France “could have stopped” the 1994 Rwanda genocide with the help of its western and African allies but it lacked the will to end the slaughter, President Macron said on Sunday.
In a video message released on the 30th anniversary of the start of 100 days of bloodshed in which Hutu militias killed up to 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, Macron said: “The international community had the means to know and act.”
During a visit to Rwanda in 2021, Macron recognised France’s “responsibilities” in the genocide, but stopped short of an apology and rejected accusations of complicity.
Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president and former leader of the Tutsi rebels who overthrew the majority Hutu government and seized power after the genocide, said on Sunday: “It was the international community which failed all of us, whether from contempt or cowardice.”
France was an ally of the Hutu-led Rwandan government before the genocide and the subsequent government, headed by the mainly Tutsi former rebels, accused it of doing nothing to prevent the “foreseeable” massacres. A commission set up by Macron concluded in 2021 that there had been failures by France, but found no evidence that it had been complicit in the slaughter.
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Macron’s message, which stressed “the duty of remembrance”, was welcomed by Marcel Kabanda, the head of a genocide survivors’ group. “He is giving France this positive image of a country that recognises its faults,” he said.
France was an ally of the Rwandan government and sent about 600 soldiers to Rwanda during the civil war before the genocide. At the time, the French government said their role was to protect some 400 foreigners in the central African country. Later, nearly 2,500 French soldiers led a UN-mandated operation to save refugees, but Paris was accused of facilitating the escape of Hutu militias to neighbouring Zaire, since renamed as the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Under Kagame’s leadership, Rwanda, a former Belgian colony that France used to see as part of its sphere of influence in Africa, has joined the Commonwealth and promoted the use of English instead of French.
