invasion was part of an effort by the United States to end French influence in Africa. (In 1898, France and Britain came close to war over control of the upper Nile region when French and British expeditions confronted one another at the town of Fashoda, in what now is southern Sudan.) Murders of Tutsi civilians began in early 1992. Belgian intelligence reported the existence of a secret Hutu government command charged with ''exterminating the Tutsi of Rwanda ... in order to make a final solution to the ethnic problem, and also to crush the (moderate) Hutu political opposition.'' Western ambassadors made a joint protest to the Rwandan government in 1992 about the killings. The French ambassador refused to take part, saying the reports of mass murder were ''only rumors.'' At roughly that same time, the Ugandan-based leader of the Tutsi visited Paris, and was told at the Foreign Ministry that unless the invasion stopped, ''your brothers and families ... will all be massacred.'' In February 1993, an international commission denounced ''acts of genocide'' in Rwanda. President Mitterrand reportedly remarked to an associate the following summer: ''In countries like that, a genocide is not very important.'' The genocide proper began on April 6, 1994. By July more than a million Tutsi of Rwanda were slaughtered by Hutu fellow citizens, encouraged in this terrifying campaign by their government. France's collaboration with the Hutu authorities continued for at least another month. There was a delivery of arms by way of Goma in Zaire as late as July 18, long after a United Nations embargo had mandated a halt to all arms shipments. A French military intervention was launched at the end of June. It was announced as a humanitarian mission but actually covered the retreat into Zaire of Hutu soldiers, militias and the officials responsible for the massacres - including those responsible for the fanatical ethnic propaganda that had incited genocide. This policy of supporting the authors of genocide was chiefly the responsibility of Mr. Mitterrand, who under the French constitution is the ultimate authority in foreign policy. It was carried out, and covered up, by successive conservative and Socialist governments, including the Socialist government now in power. At present, in Bordeaux, the trial continues of Maurice Papon, an official of the wartime Vichy regime who is accused of crimes against humanity for having collaborated in Vichy's handing over of foreign and French Jews for extermination by Nazi Germany. His defense is that as a civil servant he obeyed orders, and had little personal latitude to resist. This past week France celebrated the centenary of Emile Zola's famous article ''J'accuse'' denouncing the gross injustice done to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer falsely accused of espionage and condemned to life imprisonment. Zola was forced into exile by that article, but Dreyfus was later vindicated. Mr. de Saint-Exup‚ry writes that there is much bitterness in the French army today because of the role it was ordered to play in the Rwandan genocide. He quotes an internal army document which speaks of soldiers who ''cracked, not because of the corpses and violence and hunting down of victims ... but because of a sense of guilt.'' There has been no open polemic, thanks to military discipline and esprit de corps, as well as to ingrained cynicism about politicians. The soldiers have been silent in public, although the articles in Le Figaro clearly draw on private confidences. The army has been abandoned before by French governments, left with terrifying responsibilities for crimes committed by political leaders. Yet it must re-cognize the irony in the coincidence of these revelations with the Papon trial and with Zola's great cry for justice.