A French examining magistrate investigating the activities of former gendarmerie captain Paul Barril during the 1994 Rwanda genocide, last month requested access to the classified archives of the late French president François Mitterrand’s chief of military staff.
It is the latest move in an investigation that raises further disturbing questions about the support France lent to the extremist Hutu regime in Rwanda, which was responsible for the slaughter of, according to some estimates, up to one million people.
The now nine-year judicial investigation was triggered following an official complaint lodged in 2013 by three NGOs (the International Federation for Human Rights, the Human Rights League, and the anti-corruption body Survie) against Barril for “complicity in genocide”. The complaint cited a contract Barril signed with Rwanda’s extremist Hutu regime for the supply of weapons and military training during the 1994 genocide of the country’s ethnic Tutsi population.
Barril, now aged 76, was in the early 1980s briefly head of the gendarmerie’s elite armed intervention group, the GIGN, before joining his former commander Christian Prouteau at the Élysée Palace’s so called “anti-terrorist cell”.
The cell became mired in scandal after revelations it was involved in tapping the phones, on Mitterrand’s orders, of around 150 people including politicians, journalists and actors, as well as planting weapons at an apartment in a Paris suburb housing three Irish nationalist activists in order to secure their arrests on the false grounds of terrorist activity.
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Following the fiasco, Barril moved into private business activity, setting up companies specialised in supplying security services, and in the early 1990s began dealings with the Hutu-led government in Rwanda.
The last genocide of the 20th century
Rwanda was plunged into a civil war beginning in 1990, when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) crossed into the east-African country from their base in neighbouring Uganda, seeking the overthrow of the regime of Hutu strongman president Juvénal Habyarimana, in power since 1973. While a peace agreement was eventually brokered, Habyarimana was assassinated in a missile attack on his plane on April 6th 1994.
The genocide began immediately afterwards, launched by the military-led regime of Hutu extremists who, forming a “crisis committee” which later appointed an interim government, took over all power just hours after Habyarimana’s assassination. A number of historians have cited evidence that the genocide of the Tutsi’s had been prepared well before, including with the arming of civilian Hutus and the signing of large weapons deals in the preceding years.
The genocide principally targeted Rwanda’s minority ethnic Tutsi population, but also moderate Hutus and the Twa pygmy people. Lasting around 100 days, it is estimated to have claimed the lives of between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people. After the start of the slaughter, the Rwandan Patriotic Front resumed its offensive against the Hutu regime which it finally defeated in mid-July, putting an end to the killings.
The many questions surrounding the role of France
Under François Mitterrand, France had long been an ally of Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana, whose regime it propped up with a military presence beginning after the 1990 incursion into Rwanda by the Tutsi-led RPF. The past role of France in supporting the Hutu regime, and accusations that it even contributed to the genocide, poisoned its relations with the Rwandan government ever since the overthrow of the Hutu extremist regime in 1994 by the RPF, which was led by Rwanda’s current president Paul Kagame.
As part his moves to defuse the tensions, President Emmanuel Macron in 2019 commissioned a report by a panel of 15 historians, led by Vincent Duclert, on the history of France’s involvement with the Hutu regime from 1990 to 1994. The report, entitled France, Rwanda and the Tutsi Genocide, was delivered in March 2021.
The historians, who were given unprecedented access to official archives, found that France bore “serious and overwhelming” responsibilities for the genocide, but they dismissed the suggestion that it had been complicit in the massacres. “Is France an accomplice to the genocide of the Tutsi? If by this we mean a willingness to join a genocidal operation, nothing in the archives that were examined demonstrates this,” they wrote. However, they were scathing of what they called the “continual blindness” of the French authorities “in their support for a racist, corrupt and violent regime” in the interests of maintaining French influence in the region.
President Mitterrand kept “a strong, personal and direct relationship” with his Rwandan counterpart Juvénal Habyarimana, they said, adding: “Providing military support to Rwanda against the RPF was always equated with defence against an external aggression. Therefore, the speedy delivery of considerable quantities of ammunition and weapons to Habyarimana’s regime was justified, along with the extensive involvement of the French military in training the Rwandan Armed Forces.”
The question of who Paul Barril was working for
The request made last month by Judge Ariane Amson for access to the classified archives of Mitterrand’s chief of military staff (a post of advisor to the president and as an interface between the president and the armed forces), general Christian Quesnot, may help to clarify whether Paul Barril acted as an unofficial agent of France in support for the Hutu regime, or whether he was acting as a mercenary in his own interest. The question is all the more pertinent given that Quesnot, in a note he wrote dated May 6th 1994, advised that France should follow an “indirect strategy” of support for the Hutu regime.
The judicial investigation has established that Barril, on May 28th 1994, signed a contract worth 3.1 million dollars to provide men and weapons to the extremist Hutu regime. The deal was made as the genocide was continuing, and one week after an international embargo had been established on all arms sales to the regime. Barril inked the contract with the then head of the interim Hutu government, Jean Kambanda, who was later arrested and found guilty of genocide at his 1997 trial by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. As of June 17th 1994, one month before the end of the genocide which began in early April, the Rwandan embassy in France transferred more than 1 million dollars onto the account of one of Barril’s private security firms, called SECRETS.
Judge Amson’s investigations are currently focused on a trip made by Barril and his team to the Rwandan capital Kigali on May 9th 1994, when their Falcon business jet made a stopover at the French air force base at Istres in southern France.
She has recently questioned a number of former senior French military officers, all now in their 80s, about the event. None have admitted to authorising the landing. Admiral Jacques Lanxade, former chief of the French armed forces between 1991 and 1995, prior to which he also served as Mitterrand’s personal chief of military staff (he was succeeded in 1991 by general Christian Quesnot), has told the judge that he had no involvement in the Falcon landing at Istres, but that authorisation “could” have come from Quesnot.
The latter has denied giving authorisation, and suggested the question be put to Vincent Lanata, who was French air force chief between 1991 and 1994. Lanata told the judge that the landing of the Falcon jet would have required a “negotiated agreement” with either the Élysée, the prime minister’s office or the defence ministry. The Istres air force base commander at the time, Patrick Thouverez, said in his statement that he had not personally authorised the Flacon to land, but added that “in the Rwanda affair, we all know that the Élysée unit [for Rwanda] played a major role, so the authorisation could have been given at that level”.
It is that which prompted Amson to request access to the archives of Mitterrand’s chief of military staff, general Quesnot. She has also requested access to the classified archives of the Istres air force base.
Contacted by Mediapart, Paul Barril’s lawyer, Hélène Clamagirand, declined to comment on both the recent developments in the judicial investigation, and the subject of her client’s stopover at a French military base.
Hubert Védrine was secretary general of the Élysée Palace under Mitterrand, between 1991 and 1995. Questioned by the judge on July 1st this year, he gave a statement in which he declared, “I cannot for one second believe that there was an agreement by the authorities” for Barril’s plane to land at Istres. He said that Barril, who Mitterrand used to describe as an “adventurer”, may have benefitted from help by a subaltern contact at Istres.
During the questioning, he minimised the importance of his role regarding the events in Rwanda, arguing that the vast majority of his time then was taken up with the internal affairs of the French Left, and with the relations of the so-called “cohabitation” between the socialist president and the conservative government elected in 1993.
Védrine (who later served as foreign minister between 1997 and 2002), was questioned about several reports drawn up by France’s foreign intelligence agency, the DGSE, which had warned him about Barril’s relations with the Hutu forces. Védrine said he could not recall receiving the documents, adding “but it is quite possible that Paul Barril had done that”. He described the former gendarme’s “business” activities as “partly legal, partly trafficking”.
He was also questioned about the relations Barril kept, well after he left service at the Élysée, with François de Grossouvre, dubbed in the media as “the man of the shadows”, who, as a close advisor to Mitterrand, was the keeper of multiple secrets of the presidency. Védrine dismissed the two men as being “two mythomaniacs”, and described Grossouvre as a man who was “uncontrollable, unhappy at not playing a greater role”.
“He was a man, at the end, completely delirious, stuffed full of grudges”, Védrine added. After an apparent suicide on April 7th 1994, the day after the genocide had begun in Rwanda, the body of François de Grossouvre was discovered by his GIGN bodyguard in his office at the Élysée Palace, his head half blown off by a bullet from a pistol found in his hand.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version, with additional reporting, by Graham Tearse