RELATIONS BETWEEN France and Rwanda are expected to improve dramatically after a report for a Paris judge cleared President Paul Kagame’s allies of involvement in the incident that sparked the 1994 genocide.
Diplomatic ties between Kigali and Paris were broken off in 2006 when a French judge said Mr Kagame, a rebel leader at the time of the killings, had orchestrated the assassination of then president Juvenal Habyarimana.
The shooting down of Mr Habyarimana’s plane was one of the events that led to the slaughter of 800,000 people – the great majority of them Tutsis – over just three months.
Mr Kagame has maintained that Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed by Hutu extremists who then blamed the incident on Tutsi rebels to provide the pretext for the genocide, preparations for which were under way before the president’s death. Rwanda was incensed when, in 2006, the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière pointed the finger at the Tutsis under Mr Kagame’s command.
A team of French investigators led by two new judges re-examined a dozen eyewitness testimonies to work out where the two missiles that brought down Mr Habyarimana’s Dassault Falcon 50 were fired from.
The judges this week presented their report to Mr Kagame’s lawyers, who told journalists they had concluded that the shots could not have come from a military base occupied by Mr Kagame’s supporters. The findings did not specifically point the finger at the Hutus. “Today’s findings constitute vindication for Rwanda’s long-held position on the circumstances surrounding events of April 1994,” said Rwandan foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo.
