Why France must resist and reject Kagame’s dangerous diplomacy
By antagonizing and humiliating France, the Rwandan strongman seeks to claim the status of a nationalist and pan-Africanist standing up to a Western power. But this is absurd
In June 1994, as the Secretary General of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) I led a delegation to meet France’s then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alain Juppe. The objective of my delegation was to dissuade the French Government from launching Operation Turquoise, the peacekeeping operation that has been at the heart of the acrimonious relationship between France and the RPF regime under Paul Kagame since then. I went back unsuccessful and disappointed. The stakes were high.
Before then, RPF had dispatched its senior leaders, Gerald Gahima and Claude Dusaidi, to New York and Washington DC to dissuade the United Nations and the United States from launching any peacekeeping operations in Rwanda.
The RPF’s double-pronged strategy in France and United States was derived from two mutually re-enforcing fears and considerations. First, because RPF was inherently an organization of Tutsi exiles, it considered France a hostile nation because of its close relationship with the then Government of Rwanda under President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu. In fact, popular perception in the rank and file of the RPF was that the French, and the Belgians before them, were pro-Hutu. The twists and turns of history are such that in post-1994 Rwanda, popular opinion within the Hutu and Tutsi communities is that Americans and the British are pro-Tutsi. Second, by ordering the shooting down of the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana, Kagame simultaneously derailed the Arusha Peace Agreement and triggered the genocide and massacres of 1994 in which Tutsi and Hutu were victims. FULL STORY