While France advises select nations on the salutary moral uplift of recognizing their dark histories, she is incapable of owning up to her own. No, for France everyday -- past, present, and to come -- was, is, or will be another shiny day of rayonnement français.
FRANCE REJECTS CLAIM ITS ARMY AIDED RWANDA GENOCIDE
PARIS April 7, 2004 (AFP) - France does not share any extra blame in Rwanda's 1994 genocide and its troops were in no way involved in helping those who carried out the massacres, officials here said Wednesday, as the world marked the 10th anniversary of the bloodshed.
FRANCE DENIES
"UNACCEPTABLE, HUMILIATING AND LYING"
RWANDA ACCUSATION IT AIDED GENOCIDE
MARSEILLE April 9, 2004 (AFP) - French junior foreign minister Renaud Muselier has described charges by Rwanda's President Paul Kagame that France was complicit in the 1994 genocide as "unacceptable, humiliating and lying".... "I regret that memories and polemics have been mixed up. There are individual and collective responsibilities (for the Rwandan genocide), but time will enable the history of it to be told objectively."
Yes, well, objective history is fast catching up with French humiliation.
FRENCH MILITARY FERRIED HUTUS TO SLAYINGS: WITNESS
KIGALI December 12, 2006 (AFP) - French military trucks ferried extremist Hutu militiamen to a mountain hideout in Rwanda to slaughter thousands of ethnic Tutsis during the 1994 genocide, an ex-member of the militia [Interahamwe] said Tuesday.... The witness also testified that six French soldiers watched the murder of about 50 Tutsis at the Camp Gisenyi military barracks in northwest Rwanda where they were military advisers.
... The ex-Interahamwe member said on Tuesday that he had participated in transporting weapons from a French military plane in the former Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo, to the north Rwanda province of Gisenyi.
"These guns were distributed to different military units and militias manning roadblocks", he said, adding that the shipment was "escorted into Rwanda by French soldiers."
RWANDAN CLAIMS FRENCH TROOPS GANG-RAPED HER
KIGALI, Dec 13, 2006 (AFP) - A female survivor of Rwanda's 1994 genocide on Wednesday told a panel probing alleged French complicity in the massacres that French troops had gang-raped her and others multiple times.
[This news story contains graphic descriptions of brutal rape by French soldiers.]
Another protected female witness testified that she had been raped by a Rwandan employed by the French in the presence of a French soldier."I thought he would save me," the woman said.
The women's testimony followed that of the former mayor of Karama district, where French troops had one of their camps, who described the atmosphere there as "scandalous beyond imagination".
NEW RWANDAN RAPE CHARGES AGAINST FRENCH TROOPS
KIGALI December 14, 2006 (AFP) - Two more female survivors of Rwanda's 1994 genocide on Thursday accused French troops of raping them, in new allegations of sexual abuse by peacekeepers that France had in the country at the time.
[This news story contains graphic descriptions of brutal rape by French soldiers.]
"[The French soldiers] destroyed me," [the witness] said through tears. "They killed me. I thought the white men were going to save me."Another witness, a soldier in the former French-backed Rwandan government's army, said he and colleagues had brought young Tutsi girls from Nyarushishi refugee camp and nearby hideouts to French troops in exchange for canned meals.
"On one occasion, they refused to pay me and my friends for a girl we were bringing them," he told the panel. "We threatened to kill her. They told us to go ahead. We did it before them."
FRENCH TROOPS ABETTED KILLING OF TUTSIS: WITNESS
KIGALI December 18, 2006 (AFP) - French troops deployed in Rwanda at the height of the country's 1994 genocide lured thousands of minority Tutsis from their hideouts to be killed by extremist militia, a witness told an enquiry Monday.... Last week, a former primary school teacher told the probe team that as an interpreter he had accompanied a French contingent to the Tutsi enclave to deliver the evacuation promise.
A former Belgian military officer on Monday told investigators that days after the genocide started, French troops refused to evacuate hundreds of Rwandans and other Africans who had sneaked into evacuation convoys.
"They were sending back these people on only the basis of what appeared to be their colour," said Lieutenant Colonel Jean Loup.
The picture that emerges of France in Rwanda is monstrous. It is no longer tenable that France did not know what was going on in Rwanda, what France had abetted and was abetting. France did not discover horrors in Rwanda, she engineered them.
Even if France asked us to believe she is the stupidest nation on earth, only a fraction of France's complicity can be chalked up to stupidity outright. Of course, France is not asking us to believe her stupid, quite the contrary. So how did enlightened France come to embrace such unenlightened, such horrific policy?
One theory posits Anglophobia.
January 11, 2007 (Guardian) - France went on backing the killers even as the bodies piled up in the streets, churches and football stadiums. "France wants to blame us, the ones whose families were murdered, the ones who put a stop to the murderers; they want to blame us for the genocide because they cannot face their own guilt," says Rwanda's foreign minister, Charles Murigande. "The French armed the killers and they trained them even when they were saying they were going to kill the Tutsis, and France supported the genocide regime right up until the end, even helping the killers to escape." Why? "Because they have this obsession with Anglo-Saxons."... Africa has traditionally been considered such a special case in Paris that France's policy is run out of the presidency. At the time, the "Africa cell" was headed by Mitterrand's son, Jean-Christophe, a close friend of the Habyarimanas. He later said that there could not have been a genocide because "Africans are not that organised". France's president did not deny what had happened, but took a view no less racist:
"In such countries, genocide is not too important."Gérard Prunier, a French historian who advised the French government during the later stages of its intervention in Rwanda, has characterised Paris's view of its former African colonies not as foreign countries but as "part of the family". Paris's African "back yard", he wrote in a history of the Rwandan genocide - in which he made clear his disaffection with French support for the Hutu regime - "remains its back yard because all the chicks cackle in French. There is a high degree of symbiosis between French and Francophone African political elites. It is a mixture of many things: old memories, shared material interests, delusions of grandeur, gossip, sexual peccadilloes."
He added: "Of course, the arch-enemy in this cosy relationship, the hissing snake in the Garden of Eden, is the 'Anglo-Saxon'." Prunier said French governments viewed "the whole world as a cultural, political and economic battlefield between France and the Anglo-Saxons ... It is the main reason - and practically the only one - why Paris intervened so quickly and so deeply in the growing Rwandan crisis."
The explanation we favor is that France is not enlightened at all. Wherever she arrives she is preceded by her thuggish reputation. Wherever she stays, she enlarges it. And wherever she exits, she bequeaths it to sympathetic locals.
Not content with yesterday"s shame, France, with no friendly Francophone government to support, spites the current Anglophone government.
Rwanda's foreign minister, Murigande, accuses France of spending more than a decade punishing the RPF for its victory: "In all international forums - the World Bank, the IMF - France not only voted against any development programme that these institutions would want to undertake in Rwanda but it even went out of its way to mobilise other countries to vote against them." Before the genocide, France was the largest donor of any country to Rwanda. Today, it is the smallest.
PFFT (What is this?): Ignominy 5 | Rayonnement français 0 (there is no lower rating)
Bonjour,
"Pave" est , bien sûr, à l'avant-garde de ce qui est un complot anglo-saxon contre la France.
Kagamé a été formé militairement aux USA dans le but unique de déclencher un génocide qui permettra d'imposer un régime dévoué aux intérêts anglo-saxons au Rwanda.
Le comble: Kagamé qui est américanophone dirige un pays francophone !
De plus , il est curieux de voir les bushiens de "Pave" soi disant dévorés par l'idée d'installer des démocraties partout , soutenir un régime qui s'appuie sur la toute petite minorité tutsie .
En fait une dictature tutsie.
Une preuve de plus que la tartuferie des Yanks n'est pas un vain mot !
Why bother Damian, it''s well-known that France is responsible for every atrocities under the sun. We also know the US can do no wrong - ever - except perharps for these facts regarding Rwanda:
Contrary to later public statements, the US lobbied the UN for a total withdrawal of UN forces in Rwanda in April 1994;
Secretary of State Warren Christopher did not authorize officials to use the term “genocide” until May 21, and even then, US officials waited another three weeks before using the term in public;
The US refused to “jam” extremist radio broadcasts inciting the killing because of costs and concern with international law;
US officials knew exactly who was leading the genocide, and actually spoke with those leaders to urge an end to the violence.
MM. AB/AY et Zmx, France's champions, France's excusers. Ah, poor France.
Their defense of France consists solely of hiding France in the umbra of America. They lack the courage and the knowledge to independently take France's measure. No, their France does not, cannot, exist except in the shadow America.
M. AB/AY, an Anglophobe, hopes to prove out the Anglophobia theory. He implicitly argues the preservation of the French language is sufficient justification for genocide. He is a fool.
M. Zmx suggests France has done nothing more contempible than what America did. This is phony from the get-go. France was complicit in engineering the Rwandan genocide long before there was cause to debate what to label it. Whatever America's sorry response, it remains a response, a response to what France wrought. France never had cause to debate the term. Genocide was never in doubt. She conspired at the start with the government of Juvénal Habyarimana and the Interahamwe to commit genocide.
Of course, M. Zmx's uncited American criticisms are his trademark defense of France. But Pave denouncing France is not Pave apologizing for the Clinton administration, as we have made clear long ago:
Mr. Clinton’s whistle-stop speech in Rwanda was just that. During his 1998 11-day African tour he managed to spare Rwanda exactly one half hour of his time to shed his ephemeral tears on the tarmac at Kigali Airport. Pointing out the obvious Mr. Clinton admitted: "We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haves for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide. We cannot change the past." This insipid speech in its entirety can be found here. His administration could have stopped the slaughter had it declared its intention to do so instead of dithering to calculate the political advantages or temporizing about the term “genocide”. The Atlantic Monthly published a chilling indictment by Samantha Power, Bystanders to Genocide, of the Clinton administration’s inaction on Rwanda.
Mr. Clinton has come to consider American inaction "the biggest regret of [his] administration", this from an administration with much to regret. And as pathetic as Mr. Clinton's apology to Rwandans was, he has made one, unlike France, which to this very day denies any special responsibility in the Rwandan genocide.
The great irony of M. Zmx's limp retort is that one of the drags on American actions was its consultations and coordinations with France.
For MM. AB/AY et Zmx it is too frightening to look at France and see France.
They are are cowards. Cowards for France.
DGB
I do not spare France in the Rwanda debacle, but engineering the massacre? By your same logic, let's just say the US is responsible for engineering 200 000 plus secterian deaths in Irak, right?
(Vietnam? Cambodia? Nicaragua?)
No surprise here, from a man who cluelessly supports any "enemy of his enemy" - Marxist thugs like Gbagbo for instance.
You pathetic moron.
Bonjour,
1)"Pave" semble réduire les intérêts anglo-saxons à des questions de langue.Cela compte beaucoup… Mais il n'y a pas que cela .Il est bien connu que les Etats-Uniens sont de purs esprits uniquement dévoués à imposer des régimes démocratique partout.On se demande alors pour quelles raisons ils s'obstinent à soutenir le régime Kagamé qui n'est nullement démocratique.
2)D'ailleurs , l'assassinat d'Habyarimana par le fondé de pouvoir des intérêts yanks (ie: Kagamé) avait uniquement pour but de déclencher un génocide visant à empêcher la tenue d'un scrutin démocratique qui aurait mécaniquement écarté les Tutsis minoritaires du pouvoir.
3)Il se trouve que la volonté dictatoriale des Tutsis a rencontré la volonté US d'installer un régime à leur botte au Rwanda.
Il serait plein d'intérêt de connaître le contenu des cours militaires et "autres" dispensés à Kagamé , le responsable avéré du génocide , par ses mentors US lors de sa formation aux USA.
4)On a vu de chose plus "fool" que cela dans la politique US.
Comme , par exemple, le soutien US (que Zoomerx rappelle fort justement) des Khmers rouges en 1988 à l' ONU alors que la réalité du génocide en cours était largement établi depuis longtemps par exemple par un Français , le père Ponchaud dans son livre "Cambodge année zéro" (1977).
Les considérations morales n'ont jamais arrêté les intérêts bien compris de la camarilla de Washington.
5)"Pave" devrait être plus disert sur l'échec consommé de la politique US en Irak.
Chaque jour , nous voyons sur nos écrans français de TV des sénateurs démocrates , républicains , des généraux US en retraite conspuer la politique de leur pays , dans des termes que Villepin n'aurait pas osé employer…
Ah, both of France's champion excusers are back.
Still incapable of looking hard at France, both again excuse France as hidden in America's shadow. Poor helpless etiolated France.
Well, whatever the truth about Rwanda, this much we know: No American soldier exchanged rations for rape. No American soldier watched indifferently while murder was threatened then committed before his eyes. No American soldier trained, armed, or colluded with Rwandan murderers in the furtherance of murders. No American soldier taxied murderers to their victims. No American soldier hid murderers amongst the would-be victims. No American soldier facilitated the escape of Rwandan murderers.
M. AB/AY continues his "dark America" defense of France. Why, it's as if France had never heard of Rwanda. We've nothing to add beyond our earlier assessment.
M. Zmx tells us he thinks that France conspiring with, training, and abetting terrorists -- before, during, and after the genocide -- is actually the very same thing as America openly waging war against terrorists in Iraq -- terrorists America has not trained, nor armed, nor given sanctuary. Yet somehow, in some mysterious way known only to M. Zmx, it is the same as French actions in Rwanda.
Then M. Zmx looses his Parthian shaft, "Moron". Oh, the wound! Quick! Iodine! Oh, to be maligned by a coward. And a stupid coward at that.
DGB
Wherever she arrives she is preceded by her thuggish reputation. Wherever she stays, she enlarges it. And wherever she exits, she bequeaths it to sympathetic locals.
Ha! Ha! Ha!
(it's a joke right?)
Bonjour ,
A)La France n'est coupable de rien de ce qu'affirme "Pave".
"Pave" relaie ici les accusations de l'agent yank Paul Kagamé formé à la provocation au génocide chez les Yankees.
Tout cela est donc tautologique: j'affirme ce que mon agent Kagamé affirme !
B)Il est établi [Pas par les Yanks , car si ces racistes font un compte méticuleux de leurs morts , les autres ils s'en contrefoutent] que le tapis de bombe yankee en Irak a tué dès le début de la guerre entre 100 000 et 200 000 civils irakiens...
After having commented twice on our post, M. Zmx has just gotten around to skimming it. He asks is it a joke? No, French collusion in Rwandan genocide is not a joke. If M. Zmx is looking for a joke we suggest his shaving mirror.
M. AB/AY is still lost in America. He thinks to dismiss Pave is sufficient to dismiss the facts of France's involvement. Of course, he has skimmed even less of the post and its cited sources than M. Zmx. Had he but superficially passed his eyes over the text below the headlines he would find himself answering to French who establish the claims against France. French claims might carry some weight with M. AB/AY where the piteous testimony of victims carries none. Here is a Frenchman M. AB/AY cannot blow-off as a shill.
We stand by our initial assessment, M. AB/AY is a fool. And he is determined to convince you, too.
DGB
Bonjour,
Il n'y a que "Pave" pour donner foi aux délires de ce personnage.
Il est contesté aussi bien par des personnes de Droite (le ministre Bernard Debré) que de Gauche (le journaliste Pierre Péan)
C'est dire son degré de fiabilité...
Il va d'ailleurs faire l'objet de procès sous peu.
Mais on s'intéresse maintenant en France à l'implication US dans ce génocide.
USA qui ont formé le provocateur au génocide Kagamé dans leurs Ecoles "militaires" et qui avaient tout intérêt à ce génocide [haine de la France et de la francosphère , volonté géopolitique d'être présent dans cette région , etc]
Good luck to your country in Irak !
PS:Renseignez-moi :
A)Bush veut faire une Sécu à la Française maintenant ?
B)Les USA vont être dirigés par un musulman ?
Cela fait jouir les islamistes ici !
On a déjà vu un député US jurer sur l'infect Coran alors ...
