France directly aided the Hutu government because they were worried about Anglophone influence in the region. Both before, during and after the genocide, France helped the perpetrators. Even their "humanitarian" efforts were largely skewed towards helping Hutus. When the French and Belgians were busy evacuating their own expatriates, they refused to help any Tutsis, even spouses. They did help evacuate Hutus.
France supplied arms to the Interahamwe for Gods sake. The people that slaughtered women and babies, who skewered heads on spikes, threw grenades into churches full of innocent people and literally gang raped women to death.
I am strongly against historical revisionism and this recent obsession with holding current generations accountable for actions that occurred hundreds of years ago, but this is not either of those things.
The genocide was unimaginably horrific and France's complicity is well documented. It also happened less than three decades ago. This has nothing to do with patriotism, and France should feel immense shame for how it acted in Rwanda.
Nobody can convince me that Ruggiu was not a secret service agent. Look what happened to him after he was a convicted war criminal. Italy set him free immediately.
But I would not only blame France alone. Most western states were complicit in these ongoing war crimes. The Kongo world wars included everybody. Ruanda controls the Kongo mines (as well as the Kongo presidency). https://www.quora.com/Are-we-heading-towards-World-War-III/a... (there somebody edited out his name btw)
overwhelming is defined as [1]:
- 2a: to cover over completely : SUBMERGE
- 2b: to overcome by superior force or numbers
- 2c: to overpower in thought or feeling
So to claim that France bears "overwhelming responsibilities" begs the question: overwhelming of what? Overwhelming the responsibilities of the people who actually committed the genocide?! And if not that, then what the heck is the word "overwhelming" doing there?
Suggesting that anyone but the people who committed the atrocities bear "overwhelming responsibility" for them is sick, infantilizing, racist and revisionist.
The people who committed those atrocities were human beings with full agency, not infants, not subhumans, and they alone bear the overwhelming responsibility for their actions.
They don't even have the tired Nazi accomplice excuse that the French ordered them to commit it, because that would be a lie.
The title of the article is bullshit. Maybe it is quoted bullshit, but it is bullshit none the less. Aljazeera's job is not to be a stenographer for liars.
I'm not sure if you intended to reply to my comment, but I can't say I disagree with that statement. I was responding to this comment by the parent poster, which surely deserves the same derision as that given to those you accuse of misapplication of blame:
> So, we speak about people who decided one day to kill their neighbours with machete. France and the French have nothing to do about it whatsoever.
You're saying using orders from leadership to commit crimes is a tired excuse. Are you therefore claiming that executors of orders bear all of the responsibility? So then, in particular, all of those in Nazi leadership that never actually fired a gun bear no responsibility?
In reality there's universal* consensus that Hitler and Goebbels et al do bear overwhelming responsibility for the atrocities of the Holocaust.
*Excluding ideologically driven contrarians/deniers
Not something I claimed.
> In reality there's universal* consensus that Hitler and Goebbels et al do bear overwhelming responsibility for the atrocities of the Holocaust.
Feel free to provide a citation.
No but it follows immediately from what you did claim (quoted in my previous reply).
>Feel free to provide a citation.
I need a citation for the fact that Hitler (and to a lesser extent Goebbels) are synonymous with the words Nazi and Holocaust? Really?
That is not what you claimed. You need a citation for the claim you made, then we can talk about you citing other claims.
I think it's really good that we finally can know what happened and why.
Seriously, what benefits would France get from a genocide? For me, this is just a move from Rwanda to find someone to blame because the country cannot admit it's sins, it is way easier that way.
Oof. Tell that to Algeria.
- Ben Kiernan, "Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur" (2007)
This is just one short pithy quote; having done archival research concentrating on this period, I can personally testify that the amount of dry, bureaucratic references to "extermination" by French colonial administrators and professionals is nauseatingly large. If the colonizers saw what they were doing as the whole-scale extermination of a people (and those murderous ideologies coincided with the actual extermination of living human beings by the thousands), you're going to have a really tough time convincing me or anyone else that what occurred was not genocidal violence.
Wow are you really that uniformed?
Algeria, Senegal and Vietnam comes instantly to my mind
It's quite concerning to see so much lack of the least basic subtelity these times... are you spending too much time on social networks ?
To quote from Linda Melvern's excellent "Intent to Deceive: Denying the Genocide of the Tutsi":
"The genocidaires continue to maintain that the mass murder of the Tutsi resulted from a 'spontaneous uprising' by an angry population. They argue there was no genocide of the Tutsi. With no planning or preparation, they argue the intent to destroy a human group was lacking, and so with no intent, the 1948 Genocide Convention does not apply. The idea of a spontaneous slaughter is not borne out by direct witnesses, by survivors or by the collective research of internationally recognized experts."
Case closed.
That's NOT the definition of Genocide.
>It's quite concerning to see so much lack of the least basic subtelity these times
Samesame, is it because it's about the "good guy" france, or are you really so arrogant about it?
1) While you may not describe any of France's horrific imperial violence against its colonies as approaching genocide, as someone who has studied France's colonial history in a professional context, I'd disagree and recommend reading up on the subject. Particularly France's colonial conquest of Algeria; apologists for France's colonial history love to overlook that 1/6 to 1/3 of the native Algerian population was wiped out in the second half of the 19th century. Beyond Algeria, it requires a powerful willed ignorance to look at France's relationship to say, Haiti, or Senegal and not see inhuman, genocidal levels of extermination taking place as a matter of course.
2) More importantly, Mitterrand had a very strong reason to favor the Hutus and sit back while they eliminated the Tutsi. As Al-Jazeera mentioned in the article:
"Mitterrand and his inner circle were also fearful of the encroachment of English-speaking influence into francophone Africa under influence from Uganda and Kagame’s RPF. The report tells of French decision-makers trapped in “post-colonial” thinking who supported the “racist, corrupt and violent” regime of Habyarimana facing a Tutsi rebellion considered as directed from English-speaking Uganda."
This has been extensively documented for some time, just not officially confirmed by the French government itself - I myself wrote the following in a presentation I gave at the University of Pennsylvania ~ 2015:
---
Il est important de souligner ici le rôle de la France et les Etats-Unis pendant ces premiers conflits entre le Front patriotique rwandais et l’armée Rwandaise, le début de la guerre civile Rwandaise.
Victor-Manuel Vallin écrit dans son article, « France as the Gendarme of Africa, 1960-2014 » que, je cite « During the Cold War, an economic rivalry had already started between France and (primarily) the United States…but this competition reached a new level in Rwanda. The Tutsi RPF guerrillas were arguably supported by Uganda and ‘perceived by French policy makers as hostile to France’ and ‘under Anglo-Saxon influence.’ »
« Uganda and Paul Kagame (leader of the RPF) had long been currying favor with the US policy-making establishment, and as such, the RPF’s incursions of the early 1990s were perceived by President Mitterand as the beginning of a regional domino effect that could eventually lead to English-speaking domination over central Africa to the detriment of France and the Francophonie. The very status of France as a power would then be at stake.»
Mitterrand's motive in covering up the Hutu extremists' role in shooting down President Habyarimana's plane, and in sitting on his hands while violence escalated, etc, is quite clear. Just because you seem to want to remember some sort of sanitized Mitterrand doesn't change what he knew and when. At the time, the anticipated benefits of France's actions vis-a-vis Rwanada would have appeared to be continued dominance and colonial influence over that sphere of Africa, resisting the encroachment of American spheres of influence. This would have been seen as of prime importance as France's relationship to the USA, especially when it comes to spheres of influence in Africa and the Middle East, was quite contentious at the time.
3) On the most irrelevant point you make: French soldiers "born in France" (I'm assuming you meant that repugnant dog whistle "français de souche" - for non-francophone readers, this term basically translates to "white French") not being able to "recognize a Hutu from a Tutsi". Well, first of all, they didn't need to be able to, as the Belgians instituted a national ethnic identity card system during their colonial administration of Rwanda and this system was kept and reinforced by the French once they took colonial control. This system was kept even after independence. I don't say this because I think individual French peacekeepers on the ground were complicit in atrocities, but to point out that the very ethnic stratification that fueled the genocide was a colonial imposition then ruthlessly utilized by Belgium and France to rule the country via divide and conquer. The "français de souche" in military intelligence knew very well how to distinguish one colonial subject from another, and also knew, in very fine detail, about the paramilitary activities that formed the run-up and mobilization for the genocide.
"Defenders" of France do France, French history and the French people a terrible disservice and injury by refusing to acknowledge the true, horrifying legacy of France's colonial empire.
Was France particulary guilty for its colonial actions? It was not worst nor better than ANY other country in ANY other times... It doesn't mean that it's good - and maybe France, as the Declaration des Droits de l'Homme country - should have held higher standards... but truth is: we were not better nor worst than anybody else.
2) Well, I'm happy that you learn geopolitic-101. That's a good beginning. And you'll see that it's "common practice". Actually, that's the basic rules of the games between nations
3) I don't say that France has to be proud because it prefered to "look elsewhere" to keep a geopolitical position. But at least, we're pleading guilty publicly. And we'll be welcoming for others countries to do the same...
France's colonial history was appalling, as were many if not all colonial histories, but the article at the heart of this thread was about France's particular postcolonial history in Rwanda, not about other colonial or postcolonial situations involving other countries. And my original response was to contradict someone trying to flatly deny any French culpability whatsoever in the atrocities committed in Rwanda in the 90s. Whatever you're trying to do here with "well sure France was a horrific colonial overlord but so were X, Y and Z" is completely beside the point.
Guilty of late intervention, maybe, but so is everyone else. But this is a strange argument, it feels like Rwanda blames France like a teenager would their parents.
I'm quite fed up with this shaming and rewriting history movement, and I really hope the French one day would stop to shame and accuse their country. I'm not against more patriotism like in the US.