On Sunday, April 7, France's president, Emmanuel Macron, will not be in Kigali when his counterpart, Paul Kagame, lights the flame of remembrance at the Gisozi Memorial to mark the 30th anniversary of the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsis in 1994. Instead, the French head of state will be paying tribute to the French resistance fighters of the Plateau des Glières, in Haute-Savoie, during the Second World War. He did the same five years ago.
The Elysée said that "the president will speak on Sunday [April 7] through a video that will be published on his social media." According to information sent to the press via WhatsApp on Thursday, April 4, "The head of state will recall in particular that when the phase of total extermination against the Tutsis began, the international community had the means to know and act, through its knowledge of genocides revealed to us by the survivors of the Armenians and the Holocaust, and that France, which could have stopped the genocide with its Western and African allies, did not have the will to do so." For the president, this is a continuation of the work begun when Macron came to power in 2017.
In Kigali, on May 27, 2021, the French president had, in a historic speech, acknowledged [France's] "overwhelming responsibility in a chain of events that led to the worst," but without going so far as to evoke any "culpability" or "complicity." These words have yet to be used. By pointing to the lack of will to stop the genocide, Macron nonetheless wants to issue a public reminder of the inability of French military operations in Rwanda to prevent the crimes, the apathy of America during the massacres and the United Nations' uselessness, which withdrew almost all its blue helmets.
Privately, several French diplomats wonder about what Macron is trying to do. "Why not come to Kigali for this historic moment, when he is the president who relaunched French-Rwandan bilateral relations as soon as he was elected in 2017?" one of them asked. Could his absence be a sign of slight tension between the two countries after what many officials were quick to describe as a "honeymoon"?
When asked about Macron's absence, Kagame feigned indifference, in an interview published on March 25 by the media Jeune Afrique: "They [the French] can decide not to come at all, or to send whoever they want." "They" will indeed be there, at a high level, represented by Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné and Hervé Berville, the Rwandan-born state secretary for the sea. In January, Kagame sent an invitation to his French counterpart.
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