By ANDREW WALLIS
The New Times

As the giant French C-160 transport planes curved away from Kigali airport carrying soldiers from Operation Amaryllis and a cargo of foreign businessmen, aid workers, ex-Habyarimana officials and Akazu members,the land underneath them was bathed in blood.

The Rwandan genocide was fully under way. The carefully laid plans were being dutifully carried out. The day the Interahamwe militia had waited for had arrived; the West had literally ‘flown away’ leaving them free to carry out their terrible umuganda.

The world’s media, along with its politicians, had eyes at this time for only one African nation, South Africa, where the first post-apartheid elections were being held. On 10 May Nelson Mandela was sworn in as the new president, with his inauguration bringing together the largest number of heads of state since the funeral of US President John Kennedy in 1963.

Politicians, journalists and Businessmen swarmed to the hotels of Cape Town and Johannesburg, seeking vital alliances in the ‘new’ situation. Rwanda, a tiny, insignificant country with, it would seem, insignificant people, was by contrast the victim of appalling Western apathy.

Gitarama, a small, dusty, faceless town 45 kilometres from Kigali, was the first haven for the interim government set up after President Habyarimana’s death. It was a government of murderers with a twofold objective: to repel the RPF advance now threatening Kigali, and to initiate and carry out the planned genocide to annihilate an entire ethnic group. An ageing and infirm Theodore Sindikubwabo was declared president and ambitious Jean Kambanda prime minister.

The new ministers, appointed days earlier in the French embassy, now held meetings with local government officials to encourage, threaten or delight in the Tutsi genocide. Heading this group of killers and pulling the strings of the new government and militias was Colonel Theoneste Bagosora. The architect of the genocide was linked to the family of Agathe Habyarimana’s but had ambitions of his own to take charge of Rwanda one day.

Using his position at the ministry of defence, Bagosora, an intelligent and ruthless individual, who had already acquired the nickname ‘the Colonel of Death’ for his role in the killing of Tutsis, had been able to monitor and set up networks for the ‘final solution’ during the two years prior to the genocide. He had returned from the Arusha talks in February 1993, where he had been supporting the extremist CDR party, proclaiming, ‘I come back to declare the apocalypse’.

Now he was enacting it. These were the men the French government would spend the next three months legitimizing and supporting, politically and militarily. The bright and busy corridors of the UN building in downtown New York were full of their usual complement of suited diplomats, fax machines and secret memorandums. While each day in April and May Security Council representatives picked up their coffee, croissant or breakfast bagel on the way to their office or debating chamber for another hard day of meetings, the lives of small children, pregnant women and terrified elderly Tutsis were being ended by laughing killers in Rwanda. The cynical disregard by Clinton’s America and its client British government of John Major for the lives of these ‘black Africans’ in a country of no economic importance has been well charted. Unlike Iraq, where evidence for armed intervention was either dubious or non-existent, in Rwanda satellites were showing the mass killings and masses of dead bodies. Even the Vatican, without any such spy system, was able to call the nightmare ‘genocide’ three weeks after it started. This was no ‘secret’ slaughter. By the end of April around 200,000 people had already been killed in Rwanda.

Besides its client francophone states, France had several important allies on the Security Council, as well as the amiable diplomacy of the UN head, secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The former Egyptian minister was a known francophone who had worked closely with all parts of the French government and, indeed, owed the government in Paris a debt of thanks because its support had been vital in gaining his current position. Boutros-Ghali had trained as a lawyer at the Sorbonne in Paris and France presented him as a candidate of impressive intellectual and diplomatic credentials when elections for the new UN secretary-general came around in November 1991.

A personal friend of Francois Mitterrand, he commented that the French president ‘seemed to feel a personal victory in my election’ - not surprising given that the Anglophone countries, including the USA and Britain, had supported a different candidate. Three years after the genocide, in November 1997, Boutros-Ghali, with French backing, was elected general secretary of the International Organization of the Francophonie.

In a UN vote on 21 April France followed Boutros-Ghali’s lead by backing Resolution 912 to reduce Dallaire’s UNAMIR force by 90 per cent to a meagre 270 peacekeepers. This effectively weakened UNAMIR so much that it would be almost impossible for it to give even humanitarian help to victims or assist those who sought UN protection. Other countries, including Russia and Britain, also voted for this option, but the difference was that France was deeply involved in Rwanda and knew the substance of events on the ground. It meant that the interim government and militia now had a free hand to continue the carnage knowing that no Western force would intervene. Bagosora’s apocalypse was safe to continue.

Prime Minister Balladur justified the French stance on the grounds that his country could not take an initiative to send troops to stop the massacres as this would look like a ‘colonial operation’, especially if they stopped the RPF advance. By contrast Operation Noroit, or the later Operation Turquoise, were, it seems, not deemed to have ‘colonial’ hallmarks.

The Rwandans’ plight managed to attract some media attention in France in the spring of 1994, and with it the views of the political establishment. From the original intervention of Operation Noroit in October 1990 to the plane crash on 6 April 1994, the occasional article in the French press had led the public to believe that Paris was standing by a country in distress. It was defending a fledgling democracy, pushing for a diplomatic solution, carrying out humanitarian work and protecting its own hard-working nationals.

The genocide, with stories of the unfolding horror starting to appear in the press, especially in Le Figaro, Liberation and Le Nouvel Observateur, shattered this cosy image with detailed evidence of the French government’s complicity with the Hutu regime. The earlier French presence was now questioned; Rwanda finally came onto the French political and public agenda. By 12 June Liberation was even suggesting that France had trained the militias that were carrying out the bulk of the killings.

On 10 May Mitterrand went before the television cameras to defend his policy, stating that French soldiers could not intervene in every war, or be ‘international referees’ in the rivalries that split so many countries. Given his constant military interventions throughout francophone Africa during the previous decade, his words sounded particularly hollow.

The government’s defensiveness was welt illustrated by an interview former minister for cooperation Michel Roussin gave to French radio on 30 May. When pressed about Operation Amaryllis leaving staff at the French embassy to be killed, and its relations towards the RPF, he (Michel Roussin) lost his cool, shouting at the startled female interviewer, ‘What are you interested in? What are you interested in, madame? Is it the fate of these people, horrific pictures of whom we see every day, or is it a political analysis which is no longer topical?’ He then exploded at questions over French training of the FAR.

No, first of all the figure is wrong, it is - the figure is totally wrong, and, and also [pauses] I do not. ... Even if it were seventy instructors, it is not these people who started [pauses] the slaughter we have been witnessing... [pauses]. We have not, we have cooperation... [pauses]. It was very limited because as soon as the Noroit operation was dismantled and UNAMIR took over from it we no longer had any role apart from traditional cooperation. Therefore I believe that again these are groundless accusations.

Inside the UN, the 15-member Security Council, its decision-making body, continued to discuss the Rwandan crisis. But as ill luck would have it, one of the countries whose turn it was to be represented was Rwanda, in the form of Jean-Damascene Bizimana, its odious ambassador who represented the interim government. He used his position to make a series of highly inflammatory speeches maintaining that the killing was due to the civil war and that both sides were responsible.

In a letter of 2 May to the president of the Security Council, Bizimana alleged that since 6 April ‘several tens of thousands of people have been killed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)’, and they were carrying out ‘large-scale massacres’. He demanded the UN put a force into Rwanda to cause an immediate ceasefire. This constant confusion between the RPF and FAR fight for control of the country and who was carrying out the genocide was carried over into the media. Papers like the New York Times and The Times (London) failed to differentiate, with reports of wide-scale ethnic massacres and war, and a failure to analyse those organizing and implementing the genocide.

Publicly, French foreign minister Alain Juppe was giving out the same message as Bizimana. ‘Since the international community cannot and is not willing to interfere physically in the country [Rwanda] ... the only remedy is democracy. The African countries are committed to get more deeply involved in resolving this country’s conflict.’ Thus, the French were making ‘all possible efforts’ to make this happen. Juppe, like the Rwandan interim government, constantly referred to the need for a ‘ceasefire’ and a return to the Arusha accords to stop the killing, so further increasing the diplomatic smokescreen.

On 28 April, Juppe told the National Assembly in Paris that the large scale massacres were part of a vicious ‘tribal war’, with abuses by both sides. Later that summer Bruno Delaye told a human rights group that, though the Hutu had committed terrible crimes, it was because they were frightened for their lives. ‘It was regrettable but that was the way Africans were.’ It was more than a little akin to Mitterrand’s comment to an aide in spring 1995 that ‘dans ces pays-la, un genocide, ce n’est pas trap important’ (in countries like that genocide doesn’t really matter), revealing an inherent racism at the heart of the Elysee. Human Rights Watch noted that ‘France continued its campaign to minimize the responsibility of the Interim government for the slaughter.’

The interim government wanted UNAMIR to stay, for it recognized early on that without it the militarily superior RPF would be unhin dered in pushing for absolute victory. France, backed by its UN francophone votes, made sure pressure was increased behind the scenes to keep the UN vacillating. Czech ambassador to the UN Karel Kovanda summed up the French diplomacy on Rwanda at the UN as being about making any number of aspersions about this or that faction, with the aim of creating sufficient confusion to stop action being taken. Kovanda described how the francophone Djibouti ambassador had never spoken a word in French in the two years the Czech diplomat knew him at the UN. ‘Then suddenly he comes out with a whole speech in fluent French when the Rwandan debate begins.’ The fact was that France was pressing its ‘client’ francophone African states in the UN to back its pro-Hutu policy in Rwanda. With the backing of francophone nations such as Oman and Djibouti, together with Rwanda, France made no attempt, despite its inside knowledge of events, to clarify the need for immediate action to stop the genocide. It received backing in this political stance from the USA, which wanted no action for a different set of cynical reasons. Clinton was afraid the spectre of body bags returning from Rwanda would badly affect his poll ratings. The ‘black hawks down’ fiasco the previous year in Somalia had been highly criticized from all sides in the USA. For both Mitterrand and Clinton the ‘do nothing’ solution as a short-term answer to the unfolding genocide suited their individual political aims.

The Series continue tomorrow (Check out previously published series in the Book Series Category ANDREW WALLIS, SILENT ACCOMPLICE; THE UNTOLD STORY OF FRANCE’S ROLE IN RWANDAN GENOCIDE)