After recognizing in 2021 the “responsibilities” of France in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Emmanuel Macron takes a further step on the occasion of the 30th anniversary, estimating that Paris “could have stopped” the massacres but “did not didn’t have the will.”
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The French president, invited by his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame to Sunday’s commemorations, will not go there and will be represented by his Minister of Foreign Affairs Stéphane Séjourné and the Secretary of State for the Sea Hervé Berville, born in Rwanda.
But the Elysée announced on Thursday that he will speak on Sunday “via a video which will be published on his social networks”, the content of which has been partly revealed.
“The Head of State will recall in particular that, when the phase of total extermination against the Tutsi began, the international community had the means to know and act, through its knowledge of the genocides revealed to us by the survivors of the Armenians. and the Shoah, and that France, which could have stopped the genocide with its Western and African allies, did not have the will,” the presidency reported to AFP.
In May 2021, the French president’s trip to Kigali, and his words there, sealed a rapprochement with Paul Kagame, who had never stopped questioning France. This question of the French role before, during, and after the genocide has been a hot topic for years, even leading to a breakdown in diplomatic relations between Paris and Kigali between 2006 and 2009.
At the memorial in the Rwandan capital, Emmanuel Macron said he had come to “recognize” France’s “responsibilities” in the genocide, which left at least 800,000 dead, mainly members of the Tutsi minority, between April and July 1994.
“While French officials had the lucidity and courage to describe it as genocide, France did not know how to draw the appropriate consequences,” he said. “We have all abandoned hundreds of thousands of victims to this infernal closed door,” he added.
“Country that recognizes its wrongs”
He clarified that Paris had “not been complicit” with the Hutu genocidaires, and had not apologized, while saying he hoped for forgiveness from the survivors.
A report by historians published shortly before under the direction of Vincent Duclert had concluded that France had “heavy and overwhelming responsibilities” and that the socialist president of the time, François Mitterrand, and his entourage were “blind” in the face of to the racist and genocidal drift of the Hutu government that Paris then supported.
The 2021 presidential speech was praised by Paul Kagame, who spoke of the “immense courage” of his “friend” Emmanuel Macron.
The message reported Thursday “goes even further than the Duclert report and the declaration he made in Kigali,” rejoiced Marcel Kabanda, president of Ibuka France, the main organization of memory, justice and support for genocide survivors. Tutsi. “I am pleased that he gives France this positive image of a country which recognizes its wrongs and which grows by recognizing its history,” he told AFP.
“It’s a step forward, undoubtedly,” also reacted Vincent Duclert, who sees in it “an extremely strong recognition” of “all the mistakes” that “France has committed from the beginning of the 90s in Rwanda.”
“We felt that France was perhaps a little behind on this 30th commemoration, and there the president, France is really coming back to the forefront,” he added on France inter.
Very involved in this issue, the Survie association, for its part, asked that France go even further by “officially recognizing” “complicity in genocide”.
According to the Elysée, on Sunday, the Head of State will also reaffirm “that France stands alongside Rwanda, the Rwandan people, in memory of a million children, women and men martyred because they were born Tutsi . He will reiterate the importance of the duty of memory but also of the development of reference knowledge and its dissemination, in particular through the education of younger generations in France.
In 2010, Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France, had already recognized in Kigali “serious errors” and “a form of blindness” on the part of the French authorities which had “absolutely dramatic” consequences.
