 A French judge is in Rwanda to investigate accusations that Paris helped a former Hutu government massacre ethnic Tutsis during the 1994 genocide, the French embassy said on Tuesday. | I don't pretend to know much about the Rwandan genocide, but if the investigators are now calling for French jurisprudence, the aggrieved parties ought to be concerned... |
Rwanda's Tutsi President Paul Kagame, whose government came to power after the genocide, accused France last year of training and arming Hutu militias who were the main force behind a 100-day slaughter that killed some 800,000 people.
"A French judge arrived last evening to hear allegations from six Rwandans accusing France of taking part in the genocide," French ambassador Dominique Decherf told Reuters. The six are all genocide survivors. Decherf said the judge, Brigitte Raynaud, would return to France on Friday to make a report from which Paris would decide if further investigations or trial hearings were necessary.
Kagame's accusation last year, at a ceremony to mark 10 years since the genocide, further strained already tense relations between Rwanda and France. His remarks followed a report in French paper Le Monde accusing him of ordering a rocket attack on then President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane. The death of Habyarimana, a Hutu, triggered the attempt to wipe out the Tutsi ethnic moderate and kill Hutu moderates. France had replaced ex-colonial power Belgium as Rwanda's main Western backer and was close to Habyarimana's government. When Kagame's Tutsi-dominated rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), launched its war against the Hutu authorities in the early 1990s, France sent soldiers to Kigali. The French helped stop the RPF advance and then stayed on, as military advisers, up to the start of the genocide. France has vehemently denied any direct involvement in the killings. | In the matter of Henhouse v. Vulpina Industries, Judge Fox presiding. |
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