Thirty years ago, in a hundred days, the last genocide of the 20th century took place in Rwanda, after that of the Armenians by the Ottoman Young Turk power (1915-1916) and that of the Jews by the Third Reich and its accomplices (1941-1945). ). Triggered on April 7, 1994 following the assassination of the Hutu dictator president Juvénal Habyarimana, an attack which represented the pretext and the reporting – and not the cause – of the genocide, this “hurricane of death” (according to the historian Jean-Pierre Chrétien) struck more than 800,000 Tutsi civilians, slaughtered by a fanatically racist Hutu Power government and a large part of the majority Hutu population.
Three decades later, the geopolitical world has changed, but two reminders are necessary, the first of which concerns France: under François Mitterrand, a President of the Republic could without scruple appoint his own son – notoriously incompetent in this case – to the head of the powerful “Africa cell” of the Elysée, a major pillar of the maligned Françafrique, then bypassing the command bodies and the traditional decision-making chain in times of military crisis to favor almost direct and willingly occult management: the son, the chief of staff, blindly obedient soldiers, even mercenaries… During the three years preceding the genocide, and while everything indicated that the Hutu power was becoming radicalized, the Elysée systematically favored its military support in the face of to external rebels and dismissed the voices and multiple clues warning of the drama to come. Worse: complacency – many speak of complicity – with regard to the genocidal regime put in place at the beginning of April 1994 (at the French embassy in Kigali!) continued until its fall in July…
Irresponsibility
Today, a scenario of such irresponsibility would undoubtedly be difficult to imagine, for two reasons. First, as if to ward off the past and avoid the infamous accusation of letting things happen again, France intervened twice to stop mass massacres in French-speaking sub-Saharan Africa; among the variables which led to the decision to intervene in Côte d’Ivoire in 2002 (operation Licorne) and in the Central African Republic in 2013 (operation Sangaris) – and even if the contexts and circumstances were very different from those of Rwanda -, the primordial was in fact to intervene. With success.
Then, the paranoid fad known as the “Fashoda syndrome”, consisting of seeing everywhere the hostile hand of the Anglo-Saxons, on the one hand, the delusional copy of the Revolution of 1789 on the “social” one of the Hutu against the “aristocratic” Tutsi ” on the other hand, will fortunately no longer be valid. Unfortunately, they contributed largely to the culpable anti-Tutsi blindness of the Elysée before, during and sometimes even after the genocide. By recognizing France’s “responsibilities” in Rwanda during his official visit to Kigali in 2021, Emmanuel Macron buried these pseudo-geopolitical fantasies from another age.
UN shipwreck
The second reminder, double, is as follows. At first, no other power stood out. The UN, under the aegis of the inconsistent Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was wrecked by withdrawing 90% of the Blue Helmets at the worst possible moment, including the precious contingent of a very pitiful former Belgian colonial power; President Clinton’s United States actively turned away from the tragedy, for fear of being called upon again in the region after its recent losses in Somalia. As for Russia and China, they were then devoid of the will and the capacity to intervene in the Africa of the Great Lakes! Let us not forget Africa itself; during the genocide, none of the numerous neighboring states intervened, which reflects a posteriori the emptiness of the concept ofAfrica in the united and/or united sense of the term.
Then, this authentic genocide (beware of the lazy or militant misuse of terms these days!), with its hundreds of thousands of murders, rapes, acts of torture and sadistic exhibitions of the horrors committed on old men, women and children. by armed men, was the direct consequence of a teaching of contempt (according to the historian Jules Isaac) over several decades, of incandescent racism, of extreme misogyny. The German (1894-1916), then Belgian (1916-1962) colonizers had certainly introduced the false notion of the two races, but it was indeed locals who, steeped in hateful propaganda, exterminated their neighbors.
Frédéric Encel, columnist at L’Express, author of a doctoral thesis on Jerusalem, published under the title Geopolitics of Jerusalem (Flammarion, 2009).
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