It is no small thing to sever bilateral diplomatic ties, but Rwanda has done precisely this in relation to France, recalling Ambassador Emmanuel Ndagijimanam from Paris for consultations. This was done in response to French anti-terrorism Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere’s recent decision to sign international arrest warrants for nine Rwandan government officials, in connection with the assassination of the Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994, an event which set in motion the horrific events that led to the deaths of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. (Several French citizens were members of the plane’s crew, hence the lawsuit in France.)

Bruguiere, while acknowledging that President Kagame and his aides are immune from prosecution in France, instead proposed that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) try Kagame, and lawyers for the tribunal have set into motion such a suit. This comes only a few weeks after the Rwandan government’s Commission of Inquiry held public testimonies concerning France’s alleged complicity in the 1994 genocide. What we have, then, are competing claims arising from the events of twelve years ago, and a public reckoning is in order, and may very well occur thanks to these two lawsuits.

It is well known that the Rwandan génocidaires, with savagery unparalleled in world history, took some 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu lives in a matter of one hundred days. It is equally well known that the international community barely lifted a finger, that then-President Bill Clinton forestalled US involvement, and that then-United Nations Under Secretary for Peacekeeping Operations Kofi Annan likewise dithered. Few are aware, however, of the proactive role that the French government played in the grim proceedings, manifested in the French military Opération Turquoise, and this is what the Rwandan Commission of Inquiry, headed by Dr. Jean de Dieu Mucyo, is investigating before making a recommendation as to whether to pursue legal redress at the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

For those familiar with the Rwandan genocide only through vague memories of news reports twelve years ago, or perhaps the recent film Hotel Rwanda, France’s connivance may come as a surprise. Indeed France, a nation with considerable diplomatic repute, has never been held fully accountable for its actions in 1994, though this may be about to change.

The story of France’s intervention in Rwanda has been told before, and told ably, particularly by Philip Gourevitch in his masterful book We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. Yet the context and the facts bear repeating, and will be the basis of any future international criminal proceedings. The Rwandan genocide grew out of a civil war between the predominately Hutu government of Juvenal Habyarimana and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a primarily Tutsi organization headed by Paul Kagame (currently the elected president of post-genocide Rwanda). Paris has long been accustomed to treating huge swathes of western and central Africa as chez nous, although Rwanda was an ex-Belgian colony, not a French one.

As a result, France positioned herself as the chief patron of the Habyarimana government, supplying weapons and auxiliaries to aid in the fight against the RPF. French soldiers even went so far as to interrogate RPF prisoners. More disturbingly, the French government insisted (over American objections) that ethnic identity cards, which divided Rwandans into fairly artificial categories of Hutu and Tutsi, not be outlawed. The requirement of ethnic identity cards, of course, would have calamitous consequences when Hutu extremists went on the prowl for ethnic Tutsis, who despite popular stereotypes are usually indistinguishable from their Hutu neighbors and relatives.

All of these measures were part of a Great Game writ small in the Lake Region of Africa. The RPF was based in Anglophone Uganda and posed a threat to French interests in Rwanda. Civil wars, intermeddling ex-colonial powers – more or less par for the course in war-torn parts of Africa. But things changed when President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on April 6, 1994 (whether by the RPF or Hutu extremists has never been determined, due to a total lack of evidence, though French courts have of course fingered Kagame). The so-called interhamwes, or Hutu extremists, promptly (almost too promptly, indicating complicity in the assassination) took over the government, and then set in motion an attempt to wipe ethnic Tutsis from the face of the earth. Kagame’s tightly-disciplined RPF launched an offensive to stop the genocide before it could spread further.

At this point, with the US and the UN unwilling to intervene in any meaningful way, France offered to set up the so-called Zone Turquoise, a humanitarian safe-zone. At the UN Security Council, the French delegation assured its counterparts that the French goal “naturally excludes any interference in the development of the balance of military forces between the parties involved in the conflict.” Yet, as Philip Gourevitch noted, “France suddenly reinterpreted its ‘humanitarian’ venture and declared its intention to turn the entire territory it had conquered into a ‘safe zone.’ The RPF was not alone in asking: safe for whom?” The RPF was forced into pitched confrontations with the French military; Gourevitch reported that Hutu Power soldiers were among the dead after the RPF put the French to flight after a battle outside of Butare. Afterwards many French troops felt deceived, with one saying that he “thought the Hutus [i.e. Hutu Power] were the good guys and the victims,” but he had since learned that it was precisely the opposite.

The French journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, whose account of France’s ignoble venture L’inavouable has inexplicably not been published in the English-speaking world, begins with a powerful indictment of the rhetoric used by then-Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, who framed the intervention in terms of the Rwandan “genocides,” pointedly using the plural. It was this sort of language that convinced the French soldier mentioned above that the Hutu génocidaires had cause for their actions, or at least that there was some kind of moral equivalence between Hutu Power and the RPF. But, as Saint-Exupéry put it, “It was one genocide. Unique, singular.” To this day Villepin will speak of the Rwandan “genocides,” drawing attention away from his own squalid role.

But with the progress of the Murcyo Commission, attention will finally be focused on the actions of the French Foreign Ministry and armed forces in the run-up and execution of the 1994 genocide. Although the French government has not been totally uncooperative with Rwandan investigations, the international criminal end-around at the ICTR can be seen in part as an attempt to shift focus away from its role and on Paul Kagame, the one man in the entire world who managed to end the grisly proceedings in 1994.

This week’s Franco-Rwandan diplomatic falling-out was inevitable, but it is quite instructive. A recent editorial in Le Figaro by Villepin’s successor, Philippe Douste-Blazy, stated that, vis-à-vis the human rights crisis in Sudan, France’s “sole objective is the political pacification (apaisement) of the crisis and regional stability.” The same logic informed France’s behavior in Rwanda in 1994, and, as usual, the quest for stability and influence in the Tiers-Monde has again meant hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced. If these two lawsuits, at the ICTR and ICJ respectively, indeed come to pass, the international community will be confronted once again with the enormities that occurred in plain sight in 1994. That the proper geopolitical lessons will be learned and applied is, sadly, doubtful, but at the very least Rwanda and France will finally be squaring off in the courts of international justice as well as the courts of public opinion.

As Montesquieu noted in his Persian Letters (No. 95), “For nature, which has established the different degrees of power and weakness among men, has also made the weak equal to the powerful through the strength of their despair.” In the coming months we will see whether the strength of Rwandan despair can hold its own against a nation that in 1994 wrought immeasurable harm to the people of Rwanda, and now must use cynical legal means to deflect justifiably critical gazes.