Should Turkey recognize the Armenian genocide to join the EU? Honestly, I believe so. Each country grows by acknowledging its past dramas and errors.

Jack,
commending the salutary moral uplift
of national confession to nations other than France
October 3, 2006 (The New Anatolian)

Dans ces pays-là, un génocide ce n’est pas trop important.

[In these countries, a genocide is no big deal.]

François Mitterrand,
Fourth President of the French Fifth Republic, quoted in
L'Inavouable : La France au Rwanda by Patrick de Saint-Exupéry

Yes. Well, as it turns out, the Rwandans do think it a big deal.

RWANDA LUKEWARM ON RECONCILIATION WITH FRANCE

KIGALI April 20, 2007 (Reuters) - Rwanda's President Paul Kagame showed little interest on Friday for a post-election resumption of diplomatic ties with France that were cut last year in a row over responsibility for the 1994 genocide.

... "During the genocide, there was a socialist government under (Francois) Mitterrand. Afterwards, there were conservatives under (Jacques) Chirac," he told reporters.

"One would have assumed things to be different but as far as we know, nothing changed -- it has been the same outlook, the same agenda on Rwanda. ... [The French] can choose between the two options, to have a relationship with us or not have one at all. Any of these two suits me fine."

See our background post here.*

FRANCE PROMOTING 'DOUBLE GENOCIDE' IDEOLOGY – WALLIS

KIGALI April 22, 2007 (allafrica.com/TNT) - France is continuously denying what happened in Rwanda and promoting the 'double genocide' ideology. The observation was made by Andrew Wallis, a British journalist and author of 'Silent Accomplice: The Untold Story of France's Role in the Rwandan Genocide'.

Wallis noted that it is a crime for France to keep on denying its role in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. He said the only way France can redeem its esteem and reinforce its relationship with Rwanda is by first accepting its past mistakes and asking for forgiveness, failure of which there will always be an impasse between the two countries.

... "You should consider the major French operations in Rwanda between 1990-94 Operation Noroit, Amaryllis and Turquoise and some of the questions that remain to be answered as to French motivation behind their support of Habyarimana and the interim government," Wallis said.

While discussing Wallis's presentation, Dr Kagabo, a professor of history in France, said France has continuously defended its position, labelling whoever tries to question France's role in the Rwandan Genocide as anti-France.

It was also noted that the French intervention in Rwanda was first and foremost an attempt by Paris to keep its beloved Francophone intact, noting that France has continued to support [French-speaking] dictators and regimes whose murderous policies towards their own people have been well documented.

The French double-genocide theory holds that all Rwandans partcipated in the genocide, which, of course, in a limited way, is true -- some as murderers and some as vicitims. The French theory, though, points in a novel direction. France maintains that both Rwandan ethnic groups -- both the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority -- committed genocide each on the other. In this theory there were two genocides: the heavily documented genocide carried out by the murderous Habyarimana and Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi Hutus, and a second undocumented genocide carried out by unarmed Tutsis, presumably while being butchered in the hundreds of thousands.

Like many a French counterargument, this one is advanced without recourse to the facts. Facts that are established, horrific, and cannot be deconstructed to fit airy French fairy tales. So. [Slight pause.] France asks that we take her word on it. [Pause.] You know, trust France.

But let us pretend for a moment like a Frenchman. Let us pretend that in 1994 in Rwanda everyone murdered everyone. [Slight pause.] How does this exonerate France? [Long pause.] A pretend double-genocide does nothing to diminish or to extenuate French complicity in the one real genocide about which everyone agrees. France has been credibly and severally accused of abetting the Hutus as they murdered Tutsis and non-murdering Hutus. She denies the accusations but has never refuted them. [Pause.] Just take her word on it.

FORMER UN SOLDIER TO TESTIFY AT FRENCH GENOCIDE PROBE

KIGALI April 24, 2007 (allafrica.com/TNT) - Making his first public testimony 13 years since the end of the Genocide in which a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed, [Belgian] Lt. Col. (Rtd) Walter Ballis said that French troops intensively trained civilian groups of extremist Hutus in a valley near Kigali International Airport. "We were tipped that the trainings were being conducted in an exclusive ground near the airport but at the time Gen. Romeo Dallaire (the UNAMIR force Commander) sent us for reconnaissance, the French had learnt of the mission and relocated the training wing," he told the seven-man commission hearing the role of France in the 1994 Genocide.

He said the complicity of the French in the masterminding of the Genocide dated way back when they refused to return to their homeland after the 1991 to 1993 Operation Noroit.

The former peacekeeping officer said that after the signing of the Arusha Peace Accord, the French troops were supposed to leave Rwandan soil by December 1993 because their mandate had expired.

"But the French soldiers remained around disguising in plain clothes. I came across one of the soldiers whom I personally knew at Meridien Hotel and I was shocked," Ballis said.

... "In all these operations [Noroit, 1991-93; Amaryllis and Operation Turquoise, 1994] the French, in one way or the other, aided the extremists and neglected the masses in the run-down to the Genocide and later during the Genocide," he told the commission.

Related posts can be found here, here, and here.

* For an article on the failure of consenus internationalism and American timidity read Samantha Power's excellent Bystanders To Genocide.

PFFT (What is this?): Trust France 0 | Ignominy 5 | Rayonnement français 0 (there is no lower rating)