Chapter 2
The invasion, when it came, was hardly a surprise. Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) troops moved over the Ugandan border into northern Rwanda in their trademark Wellington boots catching President Habyarimana’s ill-prepared government off guard. It was October 1990 and to outside eyes it seemed the start of just another low-level African civil war, blamed conveniently on ‘intertribal’ tensions and political deadlock between the two sides. But, as the exiled RPF leaders led their well-armed and trained recruits back into their homeland for the first time in many years, few could have envisaged that the end result of this war would be genocide, with Habyarimana’s Rwandan government planning the most desperate of all measures to hold onto power – the complete annihilation of its Tutsi opponents – or indeed that the French government would send in troops and munitions to keep the killers in power.
The mists that blanketed Rwanda’s valleys, rivers and hillsides in the years before the 1990 invasion were indicative of a political system hidden from all but those closest to Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana. He had built his dictatorship into a fearsome, all-controlling dominance. Only his most trusted henchmen were allowed to dip their fattened fingers into the spoils of state wealth and prestige. His 17 years in power had consolidated a stranglehold on every area of Rwandan life – political, military and economic.
Born on 8 March 1937 at Gasiza in the commune of Giciye in north Rwanda, Habyarimana was, like many African dictators, a product of the army rather than of a distinguished family. As a student he studied in neighbouring Zaire, first reading humanities and mathematics at St Paul’s College, then medicine at Lovanium University, also in Mobutu’s poverty-wracked country. A Congolese revolt against foreign students in 1960 forced the ambitious Juvénal to return home to Rwanda where a change of career beckoned. He joined the officers’ school in Kigali in 1960 and, within a year of Rwandan independence in 1962, was appointed army chief of staff. His first military action followed soon after – the savage repression of a Tutsi uprising. In the same year he married Agathe Kanziga, from the same Bushiru region and of a respected ancient Hutu lineage. By 1965 he was minister of defence and chief of police in President Kayibanda’s government. He built his power base among officers in the northern Gisenyi region, a traditionally strong Hutu area given to extremist elements. On 5 July 1973, two years after Idi Amin had seized power in neighbouring Uganda and two months after Kayibanda had promoted him to major general, Habyarimana took control of Rwanda after launching what he later claimed to be a ‘popular’ coup. Kayibanda was placed under house arrest in Kivumu, Gitarama, where he was starved to death – the new president was superstitious and afraid of ‘spilling the blood’ of his predecessor in case it came back to haunt him.1
Like his wife Agathe, Habyarimana was an impressive disciple of the Roman Catholic Church, which represented the majority of Christian believers in Rwanda, and liked to give the impression of being close to God. The pulpit was still a vital tool to any government in radiating friendly propaganda in a country where literacy levels were low and the church was still a trusted and vital part of society. The gospel of the White Fathers – a Catholic missionary society founded in 1868 – was of obedience to authority. This religious foundation, more than any other, threw its weight behind ethnic division and authoritarian rule. By the 1960s the church and state had bonded into one entity, preaching the same gospel of Hutu supremacy and total loyalty to the leadership in the capital Kigali.
Habyarimana spent much of his time in his Kanombe residence in Kigali located near the city airport. Guests would be left in no doubt that this dictator was a spiritual man of refinement, learning and intellect. A tour would include the glitteringly decorated chapel and a study stuffed full of hunting trophies, with antlers lining the walls like those of a Habsburg’s palace and portraits of the brave dictator standing beside his bloodied kills. Bookshelves crammed with literary volumes assured guests of the African leader’s learning and intellect. The weightiest tome, an embossed two-volume Dictionnaire de Littérature de Langue Française, was a gift from President Mitterrand, given in 1986 to symbolize the close ties between the two French speakers.2 Like his predecessor Kayibanda, Habyarimana was obsessed with Hitler and the Third Reich. Some of his most prized possessions included Super-8 films, books and cassettes about the German dictator, including a copy of Mein Kampf.
The French ambassador Georges Martres was one of Habyarimana’s biggest fans, telling one interviewer:
I knew President Habyarimana personally. He was a man who expressed himself very well in French, who had an interesting political vision, who gave the impression of a great morality. President Habyarimana prayed regularly, assisted regularly at mass. I’m not saying these were the elements that brought about the support of President Mitterrand but I believe that in general the face that President Habyarimana and his family presented to President Mitterrand was received in a favourable manner. I do not think I am mistaken in arriving at this judgement.3
Habyarimana’s regime reinforced ethnic stereotypes to consolidate its hold on power. All Rwandans, from the newborn to the elderly, were pressed to join the sole political party, the MRND (Mouvement républicain national pour la démocratie et le développement), founded by the Rwandan dictator in 1975. Western donor nations, including Germany, the USA and Canada, felt their funding was safer in this tiny central African state than in neighbouring Uganda, where Obote’s massacres had replaced Amin’s horror; Zaire, where the aid budget lined only Mobutu’s hidden bank accounts; or Burundi, with its ongoing ethnic killings on a massive scale. Though a rise from seventh from bottom of the World Bank’s GNP per capita in 1976 to nineteenth from the bottom in 1990 was a success of sorts, the Rwandan economy had come to rely not on exports but on foreign aid.
Habyarimana’s smiling face beamed down on his people from posters in shops and homes, on badges and T-shirts and massive roadside advertising sites. His quintessential bouffant haircut and tall, upright figure cut a dash in the streets of Brussels and Paris where his regime increasingly looked to make representations. Rwanda was small and lacking in raw materials, but by playing the francophone card the president made the most of his powerful European ally. Kigali cemented its position in ‘la Françafrique’ by hosting the Franco-African conference in 1979. Three years earlier, in 1976, Rwanda became a co-founder of the Communauté économique des Pays des Grands Lacs (CEPGL), a French-run organization promising possible new trade routes and business deals.
The ‘land of a thousand hills’ had by 1991 become ‘the land of a thousand foreign aid workers’ as external aid provided nearly a quarter of its GNP. Such aid came from Belgium, its main donor, France, Switzerland, Germany, Canada and the USA. Under Habyarimana the country seemed to offer a stable and economically forward-looking strategy, a dictatorship that was acceptable to outsiders with well-intentioned donations.
But things were less rosy in Rwanda than the donor nations believed. Habyarimana had two battles to fight in the 1970s and 1980s, and both would explode in the early 1990s. The first was an internal struggle for power and wealth within the Hutu elite. The president, from Gisenyi in the north, favoured this area over Kayibanda’s previous regime’s preference for elites from the central town of Gitarama and areas to its south. By the 1980s northern favouritism had become highly restrictive and many Rwandans, suffering from over-population and increasingly reliant on food aid, bitterly resented the greed for land and power of a small clique around the president. Although Habyarimana won the 1988 election with 99.9 per cent of the vote, a splendid result even if no opposition parties were allowed to stand against him, resistance to one-party rule was on the increase. Intellectuals, the business class and middle-ranking bureaucrats objected to the way a close-knit group around the president controlled the government, money and army. With coffee and tea prices nose-diving in the late 1980s, drought decimating harvests in the east and tin mining shut down because it was unproductive, starvation was becoming increasingly prevalent among much of the population. Meanwhile, Habyarimana’s family and friends had grown rich in power and had become addicted to the corruption now prevalent in every area of the country’s political life.
The MRND had built its impressive power base on knowing every individual in the country. In Rwanda each person was part of a ten-house group, the sous-secteur, which in turn was part of a larger secteur, colline or hill. Further up the administrative scale were communes, administered by bourgmestres (mayors), and prefectures, each represented with government loyalists. The Hutu majority had an almost total monopoly on jobs. An ‘apartheid’ system was strictly enforced, even keeping Hutu and Tutsi children apart at school and making sure only the former could later gain government or professional employment. It was another irony of the Rwandan genocide that while the Western world got so excited about the demise of apartheid in South Africa, a similar system was in place 1500 miles north. But the Tutsi did not have a Nelson Mandela to champion them. In fact, the only Tutsi who managed to become a prefect during the 20 years of Habyarimana’s rule was Jean-Baptiste Habyarimana (no relation to the president), who administered the Butare prefecture in the south. He was killed at the start of the genocide.
The presidential hold on the army was even tighter and made use of former colonial practices to ensure recruits were loyal Hutus. In the early 1960s the Belgian colonel Guy Logiest had introduced the ‘Pignet’ system to keep Tutsi recruits out of the army; after independence the newly formed Guard Nationale de Rwanda continued this military ‘apartheid’. In local administration and the civil service Tutsis were also shunned. Only in business were they allowed some degree of tolerance – due to the money they could bring the regime and its supporters.
The Rwandan President survived a coup attempt in April 1980 by Intelligence chief Colonel Theoneste Lizinde and former comrade in the 1973 plot Alexis Kanyarengwe. In 1988 the loyal, talented and moderate friend of the President, Colonel Stanislas Mayuya was murdered on the orders of senior figures in the army who feared the President had marked him down as his military successor. The killing showed the power of extremists within the army and Habyarimana’s own family, who were unable to countenance sharing the power or wealth that by the late 1980s had reached impressive proportions.
A far more dangerous threat was building up across the border in Uganda. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was born out of the pogroms and bloodshed in Rwanda during and after independence, which cost hundreds of thousands of Tutsis their lives. Up to 700,000 Tutsis had fled their homeland in the 1960s, many of them to Uganda where life under Amin and Obote was only slightly less horrific. A small group of refugees joined rebel leader Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Army to attack the Obote regime, forcing him into exile in January 1986; despite their role in liberating Uganda, the local population far from accepted the Rwandan Tutsi refugees, for they resented the influence they now had over President Museveni and his new government in Kampala. While the international community dithered over how to get the refugees back to Rwanda, and Habyarimana blocked any solution, the RPF was formed in December 1987 with a view to returning them, by force if necessary, to their homeland.
The 1990 invasion of northern Rwanda was anything but a surprise. Habyarimana had been trying for two years to infiltrate the RPF in Kampala and assassinate its leading players. In turn, RPF leaders General Fred Rwigyema and Colonel Paul Kagame had a firm eye on the international situation, using information from both Britain and America on the state of Habyarimana’s government and the possibility of an international response to their invasion. From July 1990 the RPF began a military build up of its forces near the Ugandan–Rwanda border. While the RPF plotted, with apparent help from the Ugandan regime in Kampala, Habyarimana was looking to France for his security and to the father/son combination that currently held sway in the Élysée – François Mitterrand and his appointed head of the presidential Africa Cell, Jean-Christophe Mitterrand. The fate of Rwanda in the early 1990s was inextricably linked to the policies and political careers of this père/fils combination. Their decisions, taken at the Élysée presidential palace in Paris, a building whose grandeur reflected their own sense of personal worth and respect, were to have terrible repercussions among the people living in simple huts and brick houses that make up Rwanda.
François Maurice Mitterrand arrived at the Élysée in 1981 after a presidential campaign lasting more than 20 years and a political career reaching back to the dark days of the Second World War. He had made great capital in his election campaign à la Blair of a ‘new way’ in France’s view of the world and an ethical foreign policy that would sever the link between aid given and favours expected. Mitterrand ‘pledged to defend the rights of oppressed people everywhere, champion a fairer system of international development and work for world disarmament’.4 He championed a reduction in France’s sale of armaments by stressing that his country should aim to export goods that did not further destabilize the third world with the threat of civil or international war in the way that arms do. Given that by the time Mitterrand won the 1981 election France was the leading arms exporter per capita in the world, such a pledge was quite a commitment.5
The start was auspicious. By appointing Jean-Pierre Cot as his first minister of cooperation and development Mitterrand signalled his intention to remain true to his word. The president intervened in South America to support the Sandinista National Liberation Army’s struggle against the USA in Nicaragua in the early 1980s, as well as the FMLN (Farabundo Marti para la Liberación Nacional) guerrillas fighting the US-backed government in El Salvador.
But the honeymoon policy of supporting the ‘poor and oppressed’ was short-lived. Cot resigned in 1982 and with him left Mitterrand’s only attempt to live up to his promised ethical foreign policy. Arms sales flourished again, the idea of increasing budget aid to developing countries to 0.7 per cent GNP was dropped, while political and military assistance to dictators with appalling human rights records continued apace. Realpolitik came before real aid. In effect, ‘a policy of subsidized export of arms and equipment was pursued, and a small group of private advisers to the president saw to it that the bulk of French development aid would continue to flow into the pockets of those African heads of state who had always proved faithful friends, though not necessarily effective developers of their countries.’6
Mitterrand’s policy in Africa was consistent with his Machiavellian outlook on politics and his cynical regard for life in general. His rise from a humble background – his father was a stationmaster and vinegar factory owner – was due to a chameleon-like ability to match his face to the current public need. His decision-making on Rwanda was symptomatic of his political career and was in no way exceptional. This was a man who had fought for both sides in the Second World War, beginning as a member of the right-wing nationalist group the Légion française des combattants, a militia used later to track down and deport or kill resistance fighters and Jews. A friend of Marshal Pétain and René Bousquet, leader of the Vichy government and its chief of police respectively, Mitterrand’s service to the pro-Nazi hierarchy included publication of articles in journals given to fervid anti-Semitic writing, while he had no moral difficulty accepting the ‘Francisque’ from Pétain – the highest award the Vichy regime could give. Correctly perceiving the political and military wind of change as Germany’s prospects waned, Mitterrand joined the resistance and later made great capital from helping to liberate Paris from its German occupiers.
In office under the Fourth Republic from 1954 to 1957, Mitterrand took a hard line on the Algerian independence movement; a French general later accused him of sanctioning torture in the French colony. The ensuing conflict cost more than half a million lives and both French forces and their opponents committed appalling atrocities. Mitterrand reinvented himself as a socialist in the 1960s and 1970s as a way of getting back into power, and was elected in 1981. Political and personal scandals marked his two terms in office, but with typical gusto the president ensured his survival through one presidential re-election campaign in 1988 and two periods of ‘cooperation’ with right-wing prime ministers in 1986–88 and 1993–95.
Mitterrand’s genius was in keeping under wraps a storm of immense political proportions. When finally the lid came off the president was too ill and the public inclined, as ever, to forgive and forget amid the ‘nostalgia’ of Mitterrand’s reign.
For his son Jean-Christophe, his father’s election to the Élysée in 1981 was like winning the lottery. Within five years this little-known journalist was parachuted into one of the top jobs in France. Six years later, he ignominiously left the post as head of the presidential Africa Cell after constant insinuations of corruption and malpractice. By the end of the decade he was under investigation for illegal arms trafficking and money laundering; he spent Christmas 2000 in a prison cell.
After a childhood neglected by his parents, Jean-Christophe dropped out of university and at 23 was working on a kibbutz in Israel before turning to a career in journalism in Africa with Agence France-Presse. Out of this scarcely impressive background he was thrust into the secret world of the Élysée and African politics in 1986 as head of the Africa Cell – part of the presidential office tasked with advising Mitterrand on the so-called ‘black continent’. His alleged close relationship with Jean-Pierre Habyarimana, the Rwandan dictator’s son, made Jean-Christophe prey to rumours about his own behaviour. Being seen, according to New York Times journalist Frank Smyth, ‘carousing together in discos on the Left Bank [in Paris] and in Rwanda at the Kigali Nightclub’, hardly helped Mitterrand junior’s image.7 Life heading the Africa Cell was a mixed bag and was never dull. It involved wining and dining visiting heads of states from francophone countries, providing them with suitably expensive gifts, or even ‘arranging the supply of French prostitutes to the Gabon president’.8
In his autobiography Mémoire meurtrie (‘Battered memory’) Jean-Christophe vehemently denied all allegations of corruption.9 All the sins of the father had, he alleged, been thrown on him. The result, according to Jean-Christophe, was that he was left to carry the can of worms. This father-son combination was certainly one out of which nightmares are made when it came to establishing an ethical and beneficial foreign policy towards the people of Africa. The corruption, greed and ambition so prevalent in the Élysée were in many ways matched by the client francophone governments with which they were so intimately connected. It was small wonder that the plight of ‘ordinary’ Rwandan citizens was of little concern.
Habyarimana was one of many French-backed dictators to fly to the Franco-African summit held at the pretty resort town of La Baule in June 1990. It was the usual back-slapping occasion and time for the home nation to parade its power on the continent to the 40 leaders of client African states who turned up. Mitterrand, as ever keeping up with the times, announced in his keynote speech on 20 June that aid to African states would be tied to human rights and democratic reforms. Foreign Minister Roland Dumas summarized the president’s thoughts; the wind of change had blown in the east (Europe) and should now blow in the south, namely Africa. Allied to this was the fact that there could be ‘no development without democracy and no democracy without development’, with Mitterrand making clear his support for human rights and democracy in francophone states. ‘France is putting all its effort into efforts that will produce greater liberty’, he declared to some open-mouthed African dictators. Indeed, the French president had begun to sniff the ‘wind of change blowing through Africa’s coconut trees’, as he delicately put it.10 However, the effect on dictators like Mobutu, Eyadéma, Bongo and Habyarimana, who had delighted in a previous decade of French-funded human rights abuses, with help from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and other Western nations, can only be imagined. Was this the same French president who supported Hassan II of Morocco in his authoritarian regime with a 38-year history of human rights abuse or whose secret services had been implicated in the 1987 murder of President Sankara in Burkina Faso – an African leader who stood against ‘la Françafrique’?
Sitting in his new government office in a smart suburb of Paris, the youthful and engaging defence analyst Frédéric Charillon gave me his take on the La Baule phenomenon.
After the end of the Cold War, France, like other European powers, had to search for an updated foreign policy. But here [in Paris] there were no policy think-tanks or discussion groups, especially on Africa which was a closed, family affair. Mitterrand’s France pretended to still be a global power, not just a regional one – and the answer to that lay in Africa.11
Habyarimana recognized that any ‘democratic’ reforms he implemented in Rwanda could conveniently be tailored to fit his authoritarian needs. With continued control of the military, the heralded multi-party reforms and democracy were always more of a concept than an actual policy. There were ways to split the opposition, to buy off political rivals or have them murdered if necessary. He gambled correctly that support for Mitterrand’s new stance was more a matter of words than deeds. It was in neither president’s interest to have a powerful Rwandan opposition that could in the future unseat both Habyarimana and his cosy client relationship with France.
Throughout the 1980s Habyarimana had ingratiated himself with Mitterrand. Like other African francophone leaders, he enjoyed the ego boost of walking along the red carpet to the Élysée, and the pomp and ceremony of standing alongside Mitterrand for the gathered press photographs, pictures that could be seen on the front pages of Kigali papers the next day. All the while his family could use their French funding for expensive shopping trips along the Champs-Élysée, or allegedly to do some hard bargaining on arms deals.12
The personal ties extended from the husbands and sons to the wives of the two presidents. Agathe Habyarimana was of ‘noble’ blood and, unlike her husband Juvénal, was from an ‘aristocratic’ Rwandan family from Gisenyi. As such she made sure her trips to Paris made her feel like the royalty she felt she was. Her wardrobe was an impressive array of fine snakeskin dresses, gold jewellery to match and shoes for the ballrooms of Europe and her husband’s palaces, with horn-rimmed sunglasses as a final touch. Press pictures from an official visit to Paris in 1990 show Madame Habyarimana perched happily on an Élysée couch handing over presents to Mitterrand’s wife Danielle, her gold necklace, watch and rings glittering impressively. But then, as British journalist Christian Jennings has written, ‘when you are Agathe Habyarimana buying white leather cocktails dresses and red acrylic hot pants with dollars that you have stolen from your country’s international budget, it feels doubly right. You are, after all, only returning the money to the country from which it came.’13
The RPF invasion on 1 October 1990 caught most players unawares. Habyarimana, ironically with Ugandan President Museveni, was at a UNICEF banquet in New York. Colonel Paul Kagame, a leading RPF commander, was also in the USA, while François Mitterrand, the defence minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the foreign minister Roland Dumas and the general-secretary to the presidency Hubert Védrine were all on a state visit to the Persian Gulf.
On the evening of 3 October 1990 the French president was dining aboard his frigate moored off Abu Dhabi when, between fine wines and food, he was disturbed. Jacques Lanxade, at that time Mitterrand’s personal military adviser, related what happened. ‘A telegram from Paris arrived in which Habyarimana said his country was being invaded and he needed urgent French military help. Immediately the president asked me to [go to] Rwanda. Jean-Pierre Chevènement tried in vain to present a few objections but his arguments on the neocolonial stance of France were brushed aside by the president.’14 The following day the panic-stricken Rwandan leader sent another telegram alleging that his capital Kigali was now being threatened, which led to a decision to double the French force sent out to help him.
Back in Paris, as misfortune would have it, the only player in his office when the invasion started was Africa Cell chief Jean-Christophe Mitterrand. Also there on unrelated business was African expert Gérard Prunier, who recounted the remarkable events that triggered France’s first step into a quagmire of Rwandan death and hatred.
Jean-Christophe picked up the phone to listen to a worried Habyarimana plead for urgent French military intervention. Prunier related what he heard. ‘After ten minutes I knew who he was talking to [Habyarimana]. After 20 minutes’ conversation on the phone he [Jean-Christophe] said to me “we’ll send old man Habyarimana a few troops; we’re going to bail him out, it’ll be over in two or three months”’;15 Prunier added, ‘he believed his own stupidity’. Jean-Christophe later denied that this conversation with Prunier had ever taken place.
Despite Mitterrand’s and his son’s assurances that troops were on their way, Habyarimana was far from reassured. He knew his own forces were weak and that, despite promises from Paris, it was better to be safe than sorry. Three days after the RPF invasion he staged a ‘firefight’ in Kigali on the night of 4–5 October, which received a glowing account from Ambassador Martres who reported to the French foreign office that there was ‘heavy fighting in the capital’. As a result the French troops were upgraded and Operation Noroît (north wind) breezed into the troubled African country with 600 elite paratroopers. It was a double whammy for Habyarimana who used the staged assault to round up 10,000 opposition suspects for ‘interrogation’. The RPF was nowhere near Kigali and had nothing to do with this event, but it suited the French to believe otherwise, and was all the justification needed to encourage further intervention. Admiral Lanxade recounted in his memoirs how ‘On 5 October a raid by the RPF at the heart of the capital seemed to give us reason for our intervention. The defence attaché sent an account of the clashes which had happened in the town and noted they took place close to our embassy.’16 The geography of the attack was hardly surprising; the Rwandan president had designed it to ensure that France had every reason and encouragement to get involved. He was not to be disappointed.
Whatever Mitterrand’s motives for intervening in a country that France had not even colonized, he may well have acted on a simple gut feeling that the decision to send troops to Rwanda would be quick and painless. It is possible that Mitterrand believed, as his son clearly did, that French support would not be needed for long. Like the First World War, it would be ‘over by Christmas’. Mitterrand’s close personal and family ties with Habyarimana were another reason to intervene. They were good friends and had a relationship that was mutually beneficial. However, the French foreign office and Ministry of Cooperation also advised sending in troops, as did French military intelligence in Rwanda and the embassy in Kigali. They needed to stop this francophone country becoming the first domino to fall in the feared anglophone ‘invasion’. Fashoda may have been 100 years ago, but its effects on French political and military circles were undiminished. Habyarimana certainly played up the fear of an anglophone Tutsi plot to carve out a large new central African kingdom.
Loyalty to its francophone allies was also vital. ‘If we fail to fulfil our promises’, explained a French diplomat, ‘our credibility towards other African states with which we have similar accords (Central African Republic, Comoros, Djibouti, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Togo) would be seriously damaged, and we would see those countries turning to other supporters.’17 Several African heads of state privately sent their congratulations to the Élysée for its military action.
From the start, Paris was keen to portray the RPF as nothing but the Ugandan army, which it accused of arming and training it. There was no attempt to get beneath the surface of the refugee problem, the massacres and the ‘apartheid’ system that had forced many Rwandan Tutsis to flee to Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s, or to understand that Habyarimana had stopped them peacefully returning to their homeland in the 1980s. Instead, Paris portrayed Rwandan Tutsis as Ugandan anglophones. It was pointed out that most of the RPF spoke English instead of French and had been to military academies in the USA rather than Paris. Ugandan leader and RPF supporter Yoweri Museveni was the very embodiment of an Anglo-Saxon, for he spoke English and threatened the French.18 To work alongside him, as many of the RPF leadership did, was to be guilty by default.
A French mercenary dismissed Paul Kagame, a later RPF leader, as a ‘very clever soldier. But he’s a product of America, he’s CIA. For a start he doesn’t speak a word of French. He only speaks English. And he did all his training … as an officer in American military schools.’19
Besides deliberately discriminating against the Tutsis by refusing to regard them as Rwandan, the French government described the RPF as ‘Khmer Noir’ (Black Khmers), which, with its reference to the genocide and killing fields of Cambodia where Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge supporters murdered two million fellow countrymen in the late 1970s, was highly destructive terminology. It was particularly ironic for the French government to besmirch the RPF with such a loaded reference, given that Paris had at the time supported Pol Pot and his bloody henchmen in their ‘year zero’ revolution.
To finish off the heady brew of prejudice against the RPF, some French politicians and military commanders dismissed it as a group of terrorists invading purely to wreak havoc and with no meaningful political agenda. ‘The action the RPF started from Uganda was not a classic army action. It was a terrorist action with villages razed and children disembowelled. The men led by that guy Kagame were terrorists and killers.’20 This view was especially ironic given that it came from Paul Barril, one time French secret serviceman and now a mercenary acting for a number of African dictators.
However, Mitterrand’s initial decision, taken in a few hours, to send in troops betrayed a complete misunderstanding of the complexities of the Rwandan situation. Once the decision was made, French pride made withdrawal more difficult than continuing involvement in the bitter civil war. Previous successful interventions, notably in Chad and Zaire, had lulled Paris into a sense of false security.
In President Mitterrand’s analysis, what was important above all was a global reasoning, there was no point of strategic application making Rwanda more important than Chad. He considered, as had his three [presidential] predecessors, that France had subscribed to a security role and that if she were unable to bring help in a case as simple as that of being a friend of the country suffering an armed invasion, then his guarantee of security was not worth anything anymore.21
Typically, there was no debate in the French parliament about troops being sent to intervene in Rwanda, or indeed at the UN from which France did not wait for a mandate for its action. Only two papers, Libération and L’Humanité, covered the intervention in any meaningful manner. French television barely got involved until autumn 1994 when images of post-genocide refugee camps and cholera victims were deemed newsworthy. One journalist had bemoaned his fellow Frenchmen’s silence during the first Gulf War, asking ‘where are the collective appeals, the petitions, the committees, the meetings, the marches?’22 The same was true of the intervention in Rwanda, which both public and politicians met with deafening indifference and silence.23
Once the decision was taken to send a military force to Rwanda, the next step was to cloak its duties and aims in a public relations smokescreen of ‘humanitarianism’. Thus, Operation Noroît was sold to what little of the French public was aware of it at all as purely a device to protect and evacuate French citizens. The French prime minister, Michel Rocard, told his nation on 6 October 1990 that ‘we have sent troops in to protect French citizens, and nothing more. This is a high security mission and a republican duty.’24 This position was reiterated for the next two years, with Daniel Bernard at the foreign office telling the French press ‘the presence of French forces has no other objective than to assure the security of our residents.’25
In the first two weeks of Operation Noroît in October 1994 313 French nationals were flown out of the country, leaving a force of more than 300 heavily armed elite troops to protect the remaining 290 French civilians. Though their mission was allegedly based in the capital Kigali, reconnaissance to Butare in the south and Gisenyi in the north reported an enthusiastic welcome for French soldiers by the local population and government troops, the FAR (Forces armées rwandaises).
The RPF invasion started inauspiciously enough. Within a week it had lost its commander General Fred Rwigyema, killed in unknown circumstances, and the attack petered out into a guerrilla war in the north of the country. Crucially, it failed to anticipate the military help that France was to send to keep the Rwandan dictator in power.26
While the RPF struggled to make an impact, Habyarimana’s forces struggled to know from which end of their rifles they should fire. The president’s ramshackle troops numbered little more than 3000 at the start of the war and they were poorly trained, tactically naive and inexperienced in any form of battle. As in so many francophone countries, the government troops were a shambles of military incompetence and weakness, with leadership given as a reward for political service rather than tactical awareness. This was precisely because the president could always call in external French forces to do the fighting. French mercenary Paul Barril was appalled at what he found. ‘When you take a peasant, you take a pupil. You can put him in a military uniform, but that doesn’t make him a soldier. You understand what I am saying? These guys have got absolutely no training, no motivation. No special commandos, no special action guys, they’re a balloon full of wind.’27 Habyarimana saw within days of Noroît’s arrival that the survival of his regime depended on the French staying put.
Use of French Gazelle helicopter ‘gunships’ was one method that helped stop any significant early advance by the RPF at the start of the war. Barril boasted that:
France’s official special services blocked in ’90 the attack by the RPF terrorists and Uganda, [it was] a DGSE (French Secret Services) job. A remarkable job which was a source of great pride in the first phase of the war. There were heroes on the French side who will never be known, extraordinary stories of guys who took crazy initiatives, who went out and blasted all around them with just a few helicopters and a few guns. There is material for a book on the heroism of the Secret Services in Rwanda, against Uganda and the RPF … which explains their hatred for France.28
An RPF tactician, who backed this account, said that the helicopters were one reason the RPF moved to a guerrilla-based attack rather than a frontal assault near Byumba in the north.29
In December 1990 the Rwandan president begged French military chiefs Admiral Lanxade and Colonel (later General) Jean-Pierre Huchon to remain for at least another two months. This was despite the RPF threat being confined to guerrilla skirmishes on a localized level in the Ruhengeri area. Lanxade, who painted a flattering portrait of the Rwandan dictator as a tall, amiable but reserved individual, suddenly found he was pestered by phone calls from Habyarimana day and night pleading for more French military help.
Mitterrand did not need much persuading to allow Noroît to continue into 1991. Intelligence reports made it clear the Rwandan army was unlikely to be able to contain any new concerted RPF attack. At the same time as ‘protecting their citizens’, French military know-how was keeping Habyarimana safe. As Operation Noroît swung into action in the second week of October 1990, so did the activities of the French military’s ‘consultative’ role for its Rwandan counterpart. Colonel Gilbert Canovas, deputy defence attaché, was to ‘provide appraisal and advice’ and to help equip Habyarimana’s forces for the war. A number of ‘security’ consultants were sent to the conflict zone in the north to ‘instruct, organize and motivate troops … who have forgotten the elementary rules of combat’.30 Tactical advice on the protection of Kigali and northern border towns like Gisenyi, Ruhengeri and Byumba was vital for an army devoid of any real leadership or strategy. Equally imperative was the swift recruitment and training of thousands of new troops. In 1991 the Rwandan army had swelled to around 20,000, and this was to further double in the next two years of French assistance.
On 23 and 24 January 1991, the RPF launched a sudden and impressive offensive against the town of Ruhengeri, freeing 350 prisoners from its gaol. By 27 January the attackers had retreated again into the surrounding national park. Habyarimana’s response was immediate; the indigenous Tutsi of Bagogwe were massacred as punishment.
In the 1990–94 period the French equipped the Rwandan government army with some of the most modern weaponry available. African civil wars are usually fought with old Russian or east European stocks and cheap Chinese weapons, but France ensured its allies had Gazelle helicopters, heavy mortars, radar equipment, Milan rockets, Panhard tanks and armoured vehicles, as well as a variety of small arms. The French, however, had to finance and ship the armaments to the FAR, and then train a highly demotivated and unskilled army to use the sophisticated weaponry.
The hawks at the Élysée, who wanted the RPF threat defeated in the field, made sure their Rwandan allies were not going to be outgunned. General Huchon, Mitterrand’s confidant and assistant to commander-in-chief Lanxade at the Élysée, ‘had at times to struggle at meetings of the Interministerial Committee for War Material Exports meetings to get approval for the impressive volume of lethal equipment which high government officials wanted to send to Kigali’.31 One solution was to get the deals done through ‘neutral’ countries like Egypt.
In fact, arms were sent to Rwanda both officially and unofficially, with the latter either not registered or sent via a third party to avoid questions. Evidence showed ‘31 direct transfers of arms and munitions to Rwanda were carried out in disregard of correct procedure’.32 There were also 19 ‘free’ deliveries amounting to around $3.6 million, paid for by oblivious French taxpayers as a gift to their Rwandan allies.
France ignored a new 1992 EU directive aimed at ‘ethical’ deliveries of arms to regions currently in a state of war or internal unrest. The EU had just adopted eight criteria for selling weapons to its member states. The third criterion stated that EU members would take account, in selling weapons, of ‘the internal situation of the country, according to the existence of conflicts or tensions inside its borders’.33 Instead of abiding by these rules, the French pointed the finger at other countries that were also breaking the embargo. For example, South Africa had continued to sell arms to Rwanda in the early 1990s in contravention of an international ban (Convention 558 of December 1984) that embargoed the export of weapons from the apartheid regime.
Habyarimana’s pleas for even greater destructive weaponry did not go unheeded by Paris. The Rwandan dictator begged for Jaguar attack planes to be used against the RPF, and was no doubt disconsolate when France, much to his surprise, deemed the demand ‘over the top’ and refused.
The cartoon (above) appeared in opposition newspaper Kanguka on 30 June 1992 makes it plain not only did Rwandans know full well how Mitterrand was arming Habyarimana, but that the money spent at the French ‘arms for sale’ counter – ‘Bombs’, ‘surface to surface missiles’, ‘Kalashnikovs’, ‘FAL’, and ‘R4’ rifles and ‘grenades’ could have been better used during this time of famine with feeding them.
Habyarimana: ‘Your Excellency (President) Mitterrand, Can you lend me a lot of weapons and ammunition? I will pay you if I survive’.
The People (standing behind a sign saying ‘Innocents to be killed’): ‘Can we boil this ammunition to get some food on our tables for dinner? Aren’t they to exterminate us?!’
‘We will be the ones left to pay after Ikinani’s death’. (Ikinani was Habyarimana’s self-proclaimed nickname meaning ‘the invincible one’)
The headline to this feature in the newspaper proclaimed: ‘Thirty years of Rwanda’s independence from Belgian colonialism; 19 years of which Habyarimana has put Rwanda under French colonialism.’
Instead, it offered a meagre sop of nine Eurocopter Gazelle SA 342 attack helicopters worth $7.5 million, which were exported on 22 April, 1 July and 9 October 1992, each with the capability to use canons or rocket launchers.34 Paris presumably regarded such helicopter firepower as non-excessive. The Gazelle helicopters were a utility craft able to strafe enemy positions, destroy tanks or be used for reconnaissance missions. In the mountainous terrain of northern Rwanda, they were vital for locating the movement of RPF infiltrators. At the start of October 1992, a Gazelle was responsible for destroying a column of ten RPF vehicles. It was alleged that a French instructor, who was suitably proud of his pupil’s efforts, trained the Rwandan pilot. Whether the French instructor was in the helicopter at the time is suspected but as yet not proved.35
While Jaguar fighter planes may have been ‘over the top’, a whole arsenal of sophisticated weaponry was flown in to keep Habyarimana happy and Milan missiles, made by Euromissiles based in Fontenay-aux-Roses, were shipped in. Along with heavy 120mm mortars, they gave the Rwandan army an important advantage in the artillery war, for they could smash any armoured carriers and destroy RPF positions up to three miles away. Training was also given in the use of the Rasura radar system to detect RPF troop advances. Other French aid included day-to-day military equipment, tents, clothing, parachutes, spare parts for helicopters and artillery. CIEEMG records also show the sale of 20,000 anti-personnel mines and 600 detonators, though the defence ministry in Paris denied France had sold any such mines after 1986.36
For one of the poorest countries on earth, with most people earning less than a dollar a day, Rwanda was now involved in a hi-tech war with its forces using state-of-the-art attack weapons. ‘Between 1992 and 1994, Rwanda was the region’s [sub-Saharan Africa] third largest importer of weapons (behind Angola and Nigeria), with cumulative military imports totalling $100 million.’37 While France provided some of the heavy military hardware to repel frontal attacks, its banks provided the legitimate means whereby Habyarimana could enter deals with other African countries to bring in light weapons.
Rwanda made secret contact with Egypt, liaising directly with Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then a foreign office official in Cairo before his elevation to UN secretary-general. The two governments concluded a deal in late October 1990 for nearly $6 million of weapons, including mortars and ammunition. The French government-controlled bank, Credit Lyonnais acted as insurer for the money that was deposited, according to an unheaded document dated 30 March 1992, in the French bank’s Regent Street branch in London.38 Weapons shipped to the African country as a result of the deal included 70 mortars, 16,200 mortar shells, 2000 rocket propelled grenades, 450 Egyptian Kalashnikovs, 2000 landmines, 3000 artillery shells, six 122mm heavy artillery howitzers, plastic explosives and three million rounds of ammunition.
Noroît commander Colonel Philippe Tracqui noted that on 12 February 1993 a DC8 landed with 50 machine guns of 12.7mm capacity, together with 100,000 rounds of ammunition destined for the Rwandan army (FAR). Five days later another Boeing 747 arrived with ‘discreet unloading by the FAR of 105 mm shells and 68 mm rockets’.
In total, France sold $24 million of arms to Rwanda during 1990–94, though this figure does not include non-authorized grants. It is clear that ‘secret deliveries’ outside the knowledge or authorization of the ministry of defence were taking place. Because of this secrecy there was ‘a gap between the official commentary and the actual administrative reality’.39 The imported weapons soon filtered down through black market traffickers and Rwandan military officials to towns and villages around the country. Much of the huge stocks received from France and Egypt were handed over to the civilian militia. In June 1993, a Western researcher noticed grenades being sold openly on a market stall in Kigali, alongside bananas and mangoes. He was stopped from photographing the scene by a policeman who told him such pictures were ‘not nice’.40 The grenades cost less than $2. Many would later be used to kill and maim the Tutsis gathered inside churches and community halls during the 1994 genocide.
According to Rwandan journalist André Sibomana, ‘Kigali airport was allegedly used as a hub for French arms dealers who were secretly supplying Iran.’41 The Habyarimana regime had become a key player in the drugs and arms trade, and the war from 1990 only increased the stakes. It now became less about selling for profit than buying for survival. When quizzed by a journalist on the French arming a regime known for its brutal violence against its own people, military attaché Colonel Bernard Cussac replied angrily, ‘are you saying that the providing of military assistance is a human rights violation?’ He added, when he learnt his questioner was from the USA, ‘France and the United States have a common history, for example, Vietnam.’42 It was an unfortunate comparison, given the appalling human rights violations in that campaign, with napalm, Agent Orange and civilian massacres hardly pointing to a common history to remember with pride.
From the start of the war, the Rwandan government had a number of high-level backers in the French military. Leaving aside political francophones like Jean-Christophe Mitterrand and Paul Dijoud, director of African and Malagasy affairs at the foreign office, old-school generals made it plain they felt the war in Rwanda was one that could, and should, be won in the field. General Christian Quesnot, appointed as personal chief military adviser to President Mitterrand from 1991 to 1995, ‘shared and shaped Mitterrand’s analysis of the Rwandan situation’.43 In this he was joined by other leading military figures, including Colonel Jean-Pierre Huchon, who was on the president’s military staff before becoming head of the military mission programme in 1993. Quesnot had little time for the RPF and left little doubt about where his sympathies lay in remarking, ‘The RPF is the most fascist party that I have met in Africa, and is akin to being Black Khmers.’44
Two parallel military missions were therefore taking place from October 1990. While Operation Noroît was launched with hundreds of well-armed marines and paratroopers, officially to protect French citizens, the army training corps (DAMI or Détachment d’assistance militaire et d’instruction) and the Military Assistance Mission (MAM) were working behind the scenes in surveillance, training and tactical support for Habyarimana. This resulted in the French effectively taking over the command structure of the Rwandan government forces, with the blessing of its grateful president.
Secretly, as with the arming of the Rwandan troops, Paris put in place an officer who not only directed French forces, but also became head of the Rwandan government army, with the role of direct military adviser to Habyarimana and his chief of staff Colonel Laurent Serubuga. ‘Lieutenant Colonel Chollet, head of the French Military Assistance Mission, adviser to Habyarimana’ would, in his new capacity be consulted on ‘organization of the defence and on the collaboration of the military’, duties that would require him to ‘work in close collaboration’ with officers at all levels.
In effect, until the secret was exploded in the Belgium daily La Libre Belgique on 21 February 1992, Chollet was head of the Rwandan armed forces, ‘advising the Rwandan chief of staff in such tasks as drawing up daily battle plans, accompanying him around the country, and participating in daily meetings of the general staff’.45 A letter of 3 February 1992 from the Rwandan ministry of foreign affairs to French ambassador Martres noted ‘he [Chollet] has just received unlimited power to direct all military operations in this war … our army is now run by a Frenchman.’ The letter described Chollet as an adviser since 1 January 1992. Once news was leaked to the media of his new position, the French foreign office was forced to deny Chollet’s role, and he was smartly removed. After a suitable few weeks ‘cooling down’ period Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Jacques Maurin was appointed to Chollet’s position as deputy to the defence attaché in Habyarimana’s government in April 1992. In effect, it was the same role as Chollet, but this time without the ‘official’ notification.
More secret support was soon on its way. After the RPF attack on Ruhengeri in January 1991, the constant calls from Habyarimana for more French involvement did not fall on deaf ears. Georges Martres, the French ambassador in Kigali, was sent a telegram from Paris on 15 March 1991 to tell ‘old man Habyarimana’ that a detachment of around 30 army trainers was to be sent to Rwanda for ‘four months’, though given the way the civil war was heading it was clear this would be open ended. These instructors upped the military stakes substantially. Their aim was to train and run the war for the Rwandan government, using surveillance to counteract RPF guerrilla incursions. Martres was told that this new initiative should remain secret. Habyarimana expressed himself well satisfied with this new turn of French support.46 In fact French military instructors had been in Rwanda since the late 1980s. The 11th parachute division was made up of several regiments, which in turn had smaller ‘special forces’ units attached. These chuteurs opérationnels with the unfortunate acronym CRAP (Commandos de Recherche et d’Action dans la Profondeur) had already set up a commando school for the Rwandan Army with a view to basic military training.47
The trainers lived in camps outside the capital, where they worked with their ‘pupils’, the new Rwandan army recruits. Many such bases were located in the northern areas of Gisenyi and Ruhengeri, only a few kilometres from the front line of the fighting. The French instructors were barracked at the commando training school at Bigogwe, and in military camps at Gako and Gabiro. Training would consist of tactical awareness, the use of heavy weapons such as 120mm mortars and AML 60 and 90 armoured vehicles, mining and explosives. Night infiltration, encircling manoeuvres and building strategic roadblocks at the front were also included.
Janvier, a 22 year-old Hutu, was keen to put into practice the anti-Tutsi rhetoric he had learnt at an early age.
It started during our very first days at school; we were taught that it was impossible for a Hutu and a Tutsi to get on together. We’d realized that the enemy were the Tutsis, since they always act in bad faith. I grew up in this frame of mind.
When political parties were authorized and I was ready to play my part, the party leaders, the ministers and the prefects continued to drill this into us even more intensively.
In 1992, I was highly motivated, ready to volunteer not just once but twice and join a group of young Hutus selected from among the Interahamwe [youth militia]; we were to fight for our country, as we’d been taught to. Throughout the war we applied what we’d been taught.
I liked the French – they were people who’d given us a lot of help in Rwanda. First of all during the civil war [1990–93] between the Hutus and the Tutsis, between the ex-FAR and the RPF, the Inyenzis. The French gave us a lot of help. It was from them that we received the most help. Most of the military aides came from France. It was the French who trained our soldiers who, in turn, landed on the hills to train us. They brought us the equipment they’d received from the French, and they taught us how to use it in combat, when necessary.
The example I can give. … Grenades, rifles of the FAL type it was the French who distributed all this equipment throughout the country.48
Diplomatic support went hand in hand with that of the military. The French ambassador to Rwanda, Georges Martres, was a personal friend of Habyarimana who visited his house and was free in his praise for the elderly diplomat. Martres, a tall bespectacled man in his sixties, was an old-style Africanist who had arrived in Kigali on 10 September 1989, having been head of the French mission of cooperation in other francophone client states – Mali, Niger, Senegal and Cameroon.
Martres’s view was simple. There was unrest in Rwanda and a possibility of ethnic violence leading to disaster, so French troops were needed to help pacify the trouble. Interestingly, the troops Martres was keen to keep in Rwanda to defeat the RPF were, he later explained, not strong enough to stop massacres. When the killing of Tutsis began at the start of the war in 1990, Martres’s reaction was to refuse to believe the evidence implicating his government friends.
Vénuste Kayimahe, who worked at the French Cultural Centre in Kigali, met Martres several times. He described him as ‘more Hutu than the Hutus – more Habyarimana than the president himself. He certainly seemed less a representative of France and more of Habyarimana. In every meeting I heard him defend the president’s views, explaining the Rwandan government’s views as well as the government did itself. People wondered if he really worked for Habyarimana.’49
It was joked in Kigali diplomatic circles that Ambassador Martres ‘was not the French Ambassador to Rwanda but rather the Rwandese [sic] ambassador to France.’50 Martres was meant to be the eyes and ears of the Élysée, able to note, analyse and report back to Paris on the ‘true’ state of affairs. Instead, he was politically blind and deaf, refusing to countenance criticism of the regime whatever its faults. Given his personal friendship with Habyarimana and the closeness of the military leadership, it is unsurprising that unbiased coverage of the unfolding crisis in Rwanda failed to reach Paris.
When Martres was due to retire at the start of 1993 Habyarimana took the unusual step of intervening on his behalf, asking President Mitterrand to keep him in office. Mitterrand regretfully told the dictator that he could only keep Martres in Kigali for an extra few months, until April, due to retirement rules, at which point the French diplomat, as staunch a supporter of the regime as it could have hoped for, had to bid farewell to his friends at the presidential palace and return to a cosy retirement in Paris, congratulating himself on a job well done. As Martres flew out of Kigali, the killers who a year later would commit the genocide were already receiving arms and training from the French government he represented, and carrying out orders to murder hundreds of villagers.