News – Rwanda accuses French

ET staff writer
ET staff writer
01 September, 2008 1 min read

Rwanda accuses French

An independent commission in Rwanda has accused France of being aware of preparations for the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and helping train the ethnic Hutu militia. Officials in the country have expressed hope that French officials named would be indicted for war crimes.

Among those named in the report are the late president Francois Mitterrand, the then prime minister Edouard Balladur and two men who went on to become prime minister, Alain Juppe, the foreign minister at the time, and his then chief aide, Dominique de Villepin.

The report also accuses French troops of direct involvement in the killings although Paris has consistently denied any responsibility for the genocide, in which about 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by Hutu militias in just 100 days.

France has rejected the Rwandan claims as ‘unacceptable’, but earlier this year Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner acknowledged that political errors had been made.

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