"Heavy and overwhelming responsibilities", a "bankruptcy" of France, a French president and his entourage "ideologically blinded" ... In a report of 1000 pages, a commission of fourteen historians takes stock of the commitment of the France before, during and after the Rwandan genocide and removes some of the gray areas that have remained for 27 years.
"The French authorities conducted a policy which was totally disconnected from reality, a policy which bore the stigma of colonization, ultra ethnicist, which did not actually see that Rwanda could get out of it and basically accentuated the ethnic crisis, aligned itself with the regime of President Habyarimana, which was a racist regime ”, explains Vincent Duclert, president of the Commission of historians on the role of France in Rwanda.
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If the responsibility of France and that of French President François Mitterrand are engaged, the report concludes that nothing demonstrates the complicity of France.
“France has been blind, France has refused all alerts, it is indeed a big problem, insists Vincent Duclert.
But if we must indeed consider that there is complicity in genocide, that means that basically the entire international community will be complicit in this genocide.
After years of tensions between Paris and Kigali, the French authorities hope that the report will contribute to a warming of relations between the two countries.