The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said France and its western and African allies “could have stopped” Rwanda’s 1994 genocide but did not have the will to halt the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis, reports The Guardian.
In a video message to be published on Sunday to mark the 30th anniversary of the genocide, Macron will emphasise that “when the phase of total extermination against the Tutsis began, the international community had the means to know and act”, the presidency said on Thursday.
The president believes that at the time the international community already had historical experience of witnessing genocide with the Holocaust in the second world war and the mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey during the first world war.
Macron will say that “France, which could have stopped the genocide with its western and African allies, did not have the will” to do so, the official added.
The president will not be going to Kigali to attend commemorations of the genocide this Sunday alongside Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, but instead France will be represented by its foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné.