L’Église, la France et le génocide

Between 7 April and mid-July 1994, somewhere between 800,000 and a million people were murdered in Rwanda in about a hundred days. The overwhelming majority were Tutsi, killed because they were Tutsi; a substantial number were Hutu killed for opposing the killing or for being suspected of it.

Two facts about the country make it necessary to write this chapter rather than simply record the number.

The first is that Rwanda was one of the most Christian countries on earth. Around ninety per cent of the population was Christian, roughly two-thirds Catholic, with church attendance rates among the highest in Africa. The largest massacres took place inside churches, where people had gone because in every previous wave of violence (1959, 1963, 1973) the church had been sanctuary. And some of the clergy took part.

The second is that the state that organised the killing had been armed, trained, financed and diplomatically protected by France, whose own presidentially appointed commission of historians has now concluded (using the French state's own archives) that France bears heavy and overwhelming responsibilities.

The road to April: 1990–1994

On 1 October 1990 the Rwandan Patriotic Front (the armed movement of the exiled generation described in chapter 26) crossed from Uganda into northern Rwanda. The regime's response was immediate on two fronts: military, and rhetorical.

Militarily, France, Belgium and Zaire sent troops within days. Belgium withdrew quickly. France stayed. Opération Noroît ran from October 1990 to December 1993: French paratroopers in Kigali, French officers advising the Rwandan army's operations, French instructors (the DAMI missions) training an army that grew from roughly 5,000 men to over 30,000 in three years, French soldiers manning roadblocks and (this is documented in the parliamentary record) checking Rwandan identity cards, the cards of chapter 24.¹

The motivation was never really about Rwanda. It was the doctrine of French influence in Africa and what French officials themselves called the syndrome de Fachoda: the RPF spoke English, came from Uganda, and was therefore read in Paris as an Anglo-Saxon instrument encroaching on the French sphere.

Rhetorically, the regime and the extremist press turned the invasion into a racial emergency. In December 1990 the magazine Kangura published the "Hutu Ten Commandments", which declared any Hutu who married, employed or befriended a Tutsi a traitor and demanded that Hutu stop having mercy. From 1993 the radio station RTLM (private, popular, funded by people close to the president's circle) broadcast a stream of music, jokes and incitement, using the word inyenzi, cockroach, that had been in circulation since 1963.

Meanwhile the Arusha Accords, signed in August 1993, provided for power-sharing, a broad-based transitional government and integration of the armies. For the hard core around the president's family (the akazu), Arusha was an existential threat, and the genocide was, among other things, the answer to it.

The warnings, and what was done with them

The claim that nobody could have known is false, and has been formally found to be false by two independent inquiries.

On 11 January 1994, Major-General Roméo Dallaire, commanding the UN mission, sent a cable to UN headquarters in New York reporting information from a senior Interahamwe militia trainer: that the militia had been trained by the army, that they had registered Tutsi in Kigali for extermination, that a rate of a thousand killings in twenty minutes was claimed, and that arms caches were being distributed. Dallaire proposed to seize the weapons. He was ordered not to, and instructed to inform President Habyarimana: that is, to tell the government that its own plan had been reported.²

Belgian intelligence, human rights organisations, and an international commission of inquiry in March 1993 had all documented the massacres of Tutsi civilians that had occurred repeatedly since 1990 in Kibilira, Bugesera and elsewhere, rehearsals, in effect, that killed thousands and produced no consequences at all.

The hundred days, and the withdrawal

On 6 April 1994 the president's aircraft was shot down on approach to Kigali. Who fired remains disputed and this chronicle takes no position on it; what is not disputed is what followed within hours. Roadblocks went up, prepared lists were used, the moderate prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana was murdered, and ten Belgian peacekeepers guarding her were disarmed and killed, an act calculated to remove the strongest contingent in the UN force.

It worked. Belgium withdrew. On 21 April 1994, two weeks into a genocide that was being reported daily, the UN Security Council voted to reduce UNAMIR from about 2,500 troops to 270.

In the same period, more than a thousand Western soldiers (French, Belgian, Italian, American) arrived to evacuate foreign nationals and left. They evacuated expatriates and, in several documented cases, expatriates' pets, past Rwandan staff who were killed after they departed. At the École Technique Officielle in Kigali, Belgian peacekeepers withdrew from a school where around two thousand people had taken refuge; most were killed as soon as they left.

The United States government, meanwhile, worked to avoid the word. State Department guidance instructed spokespeople to say that "acts of genocide" may have occurred rather than that a genocide was occurring, because the Genocide Convention creates obligations. The 1998 discovery of that guidance in declassified documents is one of the more shameful items in the record of any government in the period.³

Two subsequent official inquiries (the UN's own independent inquiry led by Ingvar Carlsson (1999) and the Organisation of African Unity's panel (2000)) concluded that the genocide was preventable, that the information was available, and that the failure was one of political will.

The church

Now the question that has to be asked plainly: why did the Catholic church in Rwanda not stop this?

Because it was not outside the state. Archbishop Vincent Nsengiyumva of Kigali sat on the central committee of the ruling MRND party from 1976; the Vatican pressed him to resign the position in the mid-1980s and he remained on it until 1990. He was also personal confessor to the president's wife. The church was the country's largest institution after the state, ran most schools and many hospitals, and held very substantial property. It was an organ of the establishment, not a check on it.

Because it had built the categories. Chapters 23 and 24 traced the line: missionary ethnography made the Hamitic theory Rwandan common sense; Bishop Classe defended Tutsi chiefly rule in racial terms in the 1920s and 30s; Monsignor Perraudin explained inequality in racial terms in 1959. An institution that had spent seventy years teaching that Rwanda contained two races was not well placed, in 1994, to say that it did not.

Because its statements were equivocal when it mattered. Between 1990 and 1994 the hierarchy issued appeals for peace and calm that condemned violence in general terms while avoiding naming the ideology, the party, or the press that was organising it. There was no excommunication of the organisers, no instruction from the pulpit that participation meant damnation, no closing of the churches to the killers.

And because some of its clergy participated. This is not a matter of allegation. It is a matter of conviction:

• Father Athanase Seromba, parish priest at Nyange, ordered the bulldozing of his own church with roughly 1,500 to 2,000 people sheltering inside. He was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and sentenced on appeal in 2008 to life imprisonment. He had been living and serving as a priest in Italy under a different name.
• Sisters Gertrude Mukangango and Maria Kisito Mukabutera, of the Sovu convent, were convicted by a Belgian jury in 2001 in connection with the deaths of thousands of refugees at the convent, including the provision of petrol used to burn a building with people inside.
• Father Emmanuel Rukundo, a military chaplain, was convicted by the ICTR in 2009 of genocide, murder and other crimes.

Against that must be set the priests, nuns and lay Christians who hid people, refused to hand over lists, and were killed for it. There were many. Both facts are true, and the institution has now, belatedly, said so: the Rwandan Catholic bishops issued an apology in November 2016 for members of the church who participated, and in March 2017 Pope Francis asked forgiveness of the Rwandan president and people for the sins and failings of the church and its members. Pope John Paul II had earlier condemned the genocide while insisting that the church as such could not be held responsible for the misdeeds of its members, a distinction that many Rwandans found difficult to accept from an institution that had spent a century claiming credit for the country's moral formation.⁴

There is one community in Rwanda that stands as the counter-example, and it deserves to be named. The country's Muslim minority, perhaps one or two per cent of the population in 1994, did not take part in the killing as a community. Researchers who went looking for the pattern found the same thing everywhere: mosques did not become massacre sites the way churches did, Muslim neighbourhoods such as Nyamirambo in Kigali became known as places where Tutsi could be hidden, and imams preached against the killing while it was happening, at the moment when preaching against it carried a price. The reason the community itself gave is the point of this entire chronicle. Rwandan Muslims explicitly rejected the racial ideology that was built to separate Hutu from Tutsi: in their teaching there were no Hutu Muslims and no Tutsi Muslims, only Muslims. A community that had never accepted the Hamitic categories had nothing to activate in April 1994. Individual exceptions existed and researchers have recorded them, but they were rare, and they were condemned by the community's own leadership at the time, which is precisely what the church hierarchy did not do. The contrast was not lost on Rwandans: in the years after the genocide, conversions to Islam rose sharply, driven, converts said, by the memory of who had opened their doors.⁵

France

The French case has now been examined by France itself, which is what makes it citable rather than arguable.

In 2019 President Macron appointed a commission of historians under Vincent Duclert with unprecedented access to the presidential, diplomatic, military and intelligence archives of the Mitterrand period. Its report, delivered in March 2021, runs to around a thousand pages. Its findings:

• France bore heavy and overwhelming responsibilities in the events leading to the genocide.
• French policy was driven by a colonial reflex and by the fear of Anglophone encroachment, and it maintained unwavering support for a regime that was openly racist.
• France remained blind to the preparation of a genocide that was visible in its own diplomatic and intelligence traffic.
• The commission found no evidence that France was complicit in the sense of sharing the intent to exterminate, a conclusion that Rwandan researchers and the separately commissioned Muse report disputed as too generous, while accepting the factual record the commission established.⁶

Two specific matters remain the hardest.

Arms after the embargo. Human Rights Watch documented deliveries of weapons to the defeated Rwandan forces through Goma after the UN arms embargo of 17 May 1994, and the French parliamentary mission of 1998 examined French deliveries in the period before it. The chronology of what was delivered, by whom, and with what official knowledge is still contested in detail; that a genocidal army continued to receive weapons is not.

Bisesero. During Opération Turquoise (the French intervention authorised by the Security Council in June 1994, in the last month of the genocide), a French detachment encountered surviving Tutsi in the hills of Bisesero who told them people were being hunted and killed there. The detachment left and returned three days later. Several hundred people were killed in the interval. French courts have examined the episode for over two decades; in 2018 investigating magistrates ordered a dismissal of the case, upheld in 2020, a decision the survivors' associations continue to contest.⁷

Turquoise's larger effect is chapter 27's subject: the "safe humanitarian zone" it established in the south-west became the corridor through which the defeated government, its army and its militia moved into Zaire.

In May 2021 Macron spoke at the Gisozi memorial in Kigali. He recognised France's responsibilities, said that France had stood beside a genocidal regime, and asked for the gift of forgiveness. He did not use the word apology, and he was explicit that France had not been complicit. It was, by a considerable margin, the furthest any French president had gone.

Why nobody came

The final question is why the world did nothing, and the answer this chronicle gives is the one the whole preceding argument has been building.

It was not that intervention was impossible. Dallaire's assessment (that a properly equipped force of around 5,000 could have stopped or drastically reduced the killing in the first weeks) has been debated by military analysts, but the more basic point stands: the troops to evacuate foreigners arrived within days. The capacity existed. It was deployed, used to remove the people who mattered, and withdrawn.

Compare the treatment of the former Yugoslavia in the same years: a standing UN force of tens of thousands, NATO air power, sustained front-page coverage, and a war crimes tribunal established while the war was still running. The difference in resources allocated to European and African catastrophes in the same period is not subtle, and it does not require a conspiracy to explain. It requires only the differential valuation of human life that chapters 8 through 14 documented being manufactured, legislated, and taught.

Add the immediate context: the deaths of American soldiers in Mogadishu in October 1993 had produced a presidential directive designed to keep the United States out of exactly this kind of operation. So the second-order effect of one African intervention gone wrong was that another African country was left to be exterminated.

Chapter 26 turns to the only force that actually stopped the killing.

Footnotes

1. Assemblée nationale, Rapport d'information de la mission d'information sur les opérations militaires menées par la France, d'autres pays et l'ONU au Rwanda entre 1990 et 1994 (the Quilès report), 1998; Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), ch. 4. ↩
2. The cable of 11 January 1994, "Request for Protection for Informant," released via the National Security Archive; Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003). ↩
3. Samantha Power, "Bystanders to Genocide," The Atlantic, September 2001; the underlying documents are in the National Security Archive's Rwanda collection. ↩
4. Timothy Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), is the standard scholarly treatment; see also Carol Rittner, John K. Roth and Wendy Whitworth (eds.), Genocide in Rwanda: Complicity of the Churches? (St Paul: Paragon House, 2004). ICTR judgements: Prosecutor v. Seromba, ICTR-2001-66-A (Appeals Chamber, 12 March 2008); Prosecutor v. Rukundo, ICTR-2001-70-T (2009). ↩
5. Kristin Doughty and David Moussa Ntambara, Resistance and Protection: Muslim Community Actions During the Rwandan Genocide (Cambridge, MA: CDA Collaborative Learning Projects, 2005); Emily Wax, "Islam Attracting Many Survivors of Rwanda Genocide," The Washington Post, 23 September 2002; Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda, on the comparison with the churches. ↩
6. Commission de recherche sur les archives françaises relatives au Rwanda et au génocide des Tutsi, La France, le Rwanda et le génocide des Tutsi (1990–1994) (Paris: Armand Colin, 2021); Levy Firestone Muse LLP, A Foreseeable Genocide: The Role of the French Government in Connection with the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda (2021). ↩
7. Human Rights Watch, Rwanda/Zaire: Rearming with Impunity (May 1995); on Bisesero, the reporting of Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, Complices de l'inavouable: la France au Rwanda (Paris: Les Arènes, 2009), and the successive French judicial decisions. ↩