Rwanda accuses France of complicity in 1994 genocide

Rwanda has accused the late President François Mitterrand and three former French prime ministers of being complicit in the genocide which killed 800,000 people in the central African country in 1994.

The accusation, in the report of a commission of inquiry set up by the government in Kigali, is the latest in a series of accusations between France and Rwanda in the past two years. The report accused M. Mitterrand, the then French Prime Minister, Edouard Balladur, and two later prime ministers – Alain Juppé and Dominique de Villepin – of "political, military, diplomatic and logistic" support for the Hutu regime which carried out the systematic slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis.

"Considering the gravity of the alleged facts, the Rwandan government asks authorities to undertake all necessary actions to bring the accused French political and military leaders to answer for their acts before justice," the report said.

The French government gave military and political support to the Hutu-dominated regime in Kigali before the slaughter in 1994. It also launched a UN-approved, military-humanitarian operation, whose main achievement was to protect many Hutu leaders from the Tutsi-led rebel army.

Successive governments in Paris have denied any complicity in the genocide. The French Foreign Ministry declined to comment.