A recently discovered document from official French archives reveals that in the summer of 1994, members of the genocidal Hutu regime in Rwanda, which that year organised the slaughter of the country’s ethnic Tutsi population, were allowed to escape the country out of a zone controlled by the French army and on the direct orders of the government in Paris.
Over a period of 100 days, from April to July 1994, an estimated 800,000 people – about a tenth of the Rwandan population – were massacred in a genocide that erupted after several years of civil war between rebels from the minority Tutsi ethnic population and the Hutu-led regime that was propped up by France.
The document, which Mediapart has had access to, was obtained by François Graner, a physicist and member of Survie, an association which declares its mission as being “to denounce all forms of French neo-colonial intervention in Africa”. Graner, who has written two books on the Rwandan genocide, succeeded in gaining access to the hitherto unseen official archives of the presidency of the late François Mitterrand, who was in office from 1981 to 1995.
That access was granted in June last year by France’s Conseil d’État (Council of State), the country’s highest administrative court, ending years of efforts by Mitterrand loyalists to prevent scrutiny of documents concerning French policy towards Rwanda, and notably during the genocide of the Tutsis.
Rwanda had been plunged into a civil war beginning in 1990, when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front crossed into Rwanda 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, while those who shot down Habyarimana's plane have never been officially identified.
The killings were carried out by soldiers, police and militias allied to the hardline Hutu regime which took power immediately after Habyarimana’s death, targeting mostly the Tutsi civilian population, but also moderate Hutus and the Twa pygmy people. A number of historians and journalists cite evidence that the genocide of the Tutsi’s had been prepared well before, including the arming of civilian Hutus and the signing of large weapons deals in the preceding years.
With the start of the slaughter in April 1994, the Rwandan Patriotic Front resumed its offensive against the Hutu regime which it finally defeated in mid-July, putting an end to the genocide. Meanwhile, under the mandate of the United Nations, French military forces intervened in the country to lead “Operation Turquoise”, from June to August 1994, with the mission of securing a “safe zone” in south-west Rwanda. The zone shared a border with Zaire (now renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo) to where a number of members of the defeated regime eventually fled.
The key document found by Graner in the archives was a diplomatic cable sent by the inner cabinet of then French foreign affairs minister Alain Juppé and which was addressed to Yannick Gérard, an ambassador who was then the ministry’s on-the-ground special envoy to the French military present in Rwanda for Operation Turquoise.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Earlier during the day when the cable was sent, Gérard had asked for “clear instructions” from the government for both him and the French army regarding the arrests of fleeing members of the defeated Rwandan regime who were present in the zone controlled by the French. The ambassador had advised Paris that these former regime officials had “a large responsibility for the genocide”. They included Théodore Sindikubwabo, who had been appointed as interim president following the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana, and who oversaw the genocide.
“We have no other choice, whatever the difficulties may be, than to arrest them or place them immediately under house arrest while waiting for the competent international justice authorities to take a decision on their case,” wrote Gérard.
In the cable sent by Paris in reply, at 6.22pm on July 15th, classified as “confidential” and addressed to “Yannick Gérard only”, foreign minister Juppé’s office ordered Gérard to transmit to the genocidal regime officials “our wish that they leave” the zone controlled by the French army.
The message, which was headed “The department authorises you to pass on our message in an indirect manner”, was so sensitive that the ministry told Gérard to not intervene personally with the former regime members. “You can on the other hand use all the indirect channels and notably your African contacts, while not directly exposing yourself,” read the cable from Paris, adding: “You will underline that the international community and in particular the United Nations are due to very soon determine the conduct to be followed towards these supposed authorities.”
In sum, the message, while highlighting the imminence of a decision to come from the international community regarding the members of the regime responsible for the genocide, was offering them a safe passage out of the area controlled by the French army, and into Zaire.
The cable was signed “EMIE”, for Bernard Émié, the current head of the French foreign intelligence agency, the DGSE. At the time, he was an advisor to then foreign minister Alain Juppé before later being assigned to the presidential office under François Mitterrand’s successor as president, Jacques Chirac.
Contacted by Mediapart, Juppé declined to answer questions on the subject. Bernard Émié did not respond to Mediapart’s attempts to contact him.
In France in 1994, Mitterrand, the country’s first socialist president who was re-elected to a second, seven-year term in office in 1988, sat in power above a conservative government that had been elected in 1993, when Juppé, a Gaullist conservative now aged 75, was made foreign affairs minister. A long-serving ally of Chirac, Juppé would later be appointed as prime minister by the latter after he succeeded Mitterrand.
Juppé later served again as foreign minister under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy. He now sits on France’s Constitutional Council.
Today, more than a quarter of a century after the horrific events in Rwanda, there is no longer any doubt that France knew who were the organisers and givers of orders of the genocide, and where they were located. In full knowledge of that, the French government and presidency allowed them to escape.
Over many years, numerous documents and accounts given by individuals, obtained by magistrates, historians and journalists, have allowed to establish that the French authorities were aware of the preparations for the genocide before it was unleashed, and that they maintained their unwavering support for the regime when the mass slaughter began.
The genocidal regime, which took power as Rwanda’s “interim government” immediately after the assassination of Habyarimana, who had been regarded as too moderate by the most radical Hutu groups, was established inside the French embassy in Kigali.
Théodore Sindikubwabo, a former speaker of the Rwandan parliament’s lower house, was chosen as interim president. Sindikubwabo, who was also a qualified paediatrician, is considered to be one of the commanders of the genocide and who is suspected of publicly inciting the massacres (notably during a speech on April 19th 1994 which was broadcast on Radio Rwanda) and of having dismissed prefects and other officials who he reproached for not having ensured enough people were killed.
Sindikubwabo, along with other political figures responsible for the genocide, succeeded in fleeing to Zaire in July 1994 with the agreement of the French government. He died in exile there in circumstances that remain unclear in 1998, and was never brought to justice for his crimes.
'Don't close the borders, leave them porous'
In official French archives is a note written in May 1994 by general Christian Quesnot, who was then François Mitterrand’s personnel chief of defence staff, acting as an interface between the president and the armed forces. Quesnot’s note, dated May 6th, was addressed to Mitterrand and followed a conversation between the general and Rwanda’s interim president Théodore Sindikubwabo who was overseeing the genocide that had begun one month earlier. Quesnot told Mitterrand that Sindikubwabo “thanked” the French president for what “he has done for Rwanda”.
In his personal comments at the end of the note, Quesnot advised lending support, even if by “indirect strategy”, to the Rwandan regime in its war with the Tutsi armed forces. The general in effect said he feared what he called a “Tutsiland” becoming established “with Anglo-Saxon help [editor’s note, the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is often used in France to designate Anglophone countries, notably the US and the UK] with the objective complicity of our false intellectuals [who are] remarkable relays of a Tutsi lobby to which a part of our state apparatus is also sensitive”. The note is annotated by Hubert Védrine, then secretary general of the French presidential office (and who would serve from 1997-2002 as foreign minister), who added the comment “Notified”.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
On the ground in Rwanda, meanwhile, the French diplomatic and intelligence services continued to collect evidence of the responsibility of the interim government in the genocide.
In his research of the archives of the Mitterrand presidency, François Graner found another telegram sent back to Paris by ambassador Yannick Gérard, marked “confidential” and dated July 10th 1994, in which he referred to “trustworthy testimony that confirms the collective and personal responsibility of the authorities in Gisenyi [the north-west Rwandan town to where the genocidal regime had moved] in the massacres”. Gérard added that according to other accounts interim president Sindikubwabo had personally called on several occasions for “the total elimination of the Tutsis” and that one of his ministers had in particular called for the slaughter of “women and children”.
Five days later, Gérard sent his cable to the French foreign ministry in which he asked for “clear instructions” about the taking into custody or placing under house arrest Théodore Sindikubwabo and other officials behind the genocide.
The question of the arrest of the interim government officials was a source of confusion at the very summit of the French executive. In the presidential archives is the copy of a report sent out in French by news agency Reuters also on July 15th, at the end of the morning. Above the headline, “Paris ready to arrest members of the government”, the report, citing “authorised sources in Paris”, read: “The members of the Rwandan interim government […] will be placed under arrest if they fall into the hands of French soldiers in the humanitarian zone protected by Operation Turquoise.”
But an annotation by Hubert Védrine on the side of the report, which had been printed out by the Élysée Palace, contradicted the report. Védrine noted: “The reading of the President: this is not what was said at the Prime Minister’s [office].”
The now-revealed cable sent back to Gérard that same day by the foreign ministry, instructing him to tell the genocidal officials “in an indirect manner” that Paris wanted them to flee the zone controlled by the French army, corroborates the suspicion that foreign minister Juppé was acting in tune with the policy of the socialist president, despite Juppé belonging to a conservative government led by then prime minister Édouard Balladur. In 1998, Balladur said that there “was no question” in Mitterrand’s mind “of chastising the Hutu perpetrators of the genocide”, adding: “And there was no question in mine of permitting them to take shelter in Zaire.” Yet that is exactly what happened, and on the order of Balladur’s minister, Alain Juppé.
On the ground in Rwanda, their escape was put into place by lieutenant-colonel Jacques Hogard, commander of the French military detachment in charge of Sud-Turquoise (‘South Turquoise’), made up of Foreign Legion troops.
In a special supplement published years later about the French operations in Rwanda, the monthly Foreign Legion magazine Képi blanc (‘White Cap’) reported how, “The EMT [tactical chief of staff] incited and organised the evacuation of the Rwandan transitional government towards Zaire”.
Lieutenant-colonel Hogard would later confirm the events on several occasions, notably to journalist David Servenay and political scientist and jurist Gabriel Périès, co-authors of a 2007 book about the Rwandan genocide, Une guerre noire (A black war). He told them how he had addressed a Zairian military counterpart about the plan to let the genocidal officials escape, warning him: “You don’t close the borders, you leave them porous. I don’t want you to prevent these people to leave. Zaire is big, they only have there to go.”
On July 16th 1994 – the day after foreign ministry sent its reply to ambassador Yannick Gérard – Hogard met with Théodore Sindikubwabo to tell him that he and the other officials of the defeated regime could, and must, leave the French controlled zone within 24 hours. The French military subsequently escorted the group, the principal political organisers of the genocide, out of Rwanda to Zaire.
In his book Rwanda, la fin du silence (‘Rwanda, the end of the silence’) published in 2018, former French soldier Guillaume Ancel, who served in Opération Turquoise, recounted meeting Hogard a short while after the evacuation of Sindikubwabo and his colleagues. “Certainly, he [Hogard] is convinced that it is not our role to do justice, but to politely escort decision-makers who have terrible responsibilities in the massacres and who are covered in ‘blood up to their necks’ tormented him,” wrote Ancel. “He could have arrested them, he could have even neutralised them, but his orders did not leave him the choice.”
A declassified document from the archives of the French army headquarters confirmed that late on during the day of July 17th 1994, the Hutu regime officials “have crossed the Rwandan-Zairian border”, adding that “the clearly admitted option being to withdraw to Zaire the rest of the FAR [Rwandan Armed Forces, loyal to the regime] with their weapons, in order to continue the resistance from that country”. The perpetrators of the genocide had found shelter, and readied for more blood to be spilled.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version, with added background, by Graham Tearse