Within the space of a week French and Rwandan diplomats have been working at a frenetic pace and making the right noises – all aimed at raising Kigali-Paris ties on a new pedestal.
When President Paul Kagame joined a carefully selected array of African leaders in Paris last week for a summit about the continent’s debt, the stage was set for President Emmanuel Macron to send a signal to Kigali that France had come a long way from its infamous indifference to actual acknowledgment about the 1994 genocide.
In Macron’s conviction, France under him was more than prepared to turn a corner in its relations with Rwanda.
France and Rwanda had endured strained relations for decades since the genocide in which some 800, 000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in a carefully orchestrated bloodbath.
The carefully orchestrated 100-day pogrom was triggered by the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu when his plane crashed, believed to have been shot from the sky over Kigali by Tutsi rebels.
Habyarimana was a strong ally of France at the time.
For years Paris had been accused of literally arming and training Habyarimana’s Interahamwe militias which were used to carry out the genocide that immediately followed his death on April 6, 1994.
After two decades of vociferous denial which had left relations with Rwanda “deeply estranged”, France under Macron has demonstrated a willingness to move away from this position and “embrace its role in Rwanda’s genocide history”.
During his daylong visit to Kigali last Thursday, Macron apologised for his country’s role in Africa’s last genocide of the twentieth century.
This watershed move comes two months after a commission he had appointed in April 2019 to probe French involvement before, during and after the genocide finished its report, which suggest that France bore some responsibility for what happened.
It was hailed in Kigali as the first ever report documenting Paris’ role in the 1994 genocide, an act President Paul Kagame described as a “big step forward” in repairing relations between the two countries.
According to some Rwandan analysts France had been blinded by its colonial attitude to events leading up to the genocide, but owning up to its role offers a sea change from “the boring French rhymes of the past rapping about the genocide”.
“Rwandans had refused the ludicrous idea of a foreign power telling its own history about the genocide especially when this foreign version makes some serious ommissions which offend our sensibility as a people” says one political commentator.
Since the massacres, the history of Rwanda’s relations with France had been one of anger, suspicion and sometimes outright hostility.
By 2006 Rwanda had repeatedly broke diplomatic ranks with France, shutting down all French institutions in the country and relegating the French language and promoting English as the country’s main official language.
Kagame, an English speaker had taken French-speaking Rwanda, which was colonised by Belgium into the Commonwealth.
It was well established that France had a strong presence in the country in the early 1990s under late president François Mitterrand.
From the start of the war in 1990 into 1993, the French army was training Rwandan soldiers.
However, some French senior military officers such as General Jean Varret, who worked for the French ministry of cooperation and traveled regularly to Rwanda, warned the French as early as 1990 that “a genocide is being prepared”.
Varret’s warnings were not heeded.
He was replaced in 1993.
Although France has always denied any responsibility for the killings, French officials had on several occasions sought to improve relations with Kigali by seeking justice for the victims.
In February 2010, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted that his country had made “grave errors of judgment” in Rwanda but stopped short of offering a formal apology.
Mr. Sarkozy only admitted that France and the international community had operated under “a form of blindness to not have seen the genocidal dimensions” of the former Hutu government.
Dr Joseph Nsengimana, a political researcher and senior lecturer at the University of Rwanda, a former long-serving diplomat noted that the important thing with current efforts in restoring diplomatic ties between France and Rwanda is to continue working together to document the truth.
While Rwanda-France relations are a long way from what they used to be before the genocide, the majority of Rwandans are hopeful given that several acts of cooperation are set to resume shortly.
French remains one of the official languages in Rwanda, but since 2008, the government decided to switch the country’s entire education system in public schools to English.
Before that time, Rwanda has been for decades one of nearly 30 Francophone countries in Africa where French was the language of business, power, and civilization.
With Macron in charge France seems a long way from the mid 1990s when relations with Rwanda completely broke down and very little was done to repair them.
CU/as/APA