Is France lending a hand to genocidaires?

Dear Editor,In reference to the article, “Renewed calls for France to extradite Genocide suspects”, that appeared in The New Times of January 25, 2013, we have seen this cynical French game before and should, by now, have become thoroughly inured to it. The only thing that will interest me enough to read anything on genocide suspects and France is if the headline tells me one of them has landed at Kigali International Airport. Any other story is a waste of the paper it is written on. In the meantime, the really interesting fact in all these French shenanigans (arrest in a blast of publicity, quietly released and then total silence) is, as Sherlock Holmes observed in Silver Blaze, the case of the dog that doesn’t bark. Has anyone heard the slightest squeak from the usually noisy global human rights industry about France’s incredibly blatant determination to protect people on its territory suspected of the worst crime possible and thus deny any justice to their million plus victims? Not a single little peep from the likes of Human Rights Watch and their ilk. Perhaps they are too busy bribing poor Congolese in Eastern DRC to provide fabricated evidence of crimes committed by M23 to have any left to concern themselves with those guilty of real genocide. Or might it be because the French Government is a member in full standing of the human rights lobby that is considered to be the standard-setter on human rights and which therefore should not be attacked for failure to respect international conventions on the prevention and repression of the crime of genocide? All that we see is that France is getting away scot free in helping genocidaires escape justice, including those referred to that country by ICTR.Mwene Kalinda

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Is France lending a hand to genocidaires?