A ruling from France ‘s highest administrative court might shed light on how events surrounding the Tutsis genocide in Rwanda in the 1990’s may have been affected by French government actions.
The African nation’s former leader, Juvenal Habyarimana, died in 1994 when the plane carrying him was shot down unleashing a wave of ethnic terror.
The French Council of State’s public rapporteur has now ruled in favor of the NGO Survie (Survival) researcher François Graner, calling for the opening of the archives of former French President François Mitterand.
“What we want is to understand what the political decision-makers of the time knew, François Mitterand and his advisors, what information they had when they made the decisions that have since been criticized, and that involve France during, before and after the genocide of the Tutsis in 1994,” explained Graner.
Within hours of the death of Rwanda’s former dictator in 1994, mass killing began.
In attacks ordered by the interim government between half a million and a million Tutsis and politically moderate Hutu were killed in the next hundred days or so.
Many had been hacked to death, and often the killers were police, soldiers, and militia.
The nation stunned by the scale and violence of the killings.
“What we have been able to establish from the documents we have is the complicity of the French government,” claimed Graner. “That is to say, knowledge of the cause, knowledge of what happened, active support, which had an effect on the crime. It doesn’t mean genocidal intent. Simply, we saw an intention to keep Rwanda under French influence at all costs, and at all costs, that meant by supporting those carrying out the genocide”
For the last five years Francois Graner has been calling for the Mitterrand archives to be opened. The public rapporteur ‘s opinions are generally followed by the administrative tribunal.
A decision is expected in the space of three weeks.
