This month marks the 14th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, which is commonly considered to have begun on April 6, 1994. One aspect of the genocide that has received little attention in English-language media is the close relations that existed between the French military and the armed forces of the "Hutu Power" Rwandan government. In collaboration with the pro-government Interahamwe militias, Rwandan army officials are held to have been largely responsible for organizing the massacres perpetrated against the Tutsi civilian population and moderate Hutu from April to July 1994. The massacres are estimated to have claimed some 800,000 lives. They took place against the background of a civil war between Rwandan government forces and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF): a rebel force led by Paul Kagame, the current Rwandan president. In light of France's support for the Rwandan government of the time and the ambiguities of the allegedly "humanitarian" mission -- dubbed "Operation Turquoise" -- dispatched by France to Rwanda in June 1994, victims groups and critics of French African policy have long accused the French government of complicity in the genocide. Their efforts led to the formation in 2004 of a "Citizens' Commission of Inquiry" on the French role in the Rwandan genocide.
One such critic was the late Jean-Paul Gouteux. In August 2005, he spoke with the alternative Canadian publication, The Dominion, about the origins of the Rwandan genocide, the French role in the Rwandan crisis, and what he describes as the "collusion" of the leading French media of the time in covering up the true nature and extent of the violence. World Politics Review here presents Vivien Jaboeuf's interview with Jean-Paul Gouteux for the first time in English.
John Rosenthal
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Initially, most of the French media described the Rwandan conflict of 1994 as the product of an age-old cultural antagonism between Hutu and Tutsi. From a religious or social or linguistic or historical point of view, can one say that Hutu and Tutsi are two distinct ethnic groups?
Hutu and Tutsi are social categories, which in the past were determined by their respective sorts of work activity: cattle raising in the case of the Tutsi and farming in that of the Hutu. They speak the same language and they have the same culture. Nowadays, this distinction between farmers and cattle breeders no longer makes any sense. But little by the little the "racializing" vision of the German and then Belgian colonial administrators -- and, above all, of the Catholic Church -- took hold. The categories were adopted and given a racial interpretation by the Belgian colonialists, who had them included on Rwandan identity cards. Mgr. Perraudin, the representative of the Vatican in Rwanda, spoke of Hutu and Tutsi "races." He was one of the initiators of the ethnically-based "revolution" that would lead to the first massacres of Tutsi civilians in the early 1960s.
Historically, over the course of centuries, the wars that permitted the Kingdom of Rwanda to expand pitted the Rwandan army -- including Tutsi, Hutu and Twa -- against other armies from the different kingdoms in the region. The tradition of conflicts between Hutu and Tutsi, which has been frivolously presented as the explanation for the genocide, simply does not exist. It is part of the propaganda that has been used to foment such conflicts.
The supposed ethnic conflict was an ideological construct, then, which served the political purposes of the government of the time and extremist groups?
The act of designating a scapegoat -- in this case, the Tutsi civilian population -- is eminently political. It is an old recipe, which has been constantly used, to the point of being worn out, by European populist and fascist movements. The two successive Hutu republics -- the first dominated by the Hutu of the center of the country and the second by the Hutu from the North -- made ample use of this "weapon of mass manipulation." With the advent of Hutu Power, a racist movement that transcended the political parties, this dangerous development took the form of a sort of "tropical Nazism" that led to the genocide of the Tutsi population in 1994.
The racializing vision of the colonizers ended up being adopted in its entirety by Rwandan intellectuals -- though certainly much less so by ordinary people. If the political leadership was able periodically to organize anti-Tutsi pogroms by exacerbating ethnic hatreds, it is because numerous Hutu intellectuals accepted this and found in it a means of upholding their own convictions in all good conscience. In effect, it was these intellectuals that benefited from the exclusion of Tutsi from the competition for administrative posts. There is thus a complicated interplay between, on the one hand, the manipulation of racist sentiment by those in power -- which allows social problems to be obscured through the designation of a scapegoat -- and, on the other, the interests of those who derive small privileges from this process and thus accept it and or even push it still further.
Rwandan victims of the genocide have even filed a criminal complaint "against x" [i.e. against persons unnamed] in the French courts. Do you really think that French political or military leaders could some day face trial and that France could some day make a public apology to the victims of the genocide?
It is my profound conviction that the truth about a genocide cannot be entirely hidden. The phenomenon of genocide is too grave a matter and it appeals to the conscience of humanity as a whole. There are those who think that the consequences of their political turpitude will never be known, because they played themselves out in the "black hole" that is Africa: the "heart of darkness," as Joseph Conrad put it. But they are mistaken.
The complaint filed by the Rwandan victims is thus of fundamental importance. From how it is handled, we will see the state of the information available in France and also the state of people's consciences: both of the judges and of the broader public. But there will be other suits filed, as there will be other revelations: still more embarrassing ones for the French state.
Next Page: The role of the French media . . .
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