France accused over genocide in Rwanda

John Lichfield in Paris reports on claims French missiles helped start the carnage

THE MISSILES which killed the Rwandan president four years ago this week and led to the genocide of 1 million people came from stocks held by the French military.

This assertion by a Belgian expert on Rwanda, citing British, US and Belgian sources, has caused fury among French MPs investigating their country's role in the Rwandan disaster. The claim has been made before, but never with such authority and never in direct, public testimony to the French parliament. Evidence pointing in the same direction was also published recently by Le Figaro, a pillar of the French establishment.

The shooting down of the aircraft carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana on 6 April 1994 fired the starting-gun for an apparently planned massacre of Rwanda's minority Tutsi population.

In another development throwing new shadows on France's role, the then development minister, Bernard Debre, admitted this week that Paris supplied arms to the Hutu regime in Kigali several weeks after the massacres began.

Filip Reyntjens, of Antwerp University, says the missiles which destroyed Habyarimana's aircraft came from a batch of Sam-16 "Gimlet" weapons seized from the Iraqis by French troops during the Gulf war in February 1991.

Prof Reyntjens first made the assertion, tentatively, quoting British intelligence sources, in a book two years ago. He told the French parliamentary "study group" on Rwanda this week that he had confirmed the story, and checked the numbers of the missiles with US and Belgian intelligence sources.

That Soviet-made missiles had once been in French hands did not necessarily suggest France was behind the assassination, he said. (The aircraft and crew were French; the President of Rwanda a French ally). But it did mean the French authorities could help investigators trace what happened to the missiles and who owned them - legally or illegally - in April 1994. Inquiries in Paris in this direction were met with a "concrete wall", he said.

Le Figaro, without offering convincing proof, has gone further than Prof Reyntjens. It suggested the then president, Francois Mitterrand, operated a clandestine Rwandan policy from the Elysee Palace.

Although France was committed to peace talks between the two Rwandan ethnic, or social, groups - majority Hutus and minority Tutsis - Mitterrand was suspicious of the Tutsi rebel leaders, based in Uganda. Since they had lived mostly in exile, speaking English, under Ugandan and US influence, he believed they posed a threat to French influence and the French language in central Africa. Le Figaro quoted a former French officer as saying the character in charge of dirty tricks at the Elysee under Mitterrand - Captain Paul Barril - had been searching for ground-to-air missiles to send to Rwanda in late 1993 and early 1994. He has denied it.

It is clear from other evidence in the investigations by Le Figaro and the parliamentary committee that France maintained contacts with extremist elements in the Hutu military and government in the years before the genocide. These elements are presumed to have been responsible for the attack on Habyarimana, who was pursuing a policy of national reconciliation (with French blessing). There has been a crisis of conscience in Franceabout its role before and during the massacres. Le Figaro, not normally an investigative newspaper, has led the charge.

The publication of a Belgian parliamentary report criticising the role of the French and Belgian governments also increased pressure in Paris for an official inquiry. Instead, Lionel Jospin's Socialist-led government opted for a low-level, and powerless, "study group" of the defence committee of the National Assembly.

The campaign by the right-of-centre Le Figaro has been seen by some as an attempt to tarnish the legacy of the Socialist Mitterrand era. But it was right-wing, mostly Gaullist deputies who this week scorned Prof Reyntjens's evidence. The Belgian reminded them they were supposed to be investigating the truth, not blindly defending their country.