Enlarge imageBy Arthur Asiimwe
KIGALI (Reuters) - A Rwandan government-appointed commission launched a probe on Tuesday into allegations French troops supported soldiers behind Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and helped facilitate mass murder.
Rwanda’s Tutsi President Paul Kagame, whose government came to power after the genocide, has accused France of training and arming Hutu militias who were the main force behind a 100-day slaughter that killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
France had replaced ex-colonial power Belgium as Rwanda’s main Western backer. When Kagame’s Tutsi-dominated rebel army launched its war against the Hutu authorities in the early 1990s, France sent soldiers to Kigali.
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France helped stop the advance of Kagame’s forces and then stayed on, as military advisers, up to the start of the genocide.
Kigali says France backed the government of Rwanda’s former President Juvenal Habyarimana, providing military training for government forces, despite knowing that some within the leadership were planning to use the troops to commit genocide.
France, which sent in soldiers under a U.N.-authorised operation, has always denied any involvement in the killings.
Officials said a seven-man commission, appointed by the government in April, will hear testimony from 20 witnesses over the next week. The testimony could be used as evidence in any legal action taken by Kigali against France.
"We will summon people like former militiamen who were trained and commanded by the French to kill as well as female survivors who accuse some French soldiers of rape," Jean Paul Kimonyo a member of the commission told Reuters.
"We are also going to invite foreign witnesses including French nationals to testify before the commission."
A French parliamentary commission in 1998 cleared France of responsibility for the genocide but said "strategic errors" had been made.
"The French sent troops, weapons, trained killers and manned roadblocks to facilitate murderers in achieving their mission of exterminating Tutsis," Jacques Bihozagara, a former Rwandan ambassador to France, told the commission.
Bihozagara, who was part of the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front, which launched its war against the Hutu authorities in the early 1990s, said French officials had warned the group to stop its fight.
"You will reach Kigali to only find all your relatives perished," Bihozagara quoted them as saying.
"I wonder whether these French officials were prophets or indeed were part of the planning process," he added.
Chaired by Rwanda’s former justice minister, Jean de Dieu Mucyo, the panel is made up of legal experts, historians and a former army commander.
In one case, French soldiers have been accused of facilitating the murder of up 50,000 Tutsis in Bisesero, a hilltop village in western Rwanda, by luring them out of hideouts.
Survivors say the Tutsis were abandoned and left vulnerable to militia attacks.
Six genocide survivors filed a complaint in a Paris court last year accusing French soldiers of complicity in crimes against humanity.
Justice for many perpetrators in the genocide is still being meted out through the U.N.’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Tanzania and village courts known as gacaca.
The ICTR has indicted more than 80 people for genocide-related crimes since its establishment in 1994.
