Les faits sont têtus indeed; facts are very stubborn. It seems former President Juvénal Habyarimana’s ghost will not give respite to those he considered close but stabbed him in the back, or rather, shot him down. A few weeks shy of the 25th anniversary of his shooting down and the beginning of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, French secret documents are spilling more beans on the saga. It has always been an open secret that Habyarimana’s inner circle, “Akazu”, was behind the plot to kill him for what they considered selling them out to the enemy. When he agreed to sign the Arusha Accords, he also signed his own death warrant. The power-sharing agreement with the RPF would curb down the powers and privileges enjoyed by “Akazu” and it would also derail the macabre plan to exterminate the Tutsi. But from day one, a wide mesh of conspiracy was spread from Rwanda, past former Zaire to land on the French president Francois Mitterrand’s desk. According to the declassified French intelligence documents, that is where a plot was hatched to falsely accuse the RPF and its leadership; complete with manipulating witnesses and compromising a willing and partisan investigative judge. Former French political and military leaders have been stripped bare by the new revelations; their world of deceit, lies, manipulation and complicity in the Genocide is falling apart; the centre cannot hold. The same can be said for all their foot soldiers, the so-called “experts”, the media-for-hire and perpetrators of the Genocide and their families. Rwanda had been calling for the declassification of all documents related to French involvement in Rwanda for ages, but always hit a brick wall. Now, if a tiny sample that was released could cause the earth to shift in the perpetrators camp, one cannot fail to wonder what other skeletons are buried in the French archives. editorial@newtimes.co.rw
