EDITORIAL: New French govt should not be haunted by the Genocide, it should come clean

Just a few days to the 23rd anniversary of the stopping of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, some of the enigmas are continuing to unravel. The scope of the conspiracy and the major players have always been known by those who were on the front seat; the victims. They have always recounted their plight, being subjected to identity controls by French soldiers on road blocks to check on their ethnicity, as well as training the Interahamwe militia who spearheaded the Genocide. To make matters worse, credible reports reveal that the French government continued to rearm the genocidal forces in the run-up to and during the Genocide, as well as after their panicked routing. The French establishment has, always, backtracked in the face of growing evidence. The media is now revealing documents that Hubert Védrine, former Secretary General of l’Elisée (French presidency) under François Mitterrand, gave direct orders to rearm the former Rwandan army and Interahamwe militia, even after a UN arms embargo. A former French officer who was in the theatre of operations, Guillaume Ancel, has on several occasions bared his soul and spilled the beans on his government’s conspiracy. “I was deeply disturbed by what we were doing because we had partly disarmed them because we knew they were immersed in blood right up to their necks,” he said. To date, the French government has refused to declassify all documents related to the Genocide against the Tutsi. Védrine himself hits the roof whenever his actions during the Genocide are raised. Successive French governments have buried their heads in the sand whenever their complicity in Rwanda comes under scrutiny. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy is the only one who came close to a Mea Culpa when he said that some errors of judgment had been committed. The new French administration is young and has no skeletons in the cupboard. It has no remorse to wrestle with. This is the right time to revisit its country’s past and come clean. Sweeping sins under the carpet in the name of “Honeur de la France” does not hold water today in the face of new emerging revelations. Slowly but surely, the layers of complicity are being peeled away to reveal complicity in the highest echelons of the French government. It is time it redeemed itself. But as President Kagame famously once said: “Les faits sont têtus”.

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EDITORIAL: New French govt should not be haunted by the Genocide, it should come clean