by Philip Short
Mitterrand’s speech introduced a new element into the equation. Urging African leaders to adopt a multi-party system, which meant creating a space for their political opponents, risked reigniting dormant regional and ethnic tensions. That had been one of the reasons why, at La Baule, he had addressed the issue so gingerly. But it was a risk that was inherent in any democratic transition. Exactly the same situation had arisen in former Yugoslavia. Once the dead hand of Tito’s dictatorship was lifted, ethnic nationalism exploded.
In October 1990, three months after Habyarimana announced the legalisation of opposition parties, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi exile organisation based in Uganda, sent a small guerrilla force, numbering about a hundred men, into northern Rwanda, hoping to take the government by surprise and trigger an uprising. Two weeks later, France and Belgium sent 800 soldiers, ostensibly to protect their citizens in Rwanda. The rebel incursion was halted about 60 miles north of the capital and the guerrillas scattered into the mountains. There is no evidence that French troops took part directly. But the message that their presence conveyed was that France had decided to back Habyarimana’s regime.
Over the next three years, it became clear that the Rwandan dictator had no intention of paying more than lip-service to democracy. In such circumstances, Mitterrand had warned at La Baule, France would reduce its aid. Instead French military and economic assistance not only continued but increased. Habyarimana, an American diplomat commented, concluded that ‘he could do anything he liked, militarily and politically . . . France would stick behind him no matter what.’
Mitterrand never explained why he adopted this attitude. But, apart from his reluctance, shared by the rest of the French political establishment, to be seen as a neo-colonialist, telling his African partners what to do, there were a number of factors specific to Rwanda.
The country was a useful listening post to observe neighbouring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), which, because of its wealth of natural resources, was of enormous interest to all the Western powers. Mitterrand did not want to lose that. Moreover he had promised the African leaders at La Baule: ‘Each time an external threat arises . . . France will be there beside you.’ The RPF incursion could be said to fit the definition of an external threat because it had been launched from Uganda. Finally, there was what the French call ‘the Fashoda syndrome’, named after a village in what is now South Sudan where French and British troops faced off in 1898 in a struggle for control of the Nile Valley. The British had won. To men of de Gaulle’s and Mitterrand’s generations, that defeat was a symbol of the need to resist British encroachments in the continent wherever they might occur. Rwanda lay on the divide between anglophone and francophone Africa. The RPF leader, Paul Kagame, had lived in Uganda, a former British protectorate, since the age of four. He had been trained as a soldier in the United States and had served in the Ugandan army as Chief of Military Intelligence. Habyarimana was a francophone with close ties to Paris. To Mitterrand that alone was enough to justify his support.
At the outset no one could have foreseen the repercussions of that decision. Neither Mitterrand nor anyone else imagined that by supporting Habyarimana’s regime he was putting his hand into an infernal mechanism which would lead, four years later, to his being accused of complicity in the Rwandan genocide.
But as the months passed there were warning signs that should have alerted him. In February 1993, the DGSE reported that ‘veritable ethnic massacres’ were being carried out by militias associated with the President’s party against ‘Tutsis, people married to Tutsis and [moderate] Hutus from the South’. Other foreign observers filed similar reports. The picture which emerged was of Habyarimana’s entourage, known as the Akazu or ‘private council’, led by his wife, Agathe, fomenting racial hatred to solidify support behind the ruling group. Hutu villagers were encouraged to kill their Tutsi neighbours, whom the authorities accused of colluding with the inyenzi, the ‘cockroaches’, as the RPF were called. Thousands died in small-scale pogroms orchestrated by local officials. A refugee would later tell a French parliamentary commission, ‘It was less risky to kill a Tutsi than it would have been to steal a chicken.’
While a peace accord, providing for a transitional government of Hutus and Tutsis, was signed in Arusha in August 1993, grenades, assault rifles and machetes were already being distributed to Hutu militiamen for use against ‘the enemy within’: Tutsis and Hutu moderates. Scattered across the green mountains of some of the most exquisite countryside in Africa, where the long-horned cattle of the Tutsi herders grazed on the mountainsides as though stuck on with drawing pins, the towns and villages were tinder-dry, waiting to catch fire.
The spark was provided on April 6 1994. Habyarimana’s plane was hit by a missile as it came in to land at the capital, Kigali. The Rwandan leader; the President of Burundi, who was travelling with him; several government ministers and the French crew were all killed. For years afterwards, there would be argument about who had been responsible. Kagame’s RPF, dissatisfied with the peace terms? Or, more plausibly, the Hutu extremists of the Akazu who feared that under the arrangements agreed at Arusha they would lose their power? In the end it hardly mattered. Habyarimana’s assassination, regardless of who was behind it, was the trigger for the worst genocide of the late twentieth century. In the next 100 days an estimated 800,000 people, almost all of them Tutsis, were slaughtered.
Whether it would have made a difference if Mitterrand had withdrawn the French military in 1991 or 1992, when it became clear that the conflict was not a foreign invasion but the beginning of a civil war, is unclear. Pierre Joxe had urged him to do so. His military adviser, General Christian Quesnot, acknowledged that the RPF would have taken power sooner had there been no French military presence. In that case the genocide might have been forestalled. But it is also possible that the prospect of the RPF’s victory would have made the Akazu unleash the killings earlier. There is no way of telling.
That France continued to support the Hutu government for more than a year after the President had been briefed about massacres by Hutu extremists is harder to explain. But until the spring of 1994 no one in Paris recognised the nature of the evil that was at work in Rwanda. It may be argued that they should have done so: the massacres in neighbouring Burundi in 1972 and again, just six months earlier, after the assassination by a Tutsi of Burundi’s Hutu President, where each time more than 100,000 people had died, were proof enough of the ethnic hatreds smouldering beneath the surface. But it is easy to be wise after the event. If the RPF had agreed to take part in a transitional government under Habyarimana, despite the continuing murders of Tutsis in the countryside, why should France place the bar higher? Non-interference in internal affairs was the cornerstone of policy towards its former African colonies.
Where Mitterrand’s attitude became problematic was over what happened after Habyarimana’s assassination. A new government was formed by Hutu extremists from the Akazu. Within a week the French Air Force evacuated most of Rwanda’s European residents. But for the next two months, while more than half a million Africans were being killed, France did nothing. Nor did anyone else. The bulk of the 2,500-man UN force which had been stationed in Rwanda to monitor the Arusha accords was withdrawn. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council – Britain and the United States as well as France, Russia and China – refused to classify the massacres as genocide because that would have required them to intervene. America had just been forced into a humiliating withdrawal from Somalia after the ‘Black Hawk down’ incident in Mogadishu. Britain thought the quickest way to end the killing would be for the RPF to take power. China and Russia had no interest in the area. The UN Secretariat, under Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had its hands full with the conflict in former Yugoslavia.
In Paris, where Mitterrand’s adviser, Bruno Delaye, noted that ‘the French silence is deafening’, Balladur opposed any intervention, even humanitarian. Mitterrand’s speech at Cancun, thirteen yea
rs earlier, in which he had denounced ‘non-assistance to a people in danger’ as too serious ‘a moral and political fault for us to continue to commit’, seemed to be from another age. The French military, which had trained the Hutu army, remained locked into a mindset which – a full eight months after the Arusha accords – held the RPF to be rebels, based abroad, and the Hutu government the legitimate power. Three weeks after the genocide had begun, at a time when there were already 200,000 Tutsi dead, Quesnot compared the RPF to the Cambodian Khmer Rouges – the ‘Black Khmers’, he called them – and insisted that they were ‘the most fascist party [he had] ever encountered in Africa’. It was an extraordinary inversion of reality. If anyone in Rwanda bore comparison with the Khmer Rouges it was the Hutu extremists of Habyarimana’s inner circle, the very people whom France was supporting.1
Mitterrand was little better. Over breakfast with Kohl, at the end of May, he dismissed as ‘one-sided’ the idea that only Tutsis were being killed.2 If it was an attempt to distance himself from a murderous regime, it was singularly unconvincing. Did he really not understand what was happening in Rwanda? Or was it realpolitik at its worst, an attempt to salvage something, regardless of the human cost, from a mistaken commitment to a Hutu leadership which had turned out to be genocidal – a commitment that had irreversibly antagonised its victorious rivals, the RPF and its leader, Paul Kagame?
Two weeks later the French President abruptly changed his position. On June 15, he called for the establishment of safe areas outside Kigali and other towns where those fleeing the massacres would find protection. Balladur was reluctant, but Mitterrand insisted and a week later, with UN backing, Operation Turquoise, as it was called, got under way. From a base at Goma, just across the Zairean border, 2,550 French soldiers, backed by a token African force, were deployed to northern and south-western Rwanda. Some of the Tutsi refugees who had escaped the massacres were saved. But the vast majority of those the French protected were Hutus, among them many of the Hutu militiamen who had been carrying out the killings and who fled to the French-held areas after Kagame’s troops occupied the capital. Shortly afterwards, Mitterrand told his colleagues at the G7 summit in Naples that if the French contingent left without UN peacekeepers being sent to take their place, ‘there will be a second genocide, this time the other way round’. He offered no evidence to back up that assertion, nor did any mass killings of Hutus occur.
The timing of Operation Turquoise, just as the RPF was about to take power, has given rise to persistent suspicions in France that it was a political, rather than a humanitarian operation, a rearguard action to save the Hutu regime which France had been supporting. Pierre Favier and Michel Martin-Roland, who chronicled Mitterrand’s presidency, were given access to some, though perhaps not all, of the confidential records of meetings of Cabinet committees and communications from the General Staff, and wrote that they could find no trace in the archives of any political motive behind ‘Turquoise’ other than a belated attempt to redeem ‘French honour’, as Mitterrand put it, by preventing further slaughter in Rwanda. However, a map attached to a note from Quesnot, dated May 6 1994, showed Rwanda divided into ‘Hutuland’ and ‘Tutsiland’, the former corresponding to what would become the French safe areas. If, six weeks before ‘Turquoise’ began, there was already talk at the Elysée of creating a rump Hutu state, it lent credence to the view that the operation had an ulterior motive.3 Other elements supported that thesis. Senior French generals continued to maintain, as late as the end of June, that it was impossible to determine who was massacring whom. French soldiers participating in ‘Turquoise’ were told that, while France had to remain neutral, the main threat to the population came from the RPF. Only after their deployment did they discover, amid the stench of charnel houses and the excavation of mass graves, that the murderers were all Hutus, acting with the encouragement or on the orders of the local administration, while almost all the victims were Tutsis.
Mitterrand’s supporters have argued that the situation at the time was much less clear than hindsight made it appear and that all leaders sometimes make bad decisions in good faith. Nonetheless, the succession of coincidences is troubling. Why did France change policy not in April or May, when the massacre of the Tutsis was in full spate, but – without explanation – in mid-June, when the Hutus were at risk? Why did French troops make no effort to arrest senior Hutu officials linked to the genocide? Why did Mitterrand not realise that by allowing the Hutu extremists to escape into Zaire, he was enabling the creation of rebel bastions which would destabilise the entire region for decades to come? Why afterwards did successive French governments drag their feet over putting on trial those implicated in the genocide who had sought asylum on French soil?4 Why, finally, did both Mitterrand and his successors systematically ostracise Kagame’s government? None of that is evidence that France was ‘responsible’ for the slaughter. The cause of the genocide was endemic to Rwanda. To each of those questions, taken individually, answers can be attempted. But, taken together, they form an indictment. Not only was Mitterrand perceived as having connived with a genocidal regime for political ends but even on the most cynical interpretation his policy was a failure. When the Hutu regime fell, France lost all influence in Rwanda, which quickly became part of the anglophone camp.
There was a disturbing parallel between Mitterrand’s response to events in Rwanda and to the developing war in Bosnia. In the one, he was confronting genocide, in the other, ethnic cleansing, a distinction which is largely semantic.
In both cases he refused to intervene: in Rwanda because, ‘How do you tell the difference between Hutus and Tutsis? . . . Everyone is killing everyone else’; in Bosnia because, ‘Where would you intervene anyway? Down there, they are fighting everywhere, in each village.’ In both cases he declined to identify the aggressor. In Rwanda, it had been the Hutu government; in Bosnia it was the Serbs and, by extension, Milošević’s regime in Belgrade. In both cases, between the lines, there was an unstated disdain for the underdog. Serbia was a ‘real’ country, an ancient nation with its own history, he kept saying; Bosnia was ‘a fiction’. The Hutus were the main force in Rwanda; the Tutsis a minority most of whose leaders were in exile. In both cases, he expected the end result to be partition: in former Yugoslavia, a cluster of small Balkan republics; in Rwanda, ‘Hutuland’ in the west, adjoining francophone Zaire, and ‘Tutsiland’ in the east, adjoining anglophone Uganda and Tanzania. In both cases, Mitterrand, like other Western leaders, was reduced to standing by helplessly as the slaughter raged. Only at the margins, through Operation Turquoise in Rwanda and participation in the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia, was France able to make its influence felt.
The difference was that in the Balkans Mitterrand’s possibilities – not to speak of responsibility – were much more limited than in the Rwandan tragedy.
Aside from his surprise visit to Sarajevo in 1992, the goal of which, he insisted, was ‘humanitarian . . . without any ulterior political motive’, the French President’s main concern had been all along to avoid getting sucked into the Balkan morass. His underlying analysis remained unchanged. The Serbs and the Croats had won and the Bosnians would have to accept it. The use of ground troops, other than UN peacekeepers, was ruled out. Airstrikes would have limited effect. Lifting the arms embargo – which would allow the Bosnians to acquire heavy weaponry – would internationalise the conflict, with the risk that the whole region might go up in flames: Serbia and its ally, Russia, would throw their weight behind the Bosnian Serbs; the Islamic world would support the Bosnian Muslims. Although he did not put it so bluntly, he was convinced that the West could do nothing and would just have to stand by and watch. In January 1993, he told George Bush:
I do not believe in a military solution. The Serbs and the Croats occupy three fifths of the territory [of Bosnia-Herzegovina] and they will not leave. It may last a long time and the [television] images will create a political situation which is hard to stomach. I am as outraged as anyone els
e, but if I send 10,000 men, I can have a thousand of them killed in the passes through the mountains before they even reach their objective. In democracies, such losses turn public opinion. So I certainly won’t do it. We can only envisage selective, limited actions like liberating the camps under the UN mandate, the neutralisation of Sarajevo and [enforcing the no fly zone].5
Bill Clinton, who was sworn in later that month, wanted to succeed where his predecessor had failed. In Geneva, where a new round of peace talks had begun, Cyrus Vance and his British counterpart David Owen had unveiled a proposal to divide Bosnia into ten provinces based on the ethnicity of the majority of their inhabitants. Over the next four months, while the murderous charade of ‘ethnic cleansing’ continued – 50,000 Bosnian women had been raped ‘on the orders of the Serb hierarchy’, a French diplomat reported – one side after the other accepted and then rejected the plan in a minuet of constantly changing intentions. Clinton threatened airstrikes if the Serbs blocked a settlement. In May, Mitterrand asked the US Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, whether the new President had thought through what that would involve:
France has been on the ground since the first day [and] now has nearly 5,000 men under the UN Command . . . The Serbs are not easily intimidated. I approve your approach of threats and dissuasion. But . . . we need to look coldly at what will follow . . . Bombing without ground support won’t solve the problem . . . Bosnia is not Iraq. No matter what the original intention, you will inevitably be sucked into a spiral of violence. Not to mention the problem of the soldiers who are now present there and who do not have the means to wage war against the Serbs whose attitude will change once they are attacked.6